The return of the giant panda to China already already it has become the latest symbol of the fragile relations between the two main world powers. already already landed on Thursday afternoon in Shanghai after leaving the Memphis Zoo (Tennessee), where he lived for the last two decades with his partner le le, who passed away in February. His departure marks the end of a 20-year loan deal and coincides with a period in which mistrust between Beijing and Washington is through the roof. Rumors and accusations of mistreatment of the animal had intensified in recent months, at a time when each gesture is analyzed to the millimeter on both sides. already already it has been received in the Asian giant as a star; the state media have poured in with coverage of the event and the internet is abuzz with messages of welcome and celebration.
Since the death of le le On February 1 – two days before the Pentagon detected a Chinese balloon on US soil that it accused of espionage – Chinese social media had been the scene of a heated debate about the treatment pandas were receiving in Memphis. Videos in which he was seen already already very thin and with bald spots in their discolored fur went viral while a totally opposite image came from Russia: the chubby ru yi and ding ding, the pandas that live in the Moscow zoo, appeared in the Chinese media doing somersaults and eating happily in the Moscow facility. “It’s the clear difference between how a good and an evil stepmother treats you,” wrote one of the Weibo users, which has hundreds of thousands of interactions. In April the panda died in Thailand Lin Hui, a death that went virtually unnoticed in Chinese forums.
The US protector In Defense of Animals accused the Memphis Zoo in 2021 of failing to properly care for the couple, alleging that they suffered “physical, mental and emotional deprivation”. Zoo employees have always denied these claims and ensured that already already he suffers from a chronic skin and coat problem, inherent to his immune system and affected by hormonal changes. Its director, Matt Thompson, came to express that le le and already already they were “two of the most pampered animals on the planet.”
Despite the fact that these rumors were also silenced by the Chinese authorities, comments abound on Weibo criticizing the “suffering” that this “national treasure” has suffered “far from the beloved homeland.” On Wednesday, the Foreign Ministry said that “the pandas have been well cared for and were very dear to the Americans.”
“The giant panda has played a pivotal role as a symbol of friendly exchanges between China and the United States. These friendly giant pandas, unique in China, have a special mission,” reads an editorial published Thursday in the official newspaper. Global Times. Shortly after, his controversial former director, Hu Xijing, speculated on his personal blog that, with the return of already already, “the curtain is lowered on what Sino-American relations were 20 years ago.” “The worst is the US political elite, which has broken friendship and basic trust and has generated a spiral of mutual suspicion, causing both peoples to question everything,” Hu lashed out.
Everything that China has changed in 20 years
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already already (Beijing, 2000) and le le (Shanghai, 1998-2023) arrived in Memphis in 2003 as part of a conservation and research project between the Chinese Association of Zoological Gardens and the United States. The context in which that loan occurred was very different from the current one. China had entered the World Trade Organization (WTO) just two years earlier, with the approval of a United States that hoped that, as that emerging giant developed, it would end up becoming a liberal democracy with a market economy similar to those of the West. . China’s entry into the WTO changed the multilateral trade system and led hundreds of foreign companies to set up shop on its soil.
Much has happened since then, from US criticism of alleged abuses by the Chinese government against ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang, to the repression after pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, to the trade war. Suspicion rises to the nth degree when it comes to Taiwan, the democratically self-governing island that Washington supplies with weapons but that China considers an inalienable part of its territory. Meanwhile, mistrust continues regarding the neutrality that Beijing claims to maintain in the war in Ukraine. Xi Jinping, who has not condemned the invasion, spoke last Wednesday with Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky for the first time since the start of the war. In this year and two months of war, however, the Chinese leader has not hidden the good harmony that he maintains with his “dear friend” Vladimir Putin.
panda diplomacy
What is known as panda diplomacy began before the establishment of the People’s Republic, which occurred in 1949. Eight years earlier, in 1941, the then Republic of China gave the United States a pair of these bears in gratitude for their help during the war. japanese invasion. These precious gifts were limited to allied countries once the Communist Party took power, but since the 1970s, when Beijing began to connect with the world, the black and white animals have become goodwill ambassadors destined for to strengthen relations with the West. The United States received a pair of pandas after the historic meeting between Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong in the Chinese capital in 1972, which started the thaw between Washington and Beijing.
The pandas are considered a kind of “award” with which China shows its friendship to those nations with which it has a good bilateral relationship. However, since 1984, he has only rented them out and for large sums of money. The contracts are usually around 10 years and are estimated to be around a million dollars. To this amount must be added the high cost of maintaining very delicate animals, which feed mainly on fresh bamboo shoots. According to data from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), there are 1,864 pandas in the wild and fifty in captivity in 26 zoos in 21 countries, including the Madrid Zoo Aquarium. Spain became the sixth country in the world to exhibit these species in 1978, after receiving two specimens as a gift after the visit to China of King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofía.
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