A BRITISH WOMAN recently altered China's 3,000-year-old written language, initiating an unprecedented pairing of Chinese characters for two previously unassociated words: animal welfare.
Informing lexicographers, transforming the social conscience and driving government policy, Hong Kong activist Jill Robinson has almost singlehandedly halted bear farming on the mainland: the practice of routinely extracting bile from caged animals' gall bladder for medicinal purposes.
Aside from her tenacity and conviction, it has taken seven years of agitation, leaving television's largest documentary-makers fighting over rights to the story. In 1998 Britain's Queen Elizabeth bestowed her with an MBE.
Yesterday, at the Shangri-La Hotel in Kowloon, mainland authorities and Animals Asia Found-ation (AAF), which Robinson founded, ceremoniously signed an historic agreement to release 500 Asiatic black bears from primitive bear farms, beginning a 'permanent turnaround in the protection of one of the most endangered species on Earth'.
'The world's largest wild animal rescue' began ignobly enough, says Robinson, when, in 1993, she visited some of the mainland's 400-odd bear farms. 'I don't feel proud of that - going around smiling, giving the kids sweets, pretending to be a tourist while taking pictures and ruining their livelihood.'
But she was compelled to document the plight of 10,000 Asiatic black bears: scars running the length of their bodies from flesh pressing against the bamboo of cramped cages, catheters dangling from infected, bleeding insertion wounds, bile being painfully extracted twice daily, atrophied bodies weighing up to one-third less than those in the wild.