Xi announces Atlanta panda pair at Trump summit

Analysts question whether pandas can still carry diplomatic weight

Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced at his summit on Thursday with President Trump in Washington that a pair of giant pandas named Ping Ping and Fu Shuang will soon arrive at Zoo Atlanta, the Wall Street Journal reported. Xi, in remarks at the summit, described the panda as “an envoy of friendship between the Chinese and Americans.”

The Atlanta arrival marks the latest chapter in China’s “panda diplomacy,” a tradition that dates to President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 opening to Beijing. Pat Nixon, the president’s wife, spotted pandas pictured on a package of cigarettes in Beijing during her husband’s historic trip. “Aren’t they cute?” she told Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. “I’ll give you some,” he replied. A pair, Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling, arrived later that year at the National Zoo. The U.S. reciprocated with two musk oxen, Milton and Matilda.

Zoo Atlanta said in April that it had reached a deal with the China Wildlife Conservation Association and expected to soon host two new pandas. The bears, born at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, are named Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, the zoo said.

The zoo previously hosted a pair, Lun Lun and Yang Yang, who produced seven offspring. That pair and their two youngest cubs returned in 2024 to the Chengdu research base, where their five older offspring also live.

But analysts said the public-performance effect of the panda gesture may be limited in today’s more competitive U.S.-China environment. “In the shadow of the Cold War, all the panda diplomacy stuff presented a friendly, totally fuzzy face of China that helped to dispel some of the China threat,” said Chong Ja Ian, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore. “The U.S.-China relationship today is far more complicated, and so the public performance effect of the pandas may not be as great. There is reason for cooperation, but there is a lot more serious competition.”

The Atlanta-bound pair follows earlier sendings to the San Diego Zoo and the National Zoo, both of which received new pairs after Xi raised the prospect of sending more pandas at a 2023 regional summit in San Francisco. At the time, Xi said he had been told that “many American people, especially children, were really reluctant to say goodbye to the pandas, and went to the zoo to see them off.” Xi’s 2023 comments came during a difficult period in bilateral ties, marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, trade disputes, and the return of some bears to China.

In 2023, the death of an aging panda at the Memphis Zoo and the poor appearance of another animal prompted social media complaints in China. Zoo officials said the animals were treated well, and Chinese experts found only evidence of common ailments.

China’s panda-lending program took its modern form in the 1980s, when Beijing began lending bears to foreign zoos at fees as high as $1 million a year, earmarked for panda conservation. In 2016, the species was reclassified from “endangered” to “vulnerable” after a 2014 survey estimated 1,864 pandas in the wild — a 17% increase over the previous decade. Improvements in breeding techniques also expanded zoo populations through the mid-2010s. Under China’s arrangements with foreign zoos, offspring are considered Chinese property and eventually returned to China.