China also sent pandas to its neighbors, including Taiwan in 2008 (marking a positive development in China-Taiwan relations) and several Southeast Asian countries in the years that followed. The first country to be the recipient of panda breeding loans was the US, with pandas embedded in the cities of San Diego, Atlanta, Washington and Memphis. When senior global politicians sign off on the next panda loan, it will not be a couple of cute bears taking up residence in a foreign land but two diplomatic envoys for the Peoples’ Republic of China. Unfortunately, the use of pandas as a diplomatic tool has gradually undermined the emphasis on conservation that defined the breeding loan model. But because the animals were on loan rather than permanent relocation, it also gave Beijing leverage over the fate of the pandas. The idea behind these loans was ostensibly to increase the number of pandas and to raise significant funds for research that would benefit the conservation of wild pandas in China. Opinion: What to make of China’s role in the handshake heard round the world CRISTINO/Pool via REUTERS TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY Mark R. The politicization of pandas has been growing steadily since the 1950s, when the Chinese Communist Party began to fashion the giant panda as China’s national treasure, as Elena Songster documents in “ Panda Nation.” In the ensuing decades, China sent pandas abroad as goodwill gifts, notably giving Hsing Hsing and Ling Ling to the National Zoo in Washington, DC, following President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.Īfter a short, unsavory period of renting out pandas for just months at a time for nothing but profit in conditions not always healthy for the animals, the San Diego Zoo worked with China to establish a more respectable program of breeding loans in the 1990s: sending a male and female panda on long-term leases to interested zoos around the world in exchange for around $1 million a year.Ĭhinese President Xi Jinping takes his oath during the Third Plenary Session of the National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People, in Beijing, China, 10 March 2023. But the unexpected death of Le Le in February before his repatriation to China and Ya Ya’s loss of hair owing to a genetic skin disorder led to wild allegations on Chinese social media that the Memphis Zoo had mistreated its pandas as a deliberate snub to China. We have long known that the Memphis agreement would come to an end this year when the pandas were returned to China. But China’s use of pandas as quasi agents of the state has meant that anything that happens to a captive panda is now viewed through a political lens. When Le Le and Ya Ya arrived in Tennessee in 2003, they seemed to be just a pair of crowd-pleasing ursids. The Memphis Zoo pandas are a case in point.

The quarter storm veronica henry