China plans to send a new pair of giant pandas to San Diego Zoo, renewing its longstanding gesture of friendship after nearly all the iconic bears on loan to US zoos were returned as relations began to sour between the two nations.
San Diego Zoo officials said that if all permits and other requirements are approved, two bears, a male and a female, are expected to arrive as early as the end of summer, about five years after the zoo sent its last pandas back to China.
“We’re very excited and hopeful,” said Megan Owen of the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and vice president of Wildlife Conservation Science. “They’ve expressed a tremendous amount of enthusiasm to re-initiate panda cooperation starting with the San Diego Zoo.”
Photo: AP
In November, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) raised hopes his country would start sending pandas to the US again after he and President Joe Biden convened in Northern California for their first face-to-face meeting in a year and pledged to try to reduce tensions.
China is considering a pair that includes a female descendent of Bai Yun and Gao Gao, two of the zoo’s former residents, said Owen, an expert in panda behavior who has worked in San Diego and China.
Bai Yun, who was born in captivity in China, lived at the zoo for more than 20 years and gave birth to six cubs there. She and her son were the zoo’s last pandas and returned to China in 2019.
Gao Gao was born in the wild in China and lived at the San Diego Zoo from 2003 to 2018 before being sent back.
BEAR NECESSITIES
Decades of conservation efforts in the wild and study in captivity saved the giant panda species from extinction, increasing its population from fewer than 1,000 at one time to more than 1,800 in the wild and captivity.
The black-and-white bears have long been the symbol of friendship since Beijing gifted a pair of pandas to the National Zoo in Washington, DC, in 1972, ahead of the normalization of bilateral relations. China later loaned pandas to zoos to help breed cubs and boost the population.
Demands for the return of giant pandas grew among the Chinese public as unproven allegations that US zoos mistreated the pandas flooded Chinese social media.
Fears over the future of so-called panda diplomacy escalated last year when zoos in Memphis, Tennessee, and Washington, DC, returned their pandas to China, leaving only four pandas in the US, all at the zoo in Atlanta. That loan agreement expires later this year.
Many loan agreements were for 10 years and often were extended well beyond. But negotiations last year to extend the agreements with US zoos or send more pandas did not produce results. China watchers speculated that Beijing was gradually pulling its pandas from Western nations due to deteriorating diplomatic relations with the US and other countries.
POLITICAL ANIMALS
Then on Nov. 15, last year, a week after the National Zoo’s pandas departed for China, Xi spoke at a dinner in downtown San Francisco with American business executives and signaled that more pandas might be sent. He said he learned San Diego Zoo and people in California “very much look forward to welcoming pandas back.”
“I was 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 said.
San Diego Zoo continued to work with their Chinese counterparts even after it no longer had any pandas.
Owen said China is particularly interested in exchanging information on the zoo’s successful breeding of pandas in captivity. Giant pandas are difficult to breed in part because the female’s reproductive window is extremely narrow, lasting only 48 to 72 hours each year.
Bai Yun’s first cub, Hua Mei, was also the first panda born through artificial insemination to survive into adulthood outside of China, and would go on to produce 12 cubs on her own after she was sent to China.
Bai Yun, meanwhile, remained at the zoo where she gave birth to two more females and three males. With cameras in her den, researchers monitored her, contributing to the understanding of maternal care behavior, Owen said.
“We have a lot of institutional knowledge and capacity from our last cooperative agreement, which we will be able to parlay into this next chapter, as well as training the next generation of panda conservationists,” she said.
Chinese experts would travel with the bears and spend months in San Diego, Owen said.
She said the return of the bears is not only good for San Diego but the giant panda’s recovery as a species.
“We do talk about panda diplomacy all the time,” Owen said. “Diplomacy is a critical part of conservation in any number of contexts. ... If we can’t learn to work together, you know, in sometimes difficult situations or situations that are completely out of the control of conservationists, then we’re not going to succeed.”
In Taiwan’s politics the party chair is an extremely influential position. Typically this person is the presumed presidential candidate or serving president. In the last presidential election, two of the three candidates were also leaders of their party. Only one party chair race had been planned for this year, but with the Jan. 1 resignation by the currently indicted Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) two parties are now in play. If a challenger to acting Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) appears we will examine that race in more depth. Currently their election is set for Feb. 15. EXTREMELY
China’s military launched a record number of warplane incursions around Taiwan last year as it builds its ability to launch full-scale invasion, something a former chief of Taiwan’s armed forces said Beijing could be capable of within a decade. Analysts said China’s relentless harassment had taken a toll on Taiwan’s resources, but had failed to convince them to capitulate, largely because the threat of invasion was still an empty one, for now. Xi Jinping’s (習近平) determination to annex Taiwan under what the president terms “reunification” is no secret. He has publicly and stridently promised to bring it under Communist party (CCP) control,
Jan. 20 to Jan. 26 Taipei was in a jubilant, patriotic mood on the morning of Jan. 25, 1954. Flags hung outside shops and residences, people chanted anti-communist slogans and rousing music blared from loudspeakers. The occasion was the arrival of about 14,000 Chinese prisoners from the Korean War, who had elected to head to Taiwan instead of being repatriated to China. The majority landed in Keelung over three days and were paraded through the capital to great fanfare. Air Force planes dropped colorful flyers, one of which read, “You’re back, you’re finally back. You finally overcame the evil communist bandits and
Last week saw the appearance of another odious screed full of lies from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian (肖千), in the Financial Review, a major Australian paper. Xiao’s piece was presented without challenge or caveat. His “Seven truths on why Taiwan always will be China’s” presented a “greatest hits” of the litany of PRC falsehoods. This includes: Taiwan’s indigenous peoples were descended from the people of China 30,000 years ago; a “Chinese” imperial government administrated Taiwan in the 14th century; Koxinga, also known as Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功), “recovered” Taiwan for China; the Qing owned
RSS