BEIJING – China has said it will renew its “panda diplomacy” efforts with the United States and other nations after spending recent years bringing the bears it loans to foreign zoos back home.
China’s wildlife agency reached an agreement with the San Diego Zoo in California and the Madrid Zoo in Spain on “a new round of international cooperation on panda conservation”, according to a statement on the official WeChat account of the Chinese embassy in the US.
The first pair of pandas – a male and a female – could arrive in San Diego by late summer, officials at the zoo told the Associated Press.
China is also discussing renewing its cooperation with the National Zoo in Washington, DC, and Austria’s Schonbrunn Zoo, according to the embassy.
Restoring its decades-old panda diplomacy marks China’s latest effort to improve relations with the West, especially the US.
Hopes that the iconic animals – which live in the wild only in China – might be sent back to the US rose after US President Joe Biden met his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in November 2023 in California.
Mr Xi declared at the time that China was “ready to continue our cooperation with the United States on panda conservation, and do our best to meet the wishes of the Californians so as to deepen friendly ties between our peoples”.
But it was not immediately clear when that process would get under way or whether it would come in time to stop the departure of the few bears remaining in the US.
Officials at Washington’s National Zoo returned their three giant pandas – Tian Tian, Mei Xiang and Xiao Qi Ji – in 2023 when the loan contracts with China were not renewed. That was the first time the facility – which had completed a US$50 million (S$67 million) overhaul of the Asia Trail enclosure where the pandas lived – was left without a single panda in decades.
The Washington zoo originally received a pair of pandas as a gift from Beijing following then President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, a landmark event helping normalise relations between the countries.
San Diego’s last pandas returned to China in 2018 and 2019 after their loan agreements expired. Zoo Atlanta is now the only place in the US that keeps pandas, but those, too, are scheduled to go home in 2024. BLOOMBERG
