What is China's "panda diplomacy"?

MATT BEVAN, HOST: In early November there was a sad farewell at the US National Zoo in Washington DC — the departure of two beloved pandas, who were being sent back home to China.

BRANDIE SMITH, DIRECTOR, SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL ZOO: The question I have been asked most in the past few weeks is are you sad and the answer is a very, it's a very simple yes.

MATT BEVAN: This was a big deal for locals. The zoo's pandas had kind of become a symbol for DC.

They're the zoo's most famous residents, there are panda statues around the city, and for a while pandas were featured on the city's train tickets.

DENNIS WILDER, SENIOR FELLOW, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY: Yes, the pandas have really become a part of life in the Washington area, and part of the life of America.

MATT BEVAN: The departure of the pandas was met with an outpouring of grief.

WASHINGTON LOCAL: They're just the sweetest, I just love them and miss them and hope we get more.

WASHINGTON LOCAL 2: I started crying because I never got to see a panda in person.

This wasn't just a sad thing for panda fans. It was interpreted as a big deal for international relations.

DENNIS WILDER: Now the Chinese are angry with us, so it could well be possible that they're trying to send a signal.

MATT BEVAN: See, the DC pandas aren't the only pandas on their way home.

Five years ago there were 16 pandas in zoos across America, but by the end of next year there will be none.

The UK's pandas left in early December and Australia's are due to leave in 2024.

And you see, the pandas are not just pandas, they're diplomats.

You're friendly to China? You get a panda. You criticise China? You get no pandas.

And yet, just hours after the pandas left Washington, the Chinese President Xi Jinping surprised everyone.

XI JINPING: (Speaking Chinese)

He hinted that he might send new pandas to America very soon.

Now, why am I talking about pandas? Well, internal politics in Beijing is notoriously difficult to discern.

And the withdrawal of these pandas, followed by the sudden change of heart, may indicate something really important.

After several years of hostility, China might be returning to a more peaceful relationship with the West.

But why? And why are pandas the key to understanding it?

I'm Matt Bevan and this is If You're Listening.

Now, all of this might kind of seem like reading tea leaves or astrology, but the panda thing is extremely real.

It started in 1972, with an unlikely friendship.

See, in the early 70s, pandas were incredibly difficult for westerners to see in person.

Wild pandas only exist in China, and as China was almost entirely closed to western tourism, you couldn't see the ones that were in Chinese zoos.

There was only one panda in the western world — a beloved panda named Chi Chi, who lived alone in London Zoo.

That wasn't through lack of trying. But the panda's unique biology left it in almost total control of the Chinese government.

In a way, it's kind of surprising they exist at all. They're not very good at being, like, alive. Like koalas, they're a cute, cuddly, hot mess.

Pandas spend 14 hours a day eating an enormous amount of bamboo.

NEWSREADER: Pandas munch through 16 kilograms of bamboo a day.

MATT BEVAN: But here's the thing — eating bamboo is a terrible idea.

Pandas are bears. They have the gastrointestinal system of an omnivorous bear, designed to eat meat and fruit.

But at some point in the past, their ancestors lost the ability to taste umami, or savoury food, which appears to have led them to just give up eating meat.

Instead, probably due to its availability, they started eating bamboo. But their digestive system didn't adapt to digest and extract nutrition from, like, wood.

They're still anatomically carnivores. Any time they don't spend eating or sleeping they spend doing what I can only assume are extremely painful bamboo poos.

Anyway, the point is, despite pandas being very famous and everyone loving them, it was incredibly hard to actually see one.

To get hold of some pandas, a zoo would need to be able to provide them with an absolutely enormous quantity of bamboo and expert care.

Plus, they'd need the Chinese government to agree to send them over.

Enter Pat Nixon, wife of US President Richard Nixon.

RICHARD NIXON, FORMER US PRESIDENT: I've often said to young candidates for the House and Senate, they always ask my advice, I say, first pick the right wife.

MATT BEVAN: Foreign trips were Pat Nixon's forte — she was a hit wherever she went.

While organising President Nixon's China trip, Mao's second in command Zhou Enlai specifically requested that Pat come too.

NEWSREADER: The presidential jet, with President and Mrs Nixon on board, will touch down on Monday for the start of the historic American mission to China.

MATT BEVAN: The point of the trip was to normalise relations between China and the US.

RICHARD NIXON: We can have differences without being enemies in war.

MATT BEVAN: While her husband sat in meetings, she hit the streets of Beijing in a bright red coat.

RON WALKER, WHITE HOUSE AIDE TO PRESIDENT NIXON: Her schedule was to go out and be with the Chinese people. I mean, we made arrangements for her to be in one of the Chinese kitchens in the hotel, we went to schools.

