China has approximately 50 or fewer tigers living in the wild but efforts to stabilize the population in the bleak northeast are starting to pay off, a conservationist said yesterday.

The population of tigers, which once roamed huge swathes of China, right up to the now-booming east coast, has collapsed due to habitat destruction and poaching for use in traditional medicine.

About 10 are still alive in Yunnan province, about 15 in the Tibet autonomous region, and 20 in Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces, said Xie Yan, China Country Program director of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

The Northeast Tiger, though small in number in China, are far more numerous in Russia, where about 500 still live in an area where fewer people reside.

"We think that the best hope for wild tigers in China is in the northeast, because it is connected to the bigger population in Russia," she added.

The South China Tiger is probably already extinct, she said yesterday, ahead of the Chinese Lunar New Year of the Tiger, which starts on Sunday.

"The number of wild tigers left in China is very depressing," Xie said. "We have less than 50 individuals in the wild. The populations in Tibet and in the south are still dropping.

"The Northeast Tiger is now stable, and maybe increasing a little, but the number is still very small," she added.

Conservationists say the trade in skin and bones remains popular in countries such as China, which has banned the use of tiger parts in medicine but where everything from fur and whiskers to eyeballs and bones remain in demand.

Activists say tough laws and occasional crackdowns cannot compensate for a crucial problem - the lack of strong and consistent enforcement.

About 3,500 wild tigers are estimated to be roaming across 12 Asian countries and Russia, compared with about 100,000 a century ago, conservationists said.

In December, a Yunnan court sentenced a man to 12 years in jail for killing and eating what may have been the last wild Indochinese Tiger in China.

The Indochinese Tiger is also on the brink of extinction, with fewer than 1,000 left in the forests of Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar.

Xie said the Tibetan and Yunnan tigers have the bleakest future, as their populations are tiny and isolated.