WASHINGTON — During Richard Nixon’s famous visit to China as US president in February 1972, which opened the way to formal diplomatic relations between the two countries, the first lady, Pat Nixon, told the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, how much she had enjoyed seeing the giant pandas at Beijing’s zoo. “I’ll give you some,” he promptly replied. Two months later, the first two pandas, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, arrived in Washington, kickstarting what became known as panda diplomacy and seemingly symbolising a promising new era of engagement between China and the US.
That era – and the optimism on both sides about the outlook for US-China relations – is now definitively over. So it is perhaps fitting that the pandas have also been recalled. Exactly one week before Joe Biden’s meeting with Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in San Francisco today (15 November), the last three pandas at Washington’s National Zoo lumbered into special crates to begin their long journey to China. The remaining four pandas in the US – at a zoo in Atlanta – are due to return to China in 2024.
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