China plans to send San Diego Zoo more pandas this year, reintroducing panda diplomacy

SAN DIEGO– China plans to send a new pair of giant pandas to the San Diego Zoo, renewing its long-standing gesture of friendship toward the United States after recalling nearly all the iconic bears loaned to U.S. zoos as relations between the two nations deteriorated.

The China Wildlife Conservation Association recently signed cooperation agreements with zoos in San Diego and Madrid, the Spanish capital, and is in talks with zoos Washington, DC and Vienna, the Chinese government-run Xinhua News Agency said on Thursday, describing the deals as a new round. of cooperation in the field of panda conservation.

San Diego Zoo officials told The Associated Press that if all permits and other requirements are approved, two bears, one male and one female, are expected to arrive as early as late summer, about five years after the zoo’s last returned pandas. to China.

“We’re very excited and hopeful,” said Megan Owen of the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and vice president of Wildlife Conservation Science. “They have shown tremendous enthusiasm to restart panda collaboration, starting with the San Diego Zoo.”

Zoos typically pay a fee of $1 million per year for two pandas, with the money earmarked for China’s conservation efforts, according to a 2022 report from the U.S. Congressional Research Service.

In November, Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed hope that his country would start sending pandas to the US again after he and President Joe Biden gathered in Northern California for their first face-to-face meeting in a year and vowed to try to ease tensions.

China is considering a pair, including a female descendant of Bai Yun and Gao Gao, two former residents of the zoo, said Owen, an expert on panda behavior who has worked in San Diego and China.

Bai Yun, who was born in captivity in China, lived in the zoo for more than 20 years and gave birth to six cubs there. She and her son were the zoo’s last pandas, returning to China in 2019.

Gao Gao was born in the wild in China and lived at the San Diego Zoo from 2003 to 2018 before being returned.

Decades of conservation efforts in the wild and research in captivity have saved the giant panda species from extinction, increasing the population from fewer than 1,000 at a time to more than 1,800 in the wild and in captivity.

The black and white bears have long been a symbol of US-China friendship since Beijing donated a pair of pandas to the National Zoo in Washington, DC, in 1972, ahead of the normalization of bilateral ties. China later loaned pandas to zoos to help breed cubs and increase the population.

The US, Spain and Austria were the first countries to cooperate with China on panda conservation, and 28 pandas have been born in those countries, the Xinhua report said. The latest collaboration includes research into disease prevention and habitat protection, and will contribute to the construction of China’s national panda park, the report said.

“We look forward to further expanding research achievements on the conservation of endangered species such as giant pandas and promoting mutual understanding and friendship among peoples through the new round of international cooperation,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning said in a statement. Beijing.

Demand for the return of giant pandas, known as China’s “national treasure,” grew among the Chinese public after unproven allegations that U.S. zoos were mistreating the pandas flooded Chinese social media.

Fears about the future of so-called panda diplomacy escalated last year when zoos in Memphis, Tennessee and Washington, DC returned their pandas to China, leaving just four pandas in the United States, all at the zoo in Atlanta. That loan agreement expires later this year.

Many loan agreements had a term of ten years and were often extended well beyond that. But negotiations last year to extend agreements with U.S. zoos or send more pandas yielded no results. Chinese observers speculated that Beijing was gradually withdrawing its pandas from Western countries due to deteriorating diplomatic relations with the US and other countries.

Then on November 15, 2023, a week after the pandas left the National Zoo for China, Xi spoke to American businessmen at a dinner in downtown San Francisco and indicated that more pandas might be sent. He said he learned about the San Diego Zoo and that people in California are “really looking forward to welcoming pandas back.”

“I was told that many American people, especially children, were really reluctant to say goodbye to the pandas and went to the zoo to see them off,” Xi said.

The San Diego Zoo continued to work with their Chinese counterparts even after there were no more pandas.

Owen said China is particularly interested in exchanging information on the successful breeding of pandas in captivity at the zoo. Giant pandas are difficult to breed in part because the female’s reproductive window is extremely narrow, lasting only 48 to 72 hours per year.

Bai Yun’s first cub, Hua Mei, was also the first panda born by artificial insemination to reach adulthood outside of China, and would go on to produce twelve cubs on her own after being sent to China.

Bai Yun, meanwhile, remained at the zoo where she gave birth to two more females and three males. Researchers monitored her with cameras in her study, adding to the understanding of mothers’ caregiving behavior, Owen said.

“We have a lot of institutional knowledge and capacity from our last partnership agreement, which we can apply in this next chapter, as well as train the next generation of panda conservationists,” she said.

Chinese experts would travel with the bears and spend months in San Diego, Owen said.

She said the return of the bears is not only good for San Diego, but also for the recovery of the giant panda as a species.

“We talk about panda diplomacy all the time,” Owen said. “Diplomacy is a crucial part of nature conservation in all kinds of contexts. … If we can’t learn to work together, you know, in sometimes difficult situations or situations that are completely outside the control of conservationists, then we’re not going to succeed.”

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Associated Press writer Ken Moritsugu in Beijing contributed.