The bewitching power of the panda (Li Hongbo/VCG via Getty Images)
![](https://unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/mary-100x100.jpeg)
One of my favourite childhood toys was a fuzzy little panda, with grippy arms that would cling to a curtain or bedpost. What I didn’t realise back then, as I doodled World Wildlife Fund-style pandas on my schoolbooks, was how distinctively modern panda iconography is. Its symbolism is intricately bound up with both the greatest achievements and deepest vulnerabilities of our modern age, including perhaps its most pressing question: are we technologising away our own capacity to self-reproduce?
The Chinese understand the bewitching power of the panda, using them as tools for soft power outreach and diplomatic communication. When, for example, all those animals on loan to the US and UK were recalled earlier this year, experts in “panda diplomacy” warned that this tracked steadily worsening relations between China and the West.
But following Xi Jinping’s recent visit to the United States, we’ve seen a further exchange of panda platitudes. First, Chinese officials hinted that panda loans to America might once again resume. Then, White House mandarins responded with enthusiasm. The geopolitical subtext is clear: US-China rapprochement may be in the offing.
The first modern instance of panda diplomacy was in 1941, when Soong Mei-ling, wife of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek, presented “a chubby pair of comical black and white furry pandas” to an American zoo. At that point China had only been a republic for three decades, and these creatures made an ideal choice of Year Zero symbol: though widely distributed in the Pleistocene era, today they’re found only in a small region of central China, making them distinctively Chinese. Meanwhile, in a culture ancestrally rich with animal emblems, pandas came with neither astrological connotations nor — unlike the mythical dragons — symbolic links with the imperial rulers so recently deposed.
Following the Kuomintang’s exile to Taiwan in 1949, the early uncertainty of the Chinese Communist successor regime’s relationship with the West is exemplified by the story of the WWF’s first poster-panda. Chi Chi was born in the wild in Sichuan in 1955, and kept in Beijing Zoo for two years, before being loaned to Moscow Zoo along with another panda at the request of Soviet diplomat Kliment Voroshilov in 1957.
At the time, most panda gifts were bestowed on other Communist states, including several sent to North Korea, all of which died due to poor treatment. Chi Chi was more fortunate: sent back to Beijing after Russian scientists mistook her for a male and requested a female instead, she was sold to Heini Demmer, an animal broker, who sought expressions of interest from American zoos. But the US Government, who still recognised only the exiled Kuomintang administration in Taiwan, refused to allow her entry, asserting that the US embargo on goods from China extended to pandas.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe“…We cannot, after all, create nature reserves for ourselves…”
Wanna bet?
Huxley always was more prescient than Orwell. Maybe the technocrats of the not too distant future will maintain spaces where the hatchery-born-and-raised masses can look with fascinated horror at those who have rejected modernity, continuing with natural childbirth and the like. There might even be some Complete Works of Shakespeare lying around.
I agrees – we already have – it’s inside your smartphone.
Gated communities, MaCarthy & Stone?
Falling fertility rates, except in Africa, where the population rises 10% a year, and among the non indigenes in Europe, where it is about three times that of the indigenes.
That’s an unpleasant bit of information, Anna.
And President Erdogan of Turkey has appealed to Muslim immigrants in the West to have at least five children. He knows that demography is destiny.
In the 1970s Pandas were such a staple feature of news programmes on slow days that the incomparable Miles Kington penned these little lines ..
Wouldn’t it be lovely to return to a world where we had slow enough news days that Producers felt obliged to pad out 5 minutes of their broadcast with footage of some cuddly-looking wildlife?
I doubt the pandas sent to N Korea died from mistreatment. I suspect they were eaten. This is, after all, what happened to a small number of giant rabbits sent from E Germany as breeding stock for a new food programme. They were all eaten before they had a chance to breed.
Similar to the giant tortoises that were so tasty they never made it back to the UK “extraordinary large and fat, and so sweet, that no pullet eats more pleasantly”
OMG! Really!
I agree, it’s hard reproducing in captivity. That said, I think the fall in babies born per women has a number of reasons. The largest might be in the ability to better deal with the unintended. A good way to evaluate such things might be the stats out of the us on unintended births that would have been ended with universal access to end births. Interesting times for sure.
Surely one of the obvious reasons must be that western women seek careers during much or most of their fertile years. When they choose to start a family after the age of 35, or later, they discover that sadly, it may be too late. The other obvious reason is that the men they want to marry refuse to commit themselves.
Such a well-crafted essay. I enjoyed the twisty path to get to Grandma’s house not knowing what was around the corner. I’m kinda confused that there’s a decline in the birth rate as I thought we were over-populated, and I’ve always found the saying”wherever you go there you are” one of the more powerful aphorisms.
So….Mary’s pregnant??