Giant pandas heading to San Francisco
China would send a pair of giant pandas to San Francisco next year, a conservation group said yesterday, following a trip to the mainland by the city’s mayor, London Breed.
The announcement is an apparent goodwill gesture ahead of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s expected trip to Beijing next week.
Breed and the China Wildlife Conservation Association confirmed the agreement for what would be the first official giant panda lease for the US tech hub since Washington and Beijing established diplomatic relations.
Breed said on social media platform X that the pandas would “honour our deep cultural connections and our Chinese and [Asian-American and Pacific Islander] heritage”. She thanked the association and China’s National Forestry and Grassland Administration for helping to realise the agreement, saying it was a “collaborative effort requiring months of coordination and advocacy”.
Zoo Atlanta is the only US facility still hosting giant pandas, but the programme will lapse at the end of this year, when all four pandas are expected to return to China. However, China signed a panda lease agreement with San Diego Zoo earlier this year and similar talks were also under way with Washington’s National Zoo.
Breed’s China trip began last Saturday and includes stops in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai. She will return home tomorrow. Breed met Shenzhen mayor Qin Weizhong, Guangzhou mayor Sun Zhiyang, and US envoy to Beijing Nicholas Burns. She also met Liu Jianchao, the Communist Party’s diplomatic head, in Beijing yesterday.
Noting the meeting between President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Joe Biden in San Francisco in November, Liu said China and the US should boost cooperation on “trade and investment, science and technology, culture and tourism, and people-to-people exchanges”, according to the foreign ministry.
“The close relationship between China and San Francisco is a vivid portrayal of the close intermingling of interests between China and the US,” Liu said.
Breed said San Francisco would strengthen cooperation with China in various areas, including the controversial sectors of artificial intelligence and electric vehicles. Breed’s visit is the latest in a series of recent high-profile communications between the two countries.
Xi and Biden spoke on the phone two weeks ago ahead of a visit to China by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and a meeting in Washington this week between Pan Gongsheng, governor of the People’s Bank of China, and Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman.