In February 1972, US president Richard Nixon defied conventional foreign policy wisdom when he arrived in Beijing for meetings with Chinese leader Mao Zedong. In recognition of the trip’s historical significance, the South China Morning Post is running a multimedia series exploring interesting points of the past 50 years in US-China relations. Our fourth piece, by Mark Magnier, looks at the role played by China’s secret diplomatic weapon: the panda. In 1972, Beijing made one of the worst deals ever. After president Richard Nixon’s historic summit with chairman Mao Zedong, China gave pandas Lingling and Xingxing to the United States, warming American hearts after decades of Cold War distrust. In return, China got two musk oxen named Milton and Matilda. “We got the better of it with the cuddly pandas versus the ugly musk oxen,” said Winston Lord, who was on the trip as a member of the National Security Council. “An immediate tactical victory.” Fifty years later, as US-China tensions mount over Taiwan, human rights, security and global health, even congenial pandas are in the fray. “The Chinese Communist Party has leveraged the cuddly panda in an effort to soften their image around the world,” said US Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina who introduced a non-binding resolution this month to retain pandas born in US zoos rather than return them to China as now required. “We should not fund China’s panda propaganda campaign,” added Mace, citing a “sinister plot” that includes Bing Dwen Dwen, the Beijing Olympics mascot dressed as an astronaut. “Let’s get serious with our diplomacy and hit China where it hurts.” Mace has one thing right. China’s panda diplomacy has been incredibly effective at softening hearts and blurring China’s sharp edges. Some 8,000 people greeted Lingling and Xingxing’s rainy arrival in April 1972, and 1 million visitors have jammed the Washington National Zoo annually since to see pandas. “It reinforced support for opening, which was a daring move,” said Lord. “It was typical of Chinese diplomatic cleverness.” Decades later, upon his diplomatic posting to the US in 2013, Cui Tiankai would write: “There are actually two Chinese ambassadors in Washington: me and the panda cub at the National Zoo.” Great thought went into the furry 1972 exchange. While Nixon and Mao talked geopolitics, first lady Pat Nixon visited the Beijing zoo and caught panda fever, prompting premier Zhou Enlai to offer the two animals as symbols of friendship. But this left the US scrambling. “There was lots of back and forth to decide what to give,” said Nicholas Platt, a State Department official on the trip. Eventually, Washington settled on musk oxen, a woolly arctic mammal with a powerful rutting smell, given China’s preference for indigenous fauna. “If we hadn’t exterminated our bison, they might’ve been useful,” said Stapleton Roy, another US diplomat on the trip. How landmark Shanghai Communique shaped China-US ties for past 50 years There’s little evidence that Milton and Matilda melted Chinese hearts as well, although Joel Berger, a Colorado State University professor and arctic wildlife authority believes they should have. “They’re cute and cuddly, just marvellous,” said Berger, “and they’re bright.” Unfortunately, they struggled with the climate. “Milton had a runny nose, cough and hair loss at the Beijing zoo,” Theodore Reed, then the director of the Washington zoo, reported on picking up the pandas in 1972. “He might be a little depressed.” China kept the zoo off limits during future president George Bush’s 1974-76 tenure as head of the US Liaison Office, fuelling suspicion of an untimely death. Later reports confirmed that Milton “swallowed a sharp object”. Bush considered offering a replacement but decided it was unseemly for US president Gerald Ford to arrive bearing a hairy beast. “I am perfectly willing to let the subject drop from this end,” Bush wrote in a June 1975 cable. “Why should we flog a dead Musk Ox?” Roy, ambassador to China two decades later, suspects Milton’s body was not wasted. “The practice then, when animals died in the zoo, was that they were eaten,” he said. “The musk ox was probably eaten.” Roy recounts being served recently deceased zoo rhinoceros at a Beijing restaurant while hosting a US congressional delegation. “I don’t recall what it tasted like,” he said. “It’s all in the sauces.” Fellow long-time State Department official Chas Freeman, who interpreted during the 1972 February summit, said it was unlikely Nixon bothered to visit the pandas or musk oxen. “He had a disdain for ceremony,” while Pat Nixon, he added, tended to give presentations that “went on and on, which if you’re an interpreter is not good”. China’s first recorded effort at panda diplomacy was in 685AD when two live bears and dozens of pelts were sent to imperial Japan. Since then, China has used its cuddly ambassadors to show favour, displeasure and exact leverage, said researcher Linda Zhang in her American Enterprise Institute report Pandas: China’s Most Popular Diplomats. Panda exports frequently track major trade deals, diplomatic initiatives and favourable statements on Tibet or Taiwan. Significant activity took place during China’s opening to the West; efforts after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown to burnish its reputation; and periods linked to President Xi Jinping’s increasingly assertive foreign policy. The 2020 birth of panda cub Qi Ji at the Washington zoo “was a bright spot in an otherwise dismal year for US-China relations”, Zhang’s report said. Most pandas go to developed countries with geopolitical clout that are able to afford panda leasing fees of up to US$1 million annually, their special enclosures and diet. Top panda recipients in 2019 – the US with 11, Japan with nine and South Korea with four – were also China’s largest