A traditional Chinese gong clangs. Adoring sighs break out as a red curtain is pulled aside. Behind it are China’s newest ambassadors to the west — a pair of chubby black-and-white bears sitting on their haunches munching bamboo stalks.
Standing in front of the glass just metres from the pandas, German Chancellor Angela Merkel beams and pumps her hands up and down like an excited schoolchild. Beside her, Chinese President Xi Jinping watches like a proud parent as Merkel coos at the animals, loaned by the Chinese government to Berlin’s Tierpark Zoo for the next 15 years at an annual cost of $1m.
“This event is symbolic of relations between our two countries,” Merkel says as she introduces three-year-old Meng Meng (“little dream”) and her seven-year-old prospective mate Jiao Qing (“darling”). “We’ve worked very closely over the past year in the G20 framework and now we have two very pleasant diplomats here.”
This is panda diplomacy at its most sophisticated and successful. Xi and Merkel, leaders of the world’s first and third-largest trading nations, appeared with the bears in front of the world’s media in early July, just two days before a tumultuous G20 meeting in Berlin.
“On this particular state visit the main point was to show . . . how smooth the relationship was ahead of the G20, where Donald Trump was going to show up and not be anybody’s friend,” said one person involved in preparations for the visit on the German side. “That moment [of handing over the pandas] was when we celebrated how close our countries are.”
By entrusting Berlin with two “national treasures” and personally witnessing their unveiling, Xi was subtly signalling China’s belief that Germany has the potential to replace the US as leader of the western world, according to people familiar with the matter. It was a moment of high diplomatic theatre with an extremely political animal as the main protagonist.
Everything about Ailuropoda melanoleuca (literally “black-and-white cat-foot”) or da xiongmao (“big bear-cat” in Chinese) is laden with meaning and symbolism. The oldest extant species of bear, the panda is found only in a small strip of mountainous terrain on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau.
To many in the west, the animal represents wildlife conservation (a panda has been the logo of the World Wide Fund for Nature, or WWF, since its inception in 1961), poor sexual performance and perhaps comedic kung-fu cartoons. In China it is a majestic “national treasure” that embodies the country’s benign nature, uniqueness and ancient culture.
Far more money, time and effort has been spent on saving the giant panda from extinction than on any other animal. As such, it is considered a touchstone species — if humans can’t rescue such an icon with all of this exertion, then what hope is there for less charismatic fauna?
In dozens of interviews with Chinese and western experts, as well as trips to reserves and zoos in China and abroad, the FT has uncovered a more complicated picture than that presented by most western zoos, conservation groups or the Chinese government. At the heart of this story is a tension between the panda’s role as a political symbol of China’s power and its global role as an icon of conservation.
“In some ways the panda is the luckiest species on earth — but in other ways it is not lucky at all,” says Professor Wang Dajun, a wild-panda expert at Peking University. “Humans want to protect pandas not for scientific reasons, or because they are ecologically important, but because they have cute faces and they are politically important.”
China now has the world’s second-largest economy and second-largest military budget. It is seen as a superpower in waiting, if not yet in fact. But in terms of “soft power” — the ability to get other countries to like you, or at least do what you want without coercion or bribes — China remains a weakling. This is something it wants to change.
According to the classic definition of soft power coined by Harvard professor Joseph Nye in the early 1990s, a country makes itself attractive in three main ways: through its culture, its political institutions and its foreign policy. The US has been the most successful nation in history in projecting soft power but others, including the UK, have also fostered it over the centuries.
Ancient imperial China ruled vast swathes of Asia through cultural and political attraction but until recently few countries have been drawn to modern China’s political system or its foreign policy. That leaves its rich and ancient culture and its cultural symbols, such as the panda.
Chinese state media describe the giant panda as one of President Xi’s most “powerful weapons” in his effort to build soft power. Through Twitter, Facebook and YouTube (all of which are blocked in China) state media pump out countless videos of cute panda antics in an attempt to make China look soft and cuddly to a global audience.
Politicians all over the world often assist them in this propaganda effort. Apart from Merkel, pandas have been photo-opportunity props for leaders ranging from former UK prime minister Edward Heath to Michelle Obama, Justin Trudeau, Bill Clinton, François Hollande and the queen of Spain.
Our universal love of pandas has even prompted neurologists to investigate why humans find these animals so damn cute. The theory (known in German as kindchenschema) is that their resemblance to human infants — fat cheeks, waddling gait, snub noses and oversized eyes — triggers the same circuitry in our brains as babies. “For China, pandas are the equivalent of the British royal family,” Nye tells the FT. “Like the royals, they are a terrific asset because you can put them on display. You trot them around the world and they add an enormous amount to the country’s soft power.”
Part of the panda’s clout derives from its international role as a symbol of conservation. Late last year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the global authority on endangered species, officially downgraded the animal from “endangered” to “vulnerable” in what was ostensibly a validation of China’s decades-long effort to save its national icon from extinction.