MATT BEVAN: While out and about, she went to Beijing zoo, where she saw her first ever panda.

That night at a state dinner, she was sitting next to Zhou Enlai. On the table in front of them was a cigarette box with a picture of pandas on it.

She told Premier Zhou that she thought they were cute.

"I'll give you some," said Zhou.

She asked if he meant he would give her some cigarettes.

"No," he said. "I'll give you some pandas."

PAT NIXON, FORMER FIRST LADY: On behalf of the people of the United States…

Just weeks later, Pat Nixon was at the National Zoo in Washington to see them arrive.

PAT NIXON: Hi.

RICHARD NIXON: Just checkin' to see how the panda thing went, I've been in a meeting.

PAT NIXON: Oh they were just darling!

MATT BEVAN: Thanks to President Nixon's obsession with taping all his conversations, we have access to this call between him and Pat on the day the pandas arrived.

RICHARD NIXON: Were you able to get up to them? Could you pet them or anything like that or do they not allow that?

PAT NIXON: No, they're in a glass cage. They're comic little things. They act up!

RICHARD NIXON: Do they really?

PAT NIXON: Oh yeah! It was a scream.

MATT BEVAN: By the end of that year, as other US allies like Japan, West Germany and Spain recognised Beijing, they received pandas of their own.

1972 was named by American media as "The Year of the Panda".

Over the following decades, pandas would arrive in foreign zoos at key moments when China wanted to improve relations.

In the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, where international media and governments criticised the Communist government for killing and imprisoning pro-democracy student protesters, another wave of pandas was sent out.

In Taiwan, an offer of pandas from the mainland became a massive political issue, with the major parties fighting over whether they should accept them.

In 2007, when Chinese economic growth was at its height, Beijing was keen for a closer relationship with Australia.

JOHN HOWARD, FORMER AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER: China's growth is very good for Australia

MATT BEVAN: And they weren't just offering to buy our resources.

GREG JENNETT, ABC NEWS: Buy gas, get pandas free — President Hu's promised a breeding pair for Adelaide zoo.

HU JINTAO, FORMER PRESIDENT OF CHINA: I believe that this will certainly be a new symbol of our friendship.

MATT BEVAN: China sees pandas as a symbol of their country, but by the 1980s, habitat loss had left only around 1,000 of them alive.

China became determined to rescue the symbolic species from extinction.

Their plan to do that is through a global lease program. Pandas are no longer given as gifts, they're leased for a million dollars a year each.

The point of the program is to generate income for panda conservation in China, and to generate new pandas.

The lease agreements say that zoos have to encourage the pandas to breed, and that any cubs the leased pandas have are the property of China.

The thing is, getting pandas to breed is a problem.

NICOLA GAGE, ABC NEWS: The last two attempts failed, now the pressure is on Wang Wang and Funi to get in the mood for love.

MATT BEVAN: Female pandas can only get pregnant for a day and a half a year.

NICOLA GAGE: With the critical reproductive opportunity only lasting 36 hours, there's little time for romance.

MATT BEVAN: Now, in the wild, they've figured out a way to make this work.

Studies of wild pandas show that in the weeks leading up to the fertility window, female pandas enjoy watching the males battle for dominance before mating with the one who wins.

They've been doing this for nearly 20 million years and it works fine apparently.

But in a zoo, there's no weird furry season of The Bachelorette.

NEWSREADER: Adult pandas are becoming more sedentary and less interested in sex.

MATT BEVAN: There's usually only one male and one female, and without the whole ritual, they're both far less interested in mating, and also don't seem to know what they're meant to do.

LUCY CATT, ZOOKEEPER, ADELAIDE ZOO: They did get really close, they were really working out the positioning um, and, what it was that they were needing to work on together.

MATT BEVAN: Zookeepers do what they can to show the pandas how it all works.

IAN SMITH, SENIOR VET, ADELAIDE ZOO: You can get panda porn on the TV. I'm sure if you search that on YouTube. Do it from your home computer, not on your work one.

MATT BEVAN: Panda porn is something that has been used for decades now to try and convince them to mate.

Zookeepers also try artificial insemination but that's only marginally more successful.

This has led to a strange situation where a quarter of all captive pandas are descended from a single male panda named Pan Pan who apparently knew what he was doing without any help from PandaHub.

I won't even bother going into the other problems like, panda penises are too small, they have random gestation periods or that they often have twins but can't care for two babies due primarily to the fact that they basically have to eat a dining table every day.

But zoos around the world are getting better at it, and by 2019 there were 600 Chinese-owned pandas alive in captivity in 19 countries.

But then the era of warm and fuzzy panda diplomacy suddenly came to an end.