trading partners. “Giant pandas are not dispersed randomly,” Zhang said. While Beijing often portrays pandas as ancient national treasures, they rarely appear in traditional arts and only became “treasures” in the 1950s, said E Elena Songster, a historian at St Mary’s College in California and author of Panda Nation , largely because they lacked imperial baggage unlike, say, dragons. In 1956, Mao visited the Nanjing Radio Factory, maker of the “Panda 1501 Premium Radio”, signaling that pandas were politically acceptable in commerce and art, said online Chinese portal Jiemian News. “The political power of the giant panda was its innate ability to exude an apolitical image,”said Songster. When Nixon met Mao: 50 years later, reverberations are still felt As the Cultural Revolution ebbed and China rediscovered traditional culture, pandas morphed again – their relative docility consistent with Confucianism; their contrasting colours with Daoism’s yin-yang dynamic; their vegetarian diets with Buddhism. And while Beijing is often credited with panda diplomacy, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government was the real pioneer, some maintain. Desperate for US support against invading Japanese, the Nationalist’s weak position fuelled innovative soft power. From 1937 to 1942, most of the 14 pandas sent West went to America. “In fact, the Republic of China is the founder of panda diplomacy,” claims Taiwan’s News Lens website. After China’s 1949 Communist revolution and relative diplomatic isolation, most pandas were sent to Soviet nations and North Korea. In 1958, an Austrian wheeler-dealer traded giraffes, rhinos, hippos and zebras for a panda he hoped to sell to Chicago’s zoo. US sanctions and the panda’s socialist roots killed the deal, however, and Jiji ended up in London, inspiring the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) logo. The 1972 gift of Lingling and Xingxing prompted successful “me too” requests from Japan, France, West Germany, Mexico, Spain and Britain. British prime minister Edward Heath traveled to Beijing in 1974. Wary of getting turned down, he finally got up his courage near the trip’s end. Chinese officials laughed. “We wondered when you’d get around to asking,” they replied, recounts Michael Brambell, retired mammal curator at the London Zoo. When Brambell arrived in Beijing a few weeks later to pick up ChiaChia and ChingChing, someone had left them hyperventilating on the searing tarmac. Terrified, he rushed them onto the air-conditioned plane. Fortunately, they recovered. Mainland China has also sought to win hearts and minds closer to home, shipping pandas to Hong Kong in 2007 and offering a pair to Taipei in 2005, hoping to turn Taiwanese voters against pro-independence president Chen Shui-bian. Beijing, which seeks to reunify with Taiwan, pointedly gave them names that, when combined, mean “reunion”. “They are meant to destroy Taiwan’s psychological defences,” thundered Huang Shi-cho, a lawmaker at the time, comparing them to a Trojan horse. Why are pandas so ‘chonky’ despite their vegan diet? Pandas, which date back millions of years, once roamed Vietnam and Myanmar, a fact China reportedly once hid to suggest they were exclusive to China. There are now fewer than 1,900 wild and some 600 captive giant pandas worldwide, according to the Smithsonian Institution. In 2016, the species was elevated to vulnerable from endangered. Notoriously poor breeders, captive males display little interest in sex, and females are only in heat a few days a year. Among Theodore Reed’s greatest regrets: none of Lingling and Xingxing’s babies survived. Their muted sex lives and zookeepers’ efforts at artificial insemination have fuelled global fascination. “I feel a little embarrassed,” Reed told reporters in 1980. “This is a private and intimate thing between the two pandas.” Brambell recalls during the Beijing-London flight shining a flashlight on the pandas to ensure they were actually male and female. “We wanted to make sure we really had the goods,” he said. “I was none the wiser when we landed.” But the rapt attention has also spurred public interest in conservation. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a zoo director, it’s that sex sells,” said Mark Reed. “It’s safe to talk about sex in mixed company. What other profession can you do that with?” How Nixon’s visit to China 50 years ago changed the world forever Panda branding is used for soy milk, dumplings, financial products and cigarettes, there are live zoo “panda cams” and they inspire endless bad puns in headlines. Following American gushing over Lingling and Xingxing, China realised how lucrative the animals were and shifted from state gifts to pricey short-term leases. Starting at US$50,000 a month for the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, rental prices would climb as high as US$1 million annually. In the 1980s, dozens of US zoos clamoured for their own bears, sparking a “rent-a-panda” phase amid stressed animals, stepped-up breeding programmes and wild-panda captures to fuel the trade. As environmental resistance mounted, China eventually replaced short-term rentals with 10-year leases worldwide. And after a WWF lawsuit, half of US fees are now earmarked for wild panda conservation. “If there is a nice positive ending to the story, it’s that China set up panda reserves and is doing a top-notch job,” said John Robinson, executive vice-president of the Wildlife Conservation Society. Pandas have done wonders for China’s image. As with many soft power initiatives, however, they only go so far in countering assertive foreign policy and brash wolf-warrior rhetoric. “Panda diplomacy provides a momentary injection of goodwill,” but is a limited tool, said Zhang. “It cannot sustain positive relations between China and panda host countries in the longer term.”