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China said it would renew its “panda diplomacy” efforts with the US and other countries after spending in recent years loaning the bears back to foreign zoos.
China’s wildlife agency reached an agreement with San Diego Zoo in California and 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.
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Zoo officials told The Associated Press that the first pair of pandas — a male and a female — could arrive in San Diego by the end of the summer. According to the embassy, China is also discussing renewing its cooperation with the National Zoo in Washington, DC and Austria’s Schönbrunn Zoo.
Reinstating 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 only in the forests of China – could be returned to the US were raised when US President Joe Biden met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in California last November.
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Xi announced at the time that China “is willing to continue its cooperation with the United States on panda conservation, and will do its best to meet the wishes of Californians so as to strengthen the friendly relations between our peoples.” ” But it is not immediately clear when this process will begin or whether it will be time to stop the departure of the few bears left in the Americas.
Officials at Washington’s National Zoo last year returned its three giant pandas – Tian Tian, Mei Jiang and Xiao Qi Jie – when the loan contract with China was not renewed. It was the first time that the facility – which had just completed a $50 million overhaul of the Asia Trail enclosure where the pandas lived – had been left without a single panda in decades.
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The Washington Zoo originally received a pair of pandas as a gift from Beijing following President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, a landmark event that helped normalize 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 they, too, are going to go home this year.
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Published: Feb 22, 2024, 01:15 PM IST
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