Pandas Are Adorable! (Also a Tool for Chinese Geopolitical Domination)
Beijing, which has a monopoly on breeding the rare bears, strategically lends them abroad as a soft-power tool to promote warm feelings for the Middle Kingdom—and sometimes dangles them to gain leverage; ‘I think they just played us’
Three-year-old panda Bao Bao was flown to China from the Washington National Zoo, leaving behind her parents and brother. Although Bao Bao was born in D.C., she has technically been on loan from China. Photo: Associated Press
By KATE O’KEEFFE
Updated March 24, 2017 11:04 a.m. ET
China produces roughly 25% of the world’s vehicles, half its steel and 75% of its smartphones.
It controls 100% of the world’s panda production, though, and therein lies the key to panda diplomacy, the soft-power tool Beijing mercilessly uses for global influence.
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Bao Bao
China strategically dispatches the bears to zoos around the world through loan agreements that guard its panda monopoly. The black-and-white diplomats, who nap and snack on the job, promote warm feelings about China even when leaders’ rhetoric is cold.
They are critical “especially for ordinary people, not politicians or diplomats, to understand that people with different systems can still work together on lots of things,” says Liu Yuqing, a Chinese-embassy press officer in Washington.
Officials from New York to New Zealand have proven susceptible to this weaponized adorability, cozying up to Beijing in hopes of drawing from its arsenal of giant pandas—2,239 of them, as of China’s latest census.
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Visitors flock to watch Bao Bao at the Smithsonian National Zoo. PHOTO: SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES
Last month, U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D., N.Y.) presented China’s New York consul general as an honored guest at the inaugural “Panda Ball” at the Chinese-owned Waldorf Astoria hotel. Black-and-white-clad partygoers raised nearly $500,000 toward trying to acquire a bear pair for New York City, which the sponsor, The Pandas Are Coming To NYC, billed as an important symbol of Sino-American friendship.
Guests broke open red fortune cookies that predicted a “panda tastic” life. In a pièce de panda résistance, the sponsors brought out Ed Cox, Richard Nixon’s son-in-law, to laud the late president’s role in China’s epic 1972 deployment of pandas Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing to the National Zoo.
The nonprofit group says it still needs to raise tens of millions and to win a contract from China to get bears by its 2020 goal. “A pair of Giant pandas would be great for New York’s economy,” says Rep. Maloney.
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Panda Le Bao plays with his ice birthday cake at his home in South Korea. PHOTO: JUNG YEON-JE//AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
The Netherlands’ Ouwehands Zoo waited nearly two decades for pandas, working Dutch and Chinese government contacts, says director Robin de Lange. The Dutch had high hopes in 2012, upon the 40th anniversary of the establishment of Sino-Dutch diplomatic relations, he says, and in 2013 with the Dutch Queen’s abdication in favor of her son.
“We thought ‘This is a perfect moment,’ but nothing happened,” he says. Finally in 2015, the zoo signed a contract in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People in the presence of President Xi Jinping and King Willem-Alexander. The pandas are set to arrive next month.
Panda diplomacy dates to the Tang dynasty, when Empress Wu Zetian (624-705 A.D.) gave pandas to the Japanese emperor, and it later became a Cold War-era strategy. Beijing gave a panda to the Soviet Union in 1957 and another in 1959. It gave Washington pandas after President Nixon’s trip to China ended decades of estrangement.
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The National Zoo's Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, here in 1974, were Beijing’s gifts to the U.S. in 1972 after President Richard Nixon's historic visit to China. PHOTO: CHARLES TASNADI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Giant pandas live in the wild only in China. “The panda represents a fascinating soft-power resource,” wrote University of Oxford researchers in a 2013 panda-diplomacy study. “Its presence in non-Chinese zoos involves others in the appreciation and care of a Chinese national treasure.”
In the 1980s, China stopped giving pandas, lending them instead, according to zoos and Chinese state media. Pandas are posted in strategically important countries across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.
In exchange, zoos work with Chinese scientists on panda research and typically pay China $500,000 to $1 million a year to help with conservation, zoos and state-media reports say, and bears born abroad are generally shipped back to the motherland by age 4 for breeding.
The Smithsonian National Zoo recently gave up its Washington-born 3-year-old Bao Bao. The Chinese embassy’s minister for commercial affairs escorted her to a private jet last month after an extensive series of farewell parties.
“We have this ambassador, the panda ambassador, which really comes in very handy,” says the embassy’s Ms. Liu. “When there’s a very cute and friendly and lovely ambassador such as the panda, it is definitely easier for us to promote the friendship and cooperation between the two countries.”
Some in Omaha, Neb., suspected other motives. The city’s zoo spent nearly nine years fundraising for a chance at a pair after a Chinese diplomat dangled the prospect, says Omaha Zoo Foundation Chairman Lee Simmons.
“As a practical businessman, these numbers will scare the hell out of you,” says Mr. Simmons, who says he cut the quest short in 2007 after the Chinese embassy called requesting help scuttling a trade deal between Nebraska and Taiwan. “They never had any intention of ever sending pandas to Omaha,” he says. “I think they just played us.”
Mr. Simmons’ account of Omaha’s panda pursuit was reported by the Omaha World-Herald in October. “I have never heard anything about it,” the Chinese embassy’s Ms. Liu says of the episode.
In 2006, a year after China had offered Taiwan pandas, then-leader Chen Shui-bian, not a friend to Beijing, declined, according to press reports. Two years later, pro-China leader Ma Ying-jeou assumed the Taiwan presidency and welcomed the bears—which Beijing gave as a gift instead of a loan because it views the self-governing island as part of China. Their names, Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan, combined mean “reunion,” a reference to Beijing’s goal of reuniting with Taiwan.
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A panda cub at the Taipei Zoo, born to a bear pair the Chinese mainland gave as a goodwill gift to Taiwan. PHOTO: XINHUA/ZUMA PRESS
New Zealand had its own pandamonium after Defense Minister Gerry Brownlee attempted what media there branded “a black ops panda mission” in China. While meeting with the People’s Liberation Army in 2015, the media reported, he visited a panda-breeding center and delivered a letter from Wellington’s then-mayor Celia Wade-Brown in which she sought to procure a pair. Some lawmakers publicly accused Mr. Brownlee of misplaced priorities and one in a press release labeled him a “panda pimp.”
Then-Prime Minister John Key, who had earlier proposed giving China two kiwi birds in exchange for pandas, told reporters he didn’t know anything about the letter. The three New Zealand officials declined to comment. New Zealand remains panda-less.
Some panda fans worry President Donald Trump’s anti-China trade rhetoric could spoil the program. Tara Cain, who attended one of the National Zoo’s “Bye Bye Bao Bao” events, says she believes the bears will keep helping U.S.-China relations, but worries: “If certain political trajectories stay in play, that could become an issue.”
The Chinese embassy’s Ms. Liu says the program will continue no matter what happens in the administration. “This is only one chapter,” she says.
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Giant Panda cubs with their mother at Vienna’s Schoenbrunn Zoo in February. PHOTO: SCHOENBRUNN ZOO/REUTERS
Write to Kate O’Keeffe at
kathryn.okeeffe@wsj.com
Appeared in the Mar. 25, 2017, print edition as 'A Panda’s Two Jobs: Be Adorable, Promote Chinese Foreign Policy.'