By Andrew Jacobs

GUILIN, China — The crowd-pleasing Year of the Tiger, which begins Sunday, could be a lousy year for the estimated 3,200 tigers that still roam the world’s diminishing forests.

With as few as 20 in the wild in China , the country’s tigers are a few gun blasts away from extinction, and in India poachers are making quick work of the tiger population , the world’s largest. The number there, around 1,400, is about half that of a decade ago and a fraction of the 100,000...