Finding balance
Over the years, animal protection activists and TCM advocates have been involved in a long-term tug-of-war.
In the face of this pressure, TCM companies have been making adjustments to create a legal and sustainable supply chain for their products, Qiu said.
Last year the national TCM association brought 15 TCM companies together to sign a pledge that says they will only use animal parts and plants legally and will refuse to use wild materials.
"There are many companies that have started keeping their own farms, such as deer farms or black bear farms," Qiu said. This way, it's not an illegal activity and TCM companies can still develop.
Another way to avoid this debate is to come up with substitute ingredients.
In 1993, China became a member of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. That year, the State Council released a document completely banning the trade of tiger bones and rhinoceros horns.
To deal with this situation, TCM companies have had to come up with creative solutions. In 2003, after more than 10 years of experimentation, TCM company Tongrentang and the Shenyang TCM company released a medicine that contains artificial tiger bone.
In another case, in order to sustainably develop TCM, some medical companies have pledged not to overexploit resources.
Weikang, a Zhejiang Province-based company that makes traditional medicine from wild herbs, signed a pledge in 2013 with TRAFFIC, a wildlife monitoring network under the World Wildlife Fund, to participate in a project that sustainably develops certain types of plants.
"It's a win-win situation for both the company and wildlife protection agencies," said Wei Dewei, Weikang's CEO.
In these couple of years Weikang has held many training seminars for farmers and herb pickers about not over-picking five types of herbs and keeping the industry sustainable. Furthermore, Weikang has established medical bases to grow these herbs.
At the same time, the Chinese government has worked to push the development of legal framework for TCM.
The State Council released China's first national plan on the protection and development of TCM resources in April 2015. The plan was jointly released by 12 government agencies and covers goals from 2015 to 2020.
During the two legislative sessions this year, seven advisors from the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference suggested the draft Wildlife Protection Law should regulate the medical use of animal parts, such as black bear, tiger or rhinoceros. Animal rights activists attacked this proposal, arguing that it would give a legal basis for practice they say should be illegal.
The advisors are all directors of TCM research academies or directors and doctors at TCM hospitals and they believe restricting the use of these materials would hinder the development of TCM.
Still debates
There's still controversy in some legal areas. For example, even though black bears are a second-class protected species according to China's wildlife law, as long as companies have government permission to raise and use the animals for commercial purposes, their exploitation is allowed.
The Ta Foundation calls for a complete ban on bile extraction, and hopes to meet with relevant companies as well as government organs in order to reach a compromise or find alternative solutions to the matter.
In the report the Ta Foundation released, it showed only a small crowd still pursues the product, making it unnecessary for companies to keep producing it. But people in the TCM business certainly don't think so.
"It's definitely not possible to not use these ingredients at all," Qiu said. "If protection went well but there's nothing for the companies to use, no medicine for people to consume, that can't work either."
He thinks it's ridiculous to call for a total ban because of animal cruelty, but says the legal system should be based on licensing and law. He said companies should be inspected to see whether they have licenses to keep and raise animals, and if they have a license from the China Food and Drug Administration to produce medicine. If they have both, there should be no legal issue.
"We would like to protect first, but we need to exploit these resources," he said. "Otherwise we'll have nothing left to use."
