China seeks to up diplomatic influence through pandas

After joining Chinese leader Xi Jinping for dinner last year, San Francisco Mayor London Breed accompanied him to the airport to bid him farewell. There, on the tarmac, she made her request: pandas.

Her city’s zoo was faltering. Tourism was suffering and she faced a tough re-election campaign. A pair of pandas from China would be a political and public relations win.

What ensued were months of informal negotiations, with Breed — a politician with no foreign affairs or security experience — becoming a diplomat of sorts. She went to China, where she met the vice president and a deputy foreign minister, her calendars and emails show. She travelled with the editor of Sing Tao US, a pro-China newspaper that registers as a foreign agent in the United States, according to other records and photographs from the trip.

All of this was organised by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, a group that US intelligence officials have concluded seeks to “malignly influence” local leaders. Unlike travelling Washington politicians, Breed received no CIA briefing about what counterintelligence threats she might face in China and how officials there might try to manipulate her.

If Breed wanted pandas, China had an interest in the meeting, too — as a way to cultivate a relationship with the mayor of one of America’s most technologically important cities. There is no evidence of any quid pro quo or wrongdoing, but intelligence officials say that China is increasingly looking to wield influence in local governments as its sway in Washington diminishes.

One lever it has, documents and interviews show, is pandas. Chinese officials have sought to use pandas to cultivate relationships, shape policy on Taiwan and soften China’s image abroad, a major goal of Xi. Panda exchanges provide Chinese leaders with rare, high-profile opportunities to rebrand their country.

This has long been the case. During panda negotiations with Omaha and with Oakland in the mid-2000s, Chinese diplomats tried to scuttle a Nebraskan trade deal with Taiwan and to persuade a California member of Congress to stop criticising Beijing, US negotiators said. When those efforts failed, China denied pandas to both cities, they said.

But intelligence officials say China’s outreach is on the rise locally, where officials often do not have the training or intelligence briefings needed to deflect it.

In September, federal prosecutors charged a former aide to New York Governor Kathy Hochul with taking payoffs for securing Chinese influence in Albany. Also this year, a former aide to New York City Mayor Eric Adams, came under scrutiny after collaborating with groups linked to China’s government.

Local officials in the US and Europe are also struggling to make sense of a network of unofficial Chinese police outposts that have popped up unexpectedly.

As relations between Beijing and Washington have cooled and high-level delegations have slowed, diplomacy at the local level has taken on increased significance.

“Every mayor wants to have the publicity of getting pandas,” said David Towne, former panda negotiator for American zoos. “Pandas become the bait,” he added.

Pandas are the face of wildlife conservation. Zoos pay about $1 million a year to rent them from China and breed them in captivity, in hopes that pandas will someday be released into the wild. China is supposed to use the money to protect the wild species.

But a New York Times investigation this year revealed that after three decades, China has actually captured more pandas than it has released. And aggressive artificial breeding has injured and even killed pandas. China has steered millions of dollars toward building infrastructure such as apartments and roads as US zoo administrators and regulators looked the other way.

Zoos have an incentive to keep the programme running. Pandas bring crowds and merchandise sales. China, too, has a stake in the exchanges.

“Pandas are an interesting piece of the propaganda and influence-seeking puzzle because they’re seemingly innocuous and fuzzy and huggable,” said Orville Schell, who directs the Centre on US-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York.

As Lee Simmons, former director of the Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium in Omaha, put it: “Almost every Chinese ambassador was a panda salesman.”

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not comment on whether China’s government had used pandas to push its political interests. It said pandas had “promoted people-to-people exchanges between China and the US and enhanced the friendship between the two peoples.” It criticised anyone who “maliciously associated and unreasonably slandered China-US cooperation on giant panda conservation without factual evidence.”

Breed’s office declined to say whether the mayor had concerns about her trip’s organisers or about the newspaper that is registered as a foreign agent.

“This was a trip designed to boost tourism, which ultimately would benefit San Francisco’s economy,” her office said in a statement. Breed announced this spring that two pandas will arrive in San Francisco next year.

The Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries portrays itself as nongovernmental. But it is an arm of the Communist Party, charged with overseeing outreach to foreign local governments.

In 2022, the US director of national intelligence warned statehouses and city halls that China had “stepped up its efforts to cultivate US state and local leaders in a strategy some have described as ‘using the local to surround the central.’” Intelligence officials cited the friendship group as part of that effort.

Across the San Francisco Bay, in Oakland, politicians spent nearly a decade trying to get pandas for the city’s zoo. Henry Chang, a former deputy mayor, said that he had met with a vice premier and several other senior Chinese officials, adding that they had made what he saw as increasingly unreasonable demands.

In a 2008 meeting with the Chinese ambassador in Washington, Chang said, he brought along Rep Barbara Lee. The meeting was ostensibly about pandas, but an aide pressured Lee to stop criticising China’s activities in Africa, Chang said. Lee had sponsored a resolution the year before calling on China to use its influence in Sudan to end the genocide there.

“They were more interested to talk to Barbara Lee about the Africa problem than to talk about pandas, to tell you the truth,” he noted.

The Oakland Zoo built a $1 million panda enclosure and donated $375,000 to a panda breeding centre in Chengdu, southwestern China, Chang said. The pandas never came.

In San Diego, a Chinese diplomat wrote to Mayor Todd Gloria in late 2023, requesting a meeting about pandas and “mutually-beneficial cooperation.” The mayor agreed to meet at the zoo, which an executive there suggested as a discreet location, emails and calendar records show. When San Diego finally got pandas, in June, Gloria flew to China for their departure. While there, he said in an interview, he met with a deputy foreign minister in Beijing.

Beijing’s talking points crept into the panda welcome ceremony in San Diego — and not just into the Chinese ambassador’s speech. Paul Baribault, a zoo official, talked about the institution’s commitment to a “shared future,” a signature foreign policy concept of Xi that sees China and other countries competing with the US for influence.