Vantage | What panda-talk says about US-China relations

Countries have their own love languages. For China, it is panda diplomacy. The giant pandas are the rarest members of the bear family and are found only in China.

If you see them in zoos abroad, China might have gifted it to them. It’s Beijing’s way of reaching out. In the last few years, panda diplomacy has struggled, and China has begun pulling them out of the US. Zoos in Memphis, Tennessee, and Washington had to return their pandas.

The China-US competition has intensified in the last few years. Especially after the 2018 trade war. So Beijing took back the pandas. But now panda diplomacy is making a comeback. China is working to send two of them to the San Diego Zoo.

This is quite symbolic. It is because China is making a U-turn. Last year, Chinese social media accused the US of mistreating pandas, but one year on, Beijing is sending more. Americans are obsessed with pandas. We saw that in November last year when two giant pandas were leaving the Washington Zoo, and their farewell was quite emotional.

In politics, the Pandas have played a key role in the US-China relationship. It dates back to 1972, when US President Richard Nixon visited China. He met Mao Zedong, buried the hatchet, and got pandas in return. These bears signalled a reset—a new chapter in US-China relations.

The relations are a lot better than during the pandemic; back then, it was daily abuse, and the countries couldn’t agree on anything. But in the last few months, a change has been seen.

A lot of top US officials travelled to Beijing—Treasury Chief Janet Yellen, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken—to set the stage for the big meeting that happened when Xi Jinping visited the US for the first time in six years. He also held talks with US President Joe Biden. Nothing big came out of those conversations, but the idea itself was welcome—keep talking to each other.

Xi Jinping isn’t about to abandon his global ambitions, nor will the US give up its position. Yet there are a couple of reasons behind this thaw.

Number one, financial stress. China’s economy has had a bad couple of years. Growth is sluggish. Youth unemployment is high. And investor confidence is low. So Beijing needs time to build things back up.

The US too struggled financially; their inflation reached a 40-year high in 2022. So Biden needed a breather. He was already dealing with a war in Ukraine. The last thing he wanted was a conflict in Asia.

Reason number two, a number of close calls. The first one was in January last year, when a Chinese spy balloon was spotted over American skies. The US eventually shot it down. The second was in June, when a Chinese warship cut across an American destroyer. It was a dangerous and risky manoeuvre. The third incident was in October. A Chinese fighter jet flew very close to a US bomber. Again, a risky manoeuvre. So the miscommunication will have been dangerous in these circumstances.

Lastly, in terms of self-interest, the US and China are deeply interconnected in terms of their economies, industrial bases, and markets. So a clean divorce would be ugly for both sides. Which is why the US won’t decouple from China; it will only de-risk.

In the short term, this is good, but what about the long term? The US is still focused on containing China in the South China Sea, and Beijing is still intent on poking the US allies with land grabs and expansionism. These differences may never disappear; for example, the US will soon have five aircraft carriers in the western Pacific, which is an unprecedented deployment.

Panda diplomacy is about the next best thing—laying ground rules of engagement—competing but not fighting—but to do that, you need political maturity. That is not the strong suit of China or the US.

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.