On January 16, Bei Bei, the male giant panda cub who was born on August 22 last year at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., will make his public debut. He’s one of four pandas at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, along with his 2-year-old sister, Bao Bao, their mother Mei Xiang, and father Tian Tian. The public and the media will go crazy, and it is likely that he will dominate the local and national news for days. While the focus will be on his cuteness and cuddly appearance, Bei Bei and his family are part of China’s famous panda diplomacy, initiated by the People’s Republic to generate soft power and to win hearts and minds globally.
Bei Bei’s parents were sent on loan from China to Washington in 2000 at a cost of $10 million for 10 years, with the money going to panda conservation research in China. In January 2011, just after President Obama and then-Chinese President Hu Jintao met in the White House, China extended the agreement for another five years, and halved the price to $500 thousand per year.
On top of the loan, zoos hosting giant pandas normally have to invest heavily in the panda enclosure, its upkeep and insurance, and in enormous amounts of bamboo. What makes this deal even more striking is the fact that when the pandas breed – and this is the official reason why they are sent abroad – it is normally the case that the hosting zoo has to pay another $500 thousand dollars to China. So the zoo has to pay for the cubs, but they are the property of China and will be sent back there. Therefore, after they turn 4, Bei Bei and his sister Bao Bao will leave Washington and join the breeding program in China. Overall, it is stunningly expensive to host the pandas, and they can become a serious financial burden for the hosting zoo. In Adelaide, for example, the pandas were a major reason why the zoo there had a debt of 24 million Australian dollars.
Besides the efforts to promote and support animal conservation and biological research, sending pandas abroad is a strong symbolic and communicative aspect of China’s foreign policy, used by the Chinese government to win hearts and minds in selected foreign countries. First, with the help of giant pandas, China can position itself as a kind friend who is generous enough to share one of its most precious “national treasures.” This generosity becomes even more pronounced when taking into consideration that giant pandas are one of the most endangered species, with roughly 1,800 living in the wild and 350 in captivity.
In early 2014, when Belgium was selected as one of the less than 20 countries to host giant pandas, serious debates between rivaling Dutch and French speaking communities emerged, as did the question of which Belgian zoo had the right to host the pandas. Some Dutch speakers were angry that they would be going to a zoo in the French-speaking part of the country. From the Chinese point of view, what more could you wish for than having foreigners quarrel with each other over the right to host Chinese pandas?
Second, China reaches a much wider audience with pandas than with other public diplomacy instruments, such as the Confucius Institutes, the newspaper China Daily, its television network CCTV, or any touring arts group.
Third, and particularly remarkable, the otherwise critical global media forget about human rights, Tibet, terrible air quality in Beijing, and so on, when it comes to the pandas. The old journalistic rule of thumb that babies and animals always “work,” makes these animals ideal for the media age: the giant panda has a child-like image.
Overall, the giant pandas are thus a great tool to win the hearts (maybe not the minds) of foreigners, at least in the short run. It remains, however, highly debatable whether a visit to the panda enclosure would change the overall perception of China and whether Bei Bei and his peers could compensate for the image damage caused by the arrest of human rights lawyers, the patronizing of journalists, or China’s increasingly self-confident (critics may say aggressive) behavior on the global stage.
