The pandas are coming!
That promise from Xi Jinping, China’s leader, could end up being regarded by many Americans as the most positive diplomatic outcome of his state visit to Washington this week.
While meeting with President Trump, Mr. Xi announced on Thursday morning that China would soon send two pandas to Zoo Atlanta. The zoo is one of a handful of institutions in the United States that has paid to host pandas on loan from China over the last half-century.
Mr. Xi called the black-and-white fur balls “envoys of friendship” — an icon of literal soft diplomacy.
Zoo Atlanta sent a family of pandas back to China in October 2024, and since then it has been in talks with Chinese conservation officials to get another pair. Zoo officials announced in August that they had reached a new research agreement with the China Wildlife Conservation Association, one of two groups in China that do scientific studies on pandas, promote their breeding and arrange to lend them to overseas institutions.
That announcement in August opened the way for the Chinese group to organize the shipping to Atlanta of two pandas, Ping Ping (male) and Fu Shuang (female). Mr. Xi’s declaration confirmed that would happen soon.
U.S.-China relations are a roller coaster, and tensions have been high for the last decade. American officials accuse China of unfair trade practices and supporting adversaries of the United States, and the governments clash over the U.S. naval presence and Chinese military activity around Taiwan and in the greater Pacific region. But panda diplomacy abides.
That began during President Richard M. Nixon’s landmark visit to Beijing in 1972, when the first lady, Pat Nixon, mentioned her fondness for pandas — “I love them” — to China’s premier, Zhou Enlai. Within two months, China had sent a female and a male panda, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, to the National Zoo in Washington.
The zoo paid $1 million per year to host them, a fee that dropped to $500,000 after the first decade. Other zoos jumped on board, including in Atlanta, San Diego and Memphis.
However, two years ago, it looked like a surge in U.S.-China tensions might be jeopardizing the diplomacy. For the first time in decades, there were no pandas in the United States — all of them had been returned to China at the request of the conservation groups there, with the final two families leaving the National Zoo in 2023 and Zoo Atlanta the next year.
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Many people speculated that the rocky geopolitical relations had prompted China’s move.
But some zoo officials said the Chinese groups had asked for the pandas back because of where they were in their life cycles. Pandas are notoriously unenthusiastic about sex, and any pandas born overseas — a cause for celebration — are sent back to China to be raised in conservation parks in Sichuan Province. When they reach a certain age, the parents are usually sent back as well. (A New York Times investigation in 2024 raised questions about the breeding and expensive loan program run from China.)
In November 2023, during a visit to San Francisco just one week after the National Zoo had sent back its three pandas, Mr. Xi said China might send more pandas to the United States soon.
“I was told that many American people, especially children, were really reluctant to say goodbye to the pandas and went to the zoo to see them off,” he said at the time.
Yun Chuan and Xin Bao arrived at the San Diego Zoo in June 2024. And that October, Bao Li and Qing Bao, both age 3, arrived at the National Zoo, ending an 11-month absence there.
