Good morning.
What we found out: Getting to meet a panda in China is tougher than securing permission to film Taylor Swift. They are A-list superstars, with top celebrity Hua Hua drawing over 250,000 visitors during Golden Week to the Chengdu panda base.
They are also animal diplomats that have helped broker pivotal relationships for China since WWII – and pandas may be a good barometer of how Beijing feels about your country. In our two-parter, we got access to pandas loaned out to three zoos in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.
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These days, to get China to loan your country a panda, your Head of State has to put in a personal request to President Xi Jinping, as we found out from Indonesia’s zoo which built the animals their own hilltop palace.
Indeed, China has lots of expectations on how their national treasures are treated – the loan agreements extend to what they should be fed and adequate entertainment. “This can cost zoos millions of dollars a year,” says fellow producer Lam Shushan, who observed Malaysia’s Zoo Negara’s VIP treatment of its guests.
How well or poorly the pandas do in your zoo can also sway Chinese public opinion of your country – and as the US found out, it can go downhill very fast.
With its panda loans expiring amid worsening US-China global rivalry, the US is now at risk of losing all its panda celebrities by end-2024. But as we learnt, this had happened to America during the Cold War. The fact that panda loans eventually resumed as ties warmed again offers hope for the current relationship – and pandas returning to the US could be the sign of normalisation to look out for.
Tang Hui Huan
Producer, Panda Power
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