US-China Cooperation Leads to Boost for Giant Pandas
Decades after China began working with zoos in the US and Europe to protect the giant panda, the number of animals in the wild has risen to 1,900.
That's up from about 1,100 in the 1980s, and they are no longer considered "at risk" of extinction but have been given the safer status of "vulnerable."
It looks like China's so-called "panda diplomacy" has worked.
Now, countries have begun a new round of giant panda conservation cooperation, after the agreements from the first round — which began around 1998 — ended in recent years.
A pair of pandas arrived at the San Diego Zoo in June. Another pair will go to the Smithsonian's National Zoo later this year, and a third pair will settle in the San Francisco Zoo in the near future.
Given the difficult relationship between China and the US, some were worried that Beijing might stop sending pandas abroad, but President Xi Jinping dispelled the worries last November with an announcement during a US visit.
It is a good move to soften China's image among Americans but is unlikely to change US policy, experts said.
Conservation, however, is keeping the two sides working together.
The first giant pandas sent abroad were gestures of goodwill from a Chinese government seeking to improve its relations with the West.
Beijing gave a pair of pandas — Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing — to the US following President Richard Nixon's historic visit to China in 1972 and then other pandas to other countries, including Japan, France, Britain and Germany, over the next decade.
When the panda population decreased in the 1980s, Beijing stopped giving pandas as gifts but turned to short-term leasing, then longer-term collaboration with foreign zoos on research and breeding.
However, experts say that it's not always easy for foreign-born pandas to return to China, where they have to get used to hearing their keepers speaking Chinese!
