“There’s nothing I enjoy more than watching the press report on pandas. The pandamania,” Gavin Newsom said today at the San Diego Zoo during a celebration to mark the arrival of two giant pandas from China.
The California governor opened the door to this development with his determined pursuit of the Chinese Communist Party’s friendship over the past year, which Beijing rewarded today.
One “press” report in particular that helps to explain pandamania is a column last November in the Global Times, the party’s English-language propaganda outlet for international audiences. In the article, it tried to disabuse skeptical Americans of the obvious observation that panda diplomacy is a coercive political tool.
As a general rule of thumb, the narratives pushed by party-state outlets can give you a sense of what Communist Party cadres have been ordered to obfuscate. These are the things that Beijing doesn’t want people to know, so it often prints the exact opposite of the truth. That’s true in this case.
The backstory is that the San Diego placement is the first new agreement to bring pandas to the U.S. in over two decades, and it follows Beijing’s decision to let other existing panda placements lapse in 2019 and then last year, when the bears left Washington, D.C.’s National Zoo.
Like everything else the party-state does, obviously, the panda stuff is political, not sentimental. Steve Tsang, one of the most insightful scholars of China in the West today, told the Washington Post last fall: “China now requires countries that have been given the privilege of hosting pandas to be friendly to China, and if they’re not doing so sufficiently, then pandas will be withdrawn.” The party gives out the photogenic bears when it finds its foreign counterparts pliant; it takes them away when they grow a spine.
After the Smithsonian announced in November that the pandas at the National Zoo would be sent back to China because an existing agreement had not been renewed, the Global Times published a commentary that attempted to debunk the idea that Beijing uses pandas for political purposes. “When China gifted or leased giant pandas to the US, some American politicians and media figures sternly warned, with a straight face, that pandas could be China’s ‘united front tool,’ cautioning everyone to be vigilant,” the piece stated, using the term for the party’s political-influence operations.
Translation: It makes sense to be vigilant, and panda diplomacy, if not a direct outgrowth of the party’s united-front bureaucracy, is a tool Beijing uses to reward its friends abroad and isolate its enemies.
The San Diego deal was announced in February, a few months after Newsom traveled to China and sat for a 45-minute meeting with General Secretary Xi Jinping. The governor said afterward that he deliberately declined to raise human-rights concerns and the Chinese government’s role in fentanyl trafficking with the Chinese leader (he claimed that the State Department advised him not to). During the trip, he met with the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, a united-front organ that aims to co-opt foreign politicians.
In San Diego, Newsom said: Today “is about people-to-people, not just panda-to-panda. At the end of the day, what it’s really about is all of us. It’s about the fact that we share this same short moment in life.” For him, it might be. But when it’s not shooting itself in the foot, the party can act as a savvy Leninist political machine. For the party, pandamania is about duping credulous foreigners.