There were a lot of things that heralded the souring of China's relationship with the West, but if you look hard, the clearest signal came in the form of a diplomat named Zhao Lijian.

INTERVIEWER: Lijian Zhao, thank you very much to have join us today.

Zhao Lijian didn't like how the United States was treating China.

ZHAO LIJIAN, CHINESE FOREIGN MINISTRY SPOKESPERSON: They are trying to bully China. We have to fight for our honour and dignity, we have to fight for our interests too.

MATT BEVAN: In 2019, he told Pakistani state TV that trying to bully China would backfire.

ZHAO LIJIAN: If you are trying to bully China, China will fight to the end.

MATT BEVAN: He decided that he would personally do something about this. But how? He was a relatively unknown civil servant in China's embassy in Pakistan with little influence over anything.

So he turned to Twitter dot com.

Initially, he basically just used Twitter normally. Chatting to people, retweeting interesting things, posting photos and videos of things he saw around Pakistan.

The fact that he was a Chinese official using Twitter to do anything other than post official press releases led to him gaining a big following.

By 2019, he had more followers than all other Chinese diplomatic accounts combined.

But when the international community, including the United States, started criticising China for its treatment of Uyghur Muslims in the far western Xinjiang province, Zhao accused the US of hypocrisy, saying they are still a racially segregated society.

LIU XIN, HOST, CGTN: Zhao tweeted that parts of Washington DC are off-limits for white people and that quote "there is a saying black in white out".

MATT BEVAN: The US didn't like this at all.

NEWSREADER: Former US National Security Advisor Susan Rice responded by calling Zhao a "racist disgrace and shockingly ignorant".

MATT BEVAN: She demanded Beijing remove Zhao from his post. Instead, they promoted him.

ANDREW PROBYN, ABC NEWS: Zhao Lijian is no junior Beijing player. He's the second ranked official in the Foreign Ministry who speaks with the authority of his nation.

MATT BEVAN: His appointment was a sign of a shift in Chinese foreign policy.

They weren't going to cop criticism anymore — for cyber crime, for intellectual property theft, or global pandemics.

BILL BIRTLES, ABC NEWS: A foreign ministry spokesman is now openly peddling, without any evidence, a claim that the US army sent the virus to Wuhan.

MATT BEVAN: When Australia criticised China's human rights record, Zhao accused Canberra of hypocrisy by tweeting a graphic of an Australian soldier appearing to murder an Afghan child.

ANDREW PROBYN: Don't be afraid, the soldier says, we are coming to bring you peace.

SCOTT MORRISON, FORMER AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER: It is a false image and a terrible slur.

MATT BEVAN: Zhao became the face of the new form of Chinese diplomacy.

ANDREW PROBYN: Wolf Warrior diplomacy…

ACTOR, WOLF WARRIOR FILM: Wolf warrior!

ANDREW PROBYN: An aggressive approach that repurposes the muscular nationalistic sentiment of a Chinese movie franchise.

MATT BEVAN: The tagline of the Wolf Warrior movies is, "Whoever attacks China will be killed, no matter how far the target is".

It went beyond tough rhetoric and threats, though. China unleashed cyber attacks, and sanctioned imports from Australia.

There were skirmishes between Chinese and Indian soldiers on their shared border. And requests to extend leases of pandas in western zoos were turned down.

But wolf warrior diplomacy kind of… didn't work. Western countries continued criticising China, and just copped the economic penalties.

Meanwhile the Chinese economy suffered from decreased cooperation with the West.

After three years at the top, Zhao was shifted into a job with no public contact, something to do with oceans.

And it seems that the wolf was abandoned, making way for the return of the panda.

In 2023, Xi Jinping travelled the world rebuilding relations, with India and with the UK.

China started importing Australian goods again. Chang Lai, an Australian journalist who was being held in a Chinese prison for more than two years, was allowed to come home.

And after taking away the pandas from the National Zoo in Washington Xi Jinping indicated that pandas would return, following a positive meeting with US President Joe Biden.

Now this doesn't necessarily mean that China is about to give up on invading Taiwan or unwind its human rights violating programs.

But it does seem to mean they're not going to be quite so touchy about it when people call them out.

Anyway, whatever. Pandas. The Adelaide Zoo's contract is up in November 2024. Unfortunately no amount of panda porn has helped their residents breed despite 15 years of trying.

But we really like these pandas, so can we keep them please?

If You're Listening is written by me, Matt Bevan.

Supervising producer is Yasmin Parry.

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And tune in next week for our last episode of the year.

We're going to check back in on the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and ask, will the western world abandon support for Ukraine now that there's a new conflict underway?

Catch you then.