The ancient Chinese read the future in tea leaves. But to read the paths of Chinese diplomacy, it is not superfluous to turn to bamboo leaves. The ones that devour every day, by tens of kilos, each of the panda bears given by Beijing to selected countries.
The thermometer of this "panda diplomacy" has recently been showing freezing temperatures in several English-speaking countries. In the spring, a panda exhibited at the Memphis zoo was repatriated by the Beijing authorities, after a campaign on Chinese networks about its bad appearance and alleged unhappiness in the land of Elvis Presley.
It could be an anecdote, but it is not. Before the end of the year, it will be the turn of the three pandas at the National Zoo in Washington. For a few months, children in the United States will still be able to admire some specimens of their favorite animal in Atlanta. But they will also be transferred to China next year, as will happen with the two who live in Australia. Before that, in December, the last two pandas in British territory will be evacuated from the Edinburgh Zoo.
None of this is accidental, just as his transfer was not, in his day. In the latter case, coinciding with the entry of Petrochina into the capital of a Scottish refinery, in 2011.
Now, the extension – or its absence – is an unequivocal sign of the state of bilateral relations. It has been this way for decades. Actually, for centuries. In fact, Empress Wu was already sending pandas to her counterpart in Japan in the first millennium. This would prove that it was never an act of weakness, but something more like a fist wrapped in plush.
In the mid-1980s, Deng Xiaoping changed the policy of giving pandas as a sign of friendship. Since then, these bears have not been found. They are only left, on the condition that their complicated offspring – in captivity, the males lose their sexual appetite – eventually return to China, to increase the number of 1,800 specimens in the wild (against the 600 that are not).
There are those who criticize that a State – worse, a political party – can arrogate to itself the ownership of an animal species. There are also those who refer to the results: during the past decade, the panda was reclassified as vulnerable, after having been endangered. The first to remember that the Chinese Communist Party did not invent "panda diplomacy" are its staunchest enemies, on the other side of the Formosa Strait. Chang Kai Shek, they say in Taiwan, was already rewarding his international allies with teddy bears in the 1930s.
However, journalistic convention would have the departure boom come from Nixon's visit to Mao in 1972. The US president's wife returned with two adorable panda bears, and the US responded with two musk oxen.
Despite the harmony at the time between the dictatorships of Spain and Taiwan, Franco re-established diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1973. A year later, Juan Carlos and Sofia, brand new kings of Spain, were not to return from China with the empty hands and a couple of pandas went to live in the zoo in Madrid.
Although the real media explosion came later, with Chu-Lin, the first panda born by artificial insemination. Madrid had found its alternative in Floquet de Neu. Since then, several pandas have been born there in captivity. Some of them have returned to China, according to what is stipulated. But the continuity of the pandas in Madrid does not seem threatened at the moment.
It must be said that even the two pandas from Taiwan were given away by Beijing, in a conciliatory gesture. So, outside of China, the only panda outside its control is Xin Xin, a very elderly female who is the last descendant of the pair with which Beijing awarded Mexico in the 1970s, precisely for having favorite in Taipei.
Significantly, in Singapore, where the recently ceded panda couple lives in princely conditions, the agreement has just been extended by China. Panda diplomacy is winding, for those who do not know how to read black on white.
