Пандагийн хамтын ажиллагаа АНУ, Хятадын зөөлөн дипломат харилцааг тэтгэж байна

On Nov. 8, 2023, three pandas left Washington, DC, with a send-off fit for visiting heads of state. Crowds waved goodbye and helicopters filmed overhead as FedEx trucks carried the bears to the airport with a police escort.

Mei Xiang and Tian Tian had spent nearly 23 years at the National Zoo. Their 3-year-old cub, Xiao Qi Ji, was born there, but all three were leaving a month before the zoo’s loan agreement with China expired.

The panda house would be empty, and negotiations for replacements hadn’t begun. Yet zoo director Dr. Brandie Smith was confident pandas would return. “I never doubted that we would get pandas back,” she told The Post.

Smith, author of the new book “In the Company of Pandas: My Life with the World’s Favorite Bear” (Atria Books, Nov. 10) is the director of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute. Over the years, she’s witnessed firsthand how China uses its adorable black-and-white bears as diplomatic tools amidst international tensions. China retains ownership of its loaned pandas and their offspring; Beijing always has something Americans want even when the governments struggle to get along.

A week after the pandas’ 2023 departure, Chinese President Xi Jinping made the bears part of his pitch for friendlier relations. Speaking in San Francisco after his first meeting with President Biden in a year, he called them “envoys of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples” and offered to continue panda cooperation with the United States.

The speech specifically mentioned Californians’ hopes of welcoming pandas back to San Diego. Washington had no replacement deal, but Smith was confident that pandas would return. “[That was] not based on a specific conversation, but rather fifty years of history and demonstrated conservation success,” she told The Post.

She saw US permits as the potential holdup. “I was not worried about the agreement, but rather our U.S. Fish and Wildlife permitting process,” she said.

“It is a long and detailed process, and it could take one to two years, but the people at the USFWS did an incredible job moving the permits forward,” Smith said.

In 2024, Bao Li and Qing Bao came to Washington.

Smith signed the new ten-year breeding and research agreement with the China Wildlife Conservation Association on May 1, 2024. The deal runs through April 2034 and comes with a substantial annual payment.

“Under the agreement, we pay an annual conservation fee of $1 million to support giant panda research and conservation in China,” she said. “That fee is covered entirely by David M. Rubenstein’s donation — no federal dollars are used to pay it.”

Rubenstein co-founded the private equity firm Carlyle Group and formerly chaired the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents. His donation supports a partnership in which even a Washington-born cub belongs to China.

“The adult bears are expected to stay through 2034, and any cubs born here must move to China by age four,” Smith explained. Those cubs join China’s breeding program, rather than becoming permanent American residents.

Asked whether tensions between Washington and Beijing had complicated her work, Smith stressed the scientists’ shared purpose. “Helping conserve and save the giant panda has connected us with Chinese colleagues who share our focus and passion for saving the giant panda and its habitat,” she said. “The panda program is often held up as the shining example of positive soft diplomacy.”

For Smith, that means agreeing on how the pandas will be treated. “Our priorities are excellent animal care, meaningful collaborative research and a partnership that supports conservation over the long term,” she said. “My responsibility is to make sure the agreement allows us to deliver on those commitments.”

That relationship has long supplied photo opportunities for political leaders. In 2015, Michelle Obama and Xi’s wife, Peng Liyuan, announced the name of the zoo’s cub Bei Bei during the Chinese president’s state visit.

The tradition goes back to 1972, when China sent Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing after President Richard Nixon’s visit. Washington’s return gift required deliberation: bald eagles and mountain lions seemed too belligerent, a grizzly too Russian, and Beijing’s zoo already had a bison, Smith writes.

America settled on musk oxen Milton and Mathilda. Smith quotes then-zoo director Ted Reed conceding, “I just don’t think musk oxen have the sex appeal pandas do.”

The Chinese partnership also helps with the less photogenic business of producing cubs. When Smith interviewed to become panda curator, she was told, “Your job is to get the panda pregnant.”

Mei Xiang and Tian Tian never produced cubs through natural mating. Mei flattened herself onto the ground, and Tian couldn’t manage the positioning, so Chinese colleagues suggested strength training for him and demonstrated tapping her above the tail with bamboo.

The team ultimately relied on artificial insemination, timing procedures by testing Mei’s urine. Samples changed hands at a Starbucks in Haymarket, Va., en route to the zoo’s endocrine laboratory.

“I’ve always imagined customers sitting there, sipping their lattes, never knowing that the exhausted-looking woman sitting nearby had a cooler full of panda pee under the table,” Smith writes. Behind the diplomatic ceremonies, someone still had to make that delivery.

Smith says the research and breeding partnership also supports work in the wild. “Smithsonian scientists working with Chinese colleagues restored degraded bamboo habitat to help reconnect isolated panda populations, then documented wild pandas using those restored areas,” she said.

“No single institution can claim credit for the giant panda’s recovery,” she added. “But the panda program demonstrates how sustained investment, scientific collaboration and international partnerships can make a real difference for a species in the wild, while inspiring millions of people to care about conservation.”

Bao Li embodies the exchange: his mother, Bao Bao, was born in Washington in 2013 and sent to China in 2017. Now her son lives at the zoo that raised her, with any cubs he fathers destined for China, too.

“From the day they’re born, we know they won’t stay with us forever, which means that their departure isn’t a failure of our commitment, but its culmination,” Smith writes. “The feeling is equal parts heartbreaking and heartening.”