Panda Diplomacy Returns to Washington: Two Chengdu Pandas Will Move to Zoo Atlanta
At the White House welcome ceremony, Xi Jinping announced that giant pandas Pingping and Fushuang will reach Zoo Atlanta within days, and that China will host 100,000 American students over five years — the friendship track of a summit otherwise full of harder subjects.
At a White House ceremony otherwise given over to geopolitics, the Chinese president saved a moment for zoology. On Thursday morning, Xi Jinping told the audience that "in a few days", two giant pandas named Pingping and Fushuang would arrive at Zoo Atlanta "to meet the American people". Pandas, he said, are "messengers of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples" — a line state media had illustrated with high-resolution photographs within minutes. The ceremony itself broke with six decades of protocol, as our earlier coverage noted: Donald Trump went to the airport to welcome the Chinese leader personally.
The arrangement was longer in the making than the summit. Last year the China Wildlife Conservation Association signed a cooperation agreement with Zoo Atlanta — the announcement that started the fan countdown — and under it a male panda, Pingping, and a female, Fushuang, both from the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, will spend ten years there. The zoo has spent the interval upgrading its enclosures, with Chinese experts advising on facilities, diet and veterinary care, The Paper reported.
On Weibo, the departure is being followed like a family emigration. Since July 9 the pair has been kept off public display at Chengdu, and fans noticed that Fushuang's old glass-fronted enclosure has already been reassigned to another panda. A fan account run in Fushuang's name has asked the base to release even "a few seconds" of footage of the two eating and sleeping during their pre-departure quarantine. "We miss that big-bottomed glutton at mealtimes so much," it wrote — in panda-fan dialect, 大屁墩, a big dumpling of a backside, is high praise.
The pandas shared the podium with the summit's other friendship deliverable. In the same speech, Xi pledged to invite 100,000 American young people to China over the next five years — doubling an earlier pledge of 50,000 student visits that has already been met ahead of schedule. The people-to-people track ran in parallel all day: Peng Liyuan, the Chinese leader's wife, toured the National Museum of Asian Art with Melania Trump and stayed to watch American schoolchildren sing Chinese songs.
Panda lending has been a barometer of the relationship since 1972, when Beijing sent Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing to Washington after Nixon's visit. Atlanta's own partnership with Chengdu spans more than two decades — what the conservation association calls twenty-plus years of "panda friendship". Within hours, the announcement sat at No. 6 on Baidu's hot-search board, a level of traction the youth pledge itself did not reach.
The symbolism was not lost on either audience. Between the airport welcome and the state dinner, the visit's most concrete new deliverables for ordinary people on both sides were two bears and a hundred thousand teenagers — the parts of the relationship the two governments can stage without conceding anything on the harder subjects of the visit. Zoo Atlanta says its renovated habitat is ready. The exact travel date for Pingping and Fushuang has not been announced.