Two giant pandas recently landed in Atlanta, a week after Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met in Washington.

The summit produced no immediate breakthrough on trade deals, Taiwan or AI, but it did produce something cuddly for the American public: a pair of giant pandas, Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, which are on a ten-year loan to Atlanta’s zoo. Both were born in 2020 at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, the showpiece of a decades-old conservation effort.

China treats the giant panda as a national treasure and retains ownership every one it lends abroad. Sending a pair is a mark of favour: the bears draw crowds and signal Beijing values the relationship. When relations cool, the loans often seem to lapse and the pandas return to China. This is panda diplomacy.

From gifts to rentals

Some trace the practice to the Tang dynasty, when Empress Wu Zetian is said to have sent a pair of bears, believed to be pandas, to Japan, between 624 and 725 AD. The better-documented history begins in 1941, when Chiang Kai-shek’s government sent a pair to New York’s Bronx zoo as thanks for American aid.

But it was Mao Zedong who turned the gesture into policy. In 1957 he sent a........

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