By Michael F. Duggan
The first thing you have to realize is that the giant panda is an absurdity of natural selection.1 It is a carnivore reverse-engineered into a clawed-and-fanged herbivore with a dietary niche limited to bamboo, a staple so nutritionally desolate, that the creature is reduced to spending its days on its back, stripping and eating leaves.
But the panda has one overwhelming advantage over so many other endangered animals: it is what is called a “charismatic” species. In other words, it is a fluffy, photogenic, teddybear-like animal that appeals—panders (sorry)—to a deeply-rooted human instinct for cute things. To be fair, with 1,500 to 3,000 individuals in the wild, the giant panda is not a robust species, and is listed as “vulnerable.” Because of habitat destruction, its range is limited to the bamboo mountain forests of the Chinese provinces of Gansu, Shaanxi, and Sichuan. They are a precious rarity (they are so valuable, that whenever there was a public relations “panda naming” contest, I favored the moniker “Cha-Ching”). It’s just a shame that the Yangtze dolphin and turtle, now both likely extinct, were apparently not charismatic enough to be diplomatically valuable species, the former falling victim to, among other things, the Three Gorges Dam.2 So much for bio-altruism.
But back to the Chinese teddybears. All of this, the rarity of the panda, its universally-acknowledged adorability, and its uniqueness to China, all made it a natural for zoological diplomacy. The original exchange pandas were brought to the United States in 1972, just as U.S.-China relations were thawing. Although the returning of Mei Xiang, Tian Tian, and Xiao Qi Ji to China is due to the expiration of the exchange lease, what can we infer from it more generally in diplomatic terms? And what does panda diplomacy hold for the future?
Notes
1. See Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb.
2. https://news.mongabay.com/2007/08/extinction-of-the-yangtze-river-dolphin-is-confirmed/