Essay by Yuchi Ma   



Pandas: The immense kinship I feel with this animal is found in my distance from home rather than in my proximity.

In April 2023, China recalled its giant pandas from the U.S. in advance of an expiring loan agreement. Ya Ya, who has lived at the Memphis Zoo for 20 years, is leaving U.S. soil. Soon after, her departure was followed by other pandas from the zoos in D.C., Atlanta, and around the globe. Amidst heated tension between China and the U.S., many posited whether this new change in panda diplomacy signifies an impending political shift. On a personal level, the pandas’ departure from the US triggered a deep-seated homesickness that I wasn’t aware of at the beginning of making this project. Looking at the pandas whose whereabouts and ways of living are tethered to the shifting relations between two places, I saw in them a metaphor for my own living abroad as a Parachute Kid.

While China has always been a controversial figure in the eyes of the West, its pandas have always been loved. When American fashion designer Ruth Harkness brought panda Su-Lin to the US in 1937, the Western obsession with these black-and-white bears began to take hold. At the D.C. Zoo, I encountered several other American tourists. Many of them had traveled across the states to see the pandas that day and met their departure with substantial disappointment. “I don’t understand why China is doing that. Recalling the pandas so suddenly out of the blue,” Said one angry white mom to me. She had driven her kids from Delaware into DC to see their favorite animals. “Don’t you think it’s kind of funny?” I asked her in reply. “Funny? I don’t think it’s funny at all,” she said. “It’s cruel.”

In truth, the history of Panda Diplomacy with foreign zoos has gone through several iterations. With China's first recorded panda gift to the Soviet Union in 1957, this policy saw expansion in the 60s and 70s. Specifically for the US and its allies, President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 and the two pandas subsequently gifted to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., thawed a long period of cold relations. These pandas were permanent gifts to select countries as a gesture of international friendship, establishing ties with countries where China had no human diplomats.

Today, there are no more permanent panda gifts. If foreign countries wish to loan a pair of pandas, they must first prove they have scientific facilities to advance panda research, a properly built habitat, and the financial ability to pay the Chinese government for the pandas and any newborns to come. All pandas must be returned to China. These new rules were established after a brief period of short-term loans deemed unethical from 1984 to the early 1990s. Long-term Panda loans for scientific study and Panda conservation are the standard today. Beyond generating financial income, the panda exchange continues improving China’s image worldwide.

In 1961, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) made the Giant Panda its logo, after the image of panda Chi Chi from the U.K. Zoo, a prior U.S. reject due to the McCarthy Era’s embargo on goods from Communist China. Nonetheless, the WWF viewed the Giant Pandas as a species that symbolized its seminal work on conservation. On China’s end, efforts to conserve pandas became proof of China's efforts toward greener environmentalism. Giant Pandas carry inherent environmental meanings as an endangered species. By becoming the top experts in Panda science, China assumes power and command over nature, contributing not only to the view that all natural resources within these borders belong to China but also that China alone (not the West) has superiority and specialty in knowledge over this highly coveted native species.

“Why do you think the Giant Panda is our national treasure?” I asked my Chinese friends who live in China. “Only China has pandas. It was always taught to us this way. They just are,” my friends answered in reply. Historically, Giant Pandas were considered “useless” to most in terms of economic value. Ordinary Chinese peasants and families found pandas’ skin coarse, meat too dry, and animals unfit for domestication as farm labor. Pandas started to build their cultural relevancy during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1967). The establishment of the Giant Panda as a beloved, iconic image of China, one whose merit is based on symbolism, grew partly from the government’s call for the population to embrace scientific thinking. “Knowledge is power, for there is no secret in the natural world.” (Songster 118) By tying learning about the Giant Pandas to scientific thinking and scientific thinking to the betterment of the socialist state, they were also tied to the future well-being of China as a nation. The Giant Panda’s symbolic status continued to rise, despite the era’s stringent censorship policies that restricted most artistic production to straightforward state propaganda. Wu Zuoren’s famous Chinese-painting style panda watercolors were turned into official stamps— the only set issued by the Chinese government during the Cultural Revolution.

