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Panda diplomacy frozen by new ‘cold war’ between China and West

The animals are leaving some western zoos as detente with China goes into reverse.

Tian Tian at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington. Picture: AFP
Tian Tian at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington. Picture: AFP

Ever since Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling wooed Washington in 1972, giant pandas have been not only the world’s favourite endangered animal but also a symbol of friendship between the communist East and the capitalist West.

Now the friendship has soured, and the pandas are going home.

Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling, offered after president Richard Nixon’s outreach to Chairman Mao Zedong, lived in Washington’s National Zoo. Their present-day successors, Mei Xiang, Tian Tian and their cub, Xiao Qi Ji, will go home to China in December. They will not be replaced.

The pair at Edinburgh Zoo, Yang Guang and Tian Tian, will also be gone by the end of the year. Their 10-year lease expired in 2021. It was prolonged for two years after detailed negotiations, but no new pandas are being sought or offered.

From Christmas, there will be no pandas in Britain. The last one in America will leave next year.

Zoo officials on both sides of the Atlantic said the pandas, which are leased by China for about $US1m ($1.6m) a year, are becoming old and need to go home.

The purpose of the captive breeding program is being questioned too, as numbers in the wild have increased and they are no longer considered immediately at risk.

But in China state media that has criticised America and Britain for hostility to Beijing has used pandas as symbols of everything that has gone wrong in the states’ relationships in the past decade.

“Is it time to end ‘panda diplomacy’?” asked the Global Times, a tabloid offshoot of the People’s Daily that is seen as representing President Xi Jinping’ s views. It argued that the international panda focus should switch from diplomacy to welfare and conservation.

Mao used pandas to cement relations with other communist powers, including the Soviet Union, and when he offered a pair to Nixon it was seen as a breakthrough. The pandas’ arrival hit a wave of growing environmental concern in the West. By the time Conservative prime minister Edward Heath won his own pandas in 1974, Ching-Ching and Chia-Chia, the animal had become the symbol of the World Wide Fund for Nature.

The arrival of the Edinburgh pandas in 2011 came at a high point of UK-China relations, with an outreach begun by Tony Blair continued by the government of David Cameron and chancellor George Osborne, who declared a “golden era” of friendship with Beijing.

Since then, rows over trade and security have changed attitudes. When Donald Trump was president he launched a trade war, which was taken up in Britain and Europe.

Pandas were then sent to China’s new trade partners instead. Pairs went to Malaysia in 2014 and Indonesia in 2017, as Mr Xi opened up his Belt and Road Initiative to Southeast Asia. Qatar installed a pair in an airconditioned luxury home last year.

The pandas in the US and Britain were faring less well. Edinburgh’s Yang Guang – which translates as Sunshine – developed testicular cancer and had to be castrated in 2018, ending any hopes Tian Tian ("Sweetie") might conceive a cub.

The pair in Memphis, Tennessee, became sick, prompting national outrage in China, which accused the US authorities of mistreating them. Le Le, the male, died aged 25 in February, while his mate, Ya Ya, 23, developed a skin condition, and no amount of assurances by experts that the causes were natural could assuage popular fury. Ya Ya was given a heroine’s welcome when she returned to China in April.

Daniel Ashe, who runs the US Association of Zoos and Aquariums, said the “panda issue” needed to be resolved at a “government level”. Xie Feng, the Chinese ambassador to the US, said he intended to “do his utmost” to bring pandas back to America.

Roddy Gow, who runs the Asia Scotland Trust in Edinburgh, said he knew of no political connection to the departure of the Scottish pandas. He pointed out the Scottish government retained a more positive attitude to China than the UK as a whole.

Iain Valentine, who ran the Edinburgh panda program until 2018, said the panda exchanges were coming to a natural end, at least for the time being.

“There is a saying in China that ‘the fallen leaves return to the tree’. In the context of pandas this expression means that China wants pandas to return ‘home’ and live in peace there and in their care until they die, rather than in another country,” he said.

David Field, chief executive of the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, said: “The giant panda habitat at Edinburgh Zoo will become home to a new species RZSS can support in the wild, which will be announced next year.”

THE TIMES

Read related topics:China Ties

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/the-times/panda-diplomacy-frozen-by-new-cold-war-between-china-and-west/news-story/a73c31421f3d6f120e76eb570d191a9a