China announces sending new pandas to the US as a gesture of diplomacy

Amid friction between China and the United States and doubts about the practical consequences of Xi Jinping's visit to Donald Trump, the Chinese leader announced what could become a good diplomatic result: new pandas for American zoos.

Xi stated that he intended to send two pandas to the zoo in Atlanta, an American city in the state of Georgia that is one of those that has received Chinese pandas in the past.

The so-called "panda diplomacy", China's national animal, has been a great weapon of Chinese soft power. Xi called the bears "ambassadors of friendship."

Atlanta returned a pair of pandas to China in October 2024, and has been negotiating with Chinese authorities since then to receive new animals. An agreement was signed in August with one of the two Chinese organizations that study pandas, promote their reproduction and lend them to other countries.

The announcement of the August agreement paved the way for the Chinese organization to arrange for two pandas, Ping Ping (male) and Fu Shuang (female), to be sent to Atlanta. Xi's statement confirmed that this would happen soon.

Panda diplomacy began during President Richard Nixon's historic visit to Beijing in 1972, when First Lady Pat Nixon told Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai about her affection for pandas. In less than two months, China had sent a female and a male, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, to the National Zoo in Washington.

The zoo paid US$1 million a year to receive them, a figure that dropped to US$500,000 after the first decade. Other zoos joined the initiative, including those in Atlanta, San Diego and Memphis.

By 2024, it appeared that rising tensions between the two countries could be putting that diplomacy at risk: for the first time in decades, all animals in American institutions had been returned, and there were no more pandas in the country.

Many people speculated that turbulent geopolitical relations had motivated China's decision. Some zoo directors, however, according to The New York Times, said that Chinese organizations had requested the return of the pandas because of the stage of their life cycle. Pandas are notoriously uninterested in sex, and any pandas born abroad, a cause for celebration, are sent back to China to be raised in conservation parks in Sichuan province.

In November 2023, during a visit to San Francisco, just a week after the National Zoo returned its three pandas, Xi said China could soon send more pandas to the US.

Yun Chuan and Xin Bao arrived at the San Diego Zoo in June 2024. And, in October of that year, Bao Li and Qing Bao, both 3 years old, arrived at the National Zoo, ending an 11-month absence there.