“A rare Indigenous species could serve the purpose of a natural monument- a tribute to China’s natural wealth.” (Liu, qtd. in Li) In 1988, the Giant Panda was listed as China’s first-class protected animal and named the National Treasure two years later. In 2025, panda images and likeness can be found almost everywhere on the streets of China, on appliances, clothes, schools, businesses, etc., living up to its status as a national mascot. This categorization of an animal species’ necessity to be protected not just on their survival rate and use value to humans, but on the metaphorical, symbolic value a species might attain for a nation marks a wholly separate front for how humans orient themselves to animals and nature. When one considers the animal mascots of most other countries, such as Eagles, Lions, etc., charismatic animals exude a sense of power and superiority. The childlike silliness that most people associate with the Giant Pandas is antithetical, yet choosing it as the mascot is also deliberate.

A dichotomy exists between pandas as a species and pandas as an image. Pandas are seen as politically safe. Songster’s book argues that this is China’s attempt to turn the Western gaze back on itself. Post-Cultural Revolution, attempting to open up globally and shift its iron-clad image, China disguised itself as a cute, harmless panda in facing the Western dominance at the time. The context surrounding Panda as an image constructs its aura. “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its origin over time, to the extent of its material duration.”(Benjamin 221) As the Chinese government actively constructs the panda’s aura by connecting it to Chinese culture, heritage, and national identity, it ensures the survival of this “material duration” through the ritualistic performance of Panda Diplomacy. “The desire of present-day citizens to forge a sense of continuity between the territory of the present nation and the same region millions of years ago through the Giant Panda embodies one of the quintessential tensions of the modern nation— that legitimacy requires both a claim on the past and a break from it.”(Songster 151) Looking from within, the Giant Pandas are undoubtedly China’s, but not the “corrupt and problematic dynastic China.” Thus, another dichotomy exists between China as a country and China as an image.

When I presented this theory to my mother, she scoffed and called it fake. “Kung-Fu Panda, that’s what I think of,” she replied instead to my question on what comes to mind regarding this topic. “That’s what the Westerners think of us.” Looking in from the outside, the Giant Pandas can be Chinese, but not the communist associations one usually builds. “A fetishistic object is one that is loved for its surface, but whose surface is charged with hidden histories and desires.” (Marks 82) The Giant Panda is an animal superstar capable of being loved despite its political heritage, simultaneously caught in the heat of its political context. The greater influence pandas have worldwide, the more domestic love they inspire, and the more the Giant Panda symbolizes China.

Today, Giant Pandas continue to be seen as indicators of China’s international relations with the rest of the world. Despite all its layers of in-political disguise, for those of us who traverse between two or more places and have a stake in both, any potential symbol can be political. I have pandas to thank for my life as a Parachute Kid. After all, Panda Diplomacy broke the ice between China and the U.S. and China and the world, and continues facilitating exchanges. From Xinhua News Report 2024, “A new round of Giant Panda conservation collaborative research was about to begin…They will also promote people-to-people exchanges between China and foreign countries.” (Tan) The U.S. pays China nearly $1 million each year to loan pandas. In 2023-2024, Chinese International students reportedly contributed over $11 billion to the U.S. Economy. Within the context of a Parachute Kid’s journey, a globalized existence as “Psychologically Everywhere” (Eng and Han 101) is often framed as the ideal outcome of such an experience. Money facilitates the possibility, the simulation that’s both a zoo and the American experience. For me, as a Parachute Kid, the Giant Panda also becomes a recollection object (Marks 82), a fossil imbued with the desire for home through the pandas’ contact with both lands. Simultaneously, it indicates my inability to detangle my perspective from the Western context.

There is nothing similar between us, though. After all, another dichotomy exists between the pandas in conservation and the pandas in the wild. Pandas in conservation live their entire lives to better the panda populations in the wild, yet they will never come in contact with or live amongst those pandas. Do they feel attachments to the zoo caretakers they grew up with? Are there distinct tastes in the bamboo grown in China vs. those in the U.S.? Do the pandas think of themselves as pandas, or do they see themselves as human? How do they perceive temporariness, a discontinued time and space, and the permanent existence within four walls? Do they feel as I feel? Where is home?

Nowhere perhaps. “Nowhere is a ruin where truth exists beween sites of memories.” (Gabriel 73) At the end of the day, I am only capable of thinking about it from my point of view. Perhaps to most everyday people, the Giant Panda can just be a cute animal. My understandings shift, and I look to the famous Zen Buddhist saying by Qingyuan Weixin (青原惟信), a Chinese Chan master from the Tang Dynasty, regarding the three stages of awakening: “1. To see mountains as mountains and water as water. 2. To see mountains not as mountains, and water not as water. 3. To see mountains still as mountains, and waters still as water.” (Suzuki 24) So then, I suppose pandas are pandas.

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