AFRICANS look at elephants much as Chinese look at Yao Ming, their 7’6" (2.29 metres) giant basketball star. They see power and majesty as well as gentleness and decency. That would make Mr Yao (pictured above) an ideal ambassador for elephant conservationists hoping to convince the Chinese public not to buy trinkets made from African ivory and thereby to deprive poachers of demand for bloodstained tusks. To the conservationists’ great relief, Mr Yao has accepted the job. He is the face of an ambitious new campaign aimed at affluent Chinese which seeks to generate interest in African wildlife—in its natural habitat rather than as carved mementoes on living-room shelves.

Having recently retired from professional basketball in America, Mr Yao will feature in a Chinese-made wildlife documentary and on billboards as well as in briefings for officials across the country. In a public-service announcement to be broadcast in December he says, “When the buying stops, the killing can, too.” Mr Yao just visited Samburu national park in northern Kenya to see evidence of elephant poaching first-hand. His blog posts from the trip were read by more than 1m Chinese. He expressed grief over the ferocious onslaught suffered by the “gentle giants”.

Demand for African ivory, and with it the rate of killing, has increased sharply in the past four years, mainly because of rising wealth in China. Recorded poaching kills in Kenya have more than doubled and the actual number may be even higher, since many elephants are hunted in remote areas, says Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save the Elephants, a Kenyan charity.

Lobbying ivory buyers is a change, of course, for conservationists. In past decades they focused on working with African governments to defeat poachers. But the inadequacy of national wildlife protection forces has led them to broaden their campaign and target Asian demand—and ignorance. “Many Chinese don’t even know that elephants are killed or that not all ivory is from natural deaths,” says Peter Knights of WildAid, an American NGO working in China. The first response has been encouraging. Zhuo Qiang, a Chinese wildlife researcher, says that mainland television crews have flocked to the Masai Mara national reserve in Kenya.