MORE THAN CUTE: THE CHANGING MEANING OF PANDA DIPLOMACY

More Than Cute: The Changing Meaning Of Panda Diplomacy

Introduction

Giant pandas are among the most loved animals in the world. This shifts when they move between two countries where they take on a diplomatic role. This is normally portrayed by the media as a sign of shared responsibility in taking care of nature and long-term friendship between the two states. There is nothing wrong with this framing but it leaves out a large percentage of what’s actually in the picture. Mostly, panda exchange is taken as cultural diplomacy which is not neutral in most cases. This kind of diplomacy is operated by governments and is closely tied to national interest and image. Ang, Isar and Mar (2015, pp. 366–367) make a clear distinction here between cultural diplomacy and other forms of exchange. They define cultural diplomacy as "interest-driven governmental practice" carried out for national representation. Cultural relations is different and it is carried out by non-state parties with minimal political goals. Panda exchange belongs to cultural diplomacy making it not taken lightly just as a basic gesture of goodwill. This exchange is largely shaped by state interests. This has led China to treat panda diplomacy as part of its image strategy and public diplomacy. Yang and Lin (2022, p. 1) point out that literature shows China has used panda exchanges for a long time to improve its international image and develop positive attitudes among people in other countries. The panda's role in this is to act as an emotional tool designed to win sympathy and attraction, making agreement possible without forcing it. Without demanding any compliance, cultural symbols shape how people feel. A funding system and institutional support sit behind this, hidden by an image that is friendly and away from attention. Since 1984, panda exchange has been based on a lease model, as described by Buckingham, Jepson and David (2013, p. 2), and, even more recently, under the CITES rules, the cost has gone up to six figures, which is pushing the exchange towards long-term breeding loans rather than short-term gifts. The same study classifies pandas as "a fascinating soft-power resource" (p. 6), which is a statement that can only be made due to the legal and financial arrangement. Although pandas cross the borders by contract, with the help of fees and political negotiations, they are still presented as symbols of care and friendship for the public. When all these details become public, the significance of the exchange changes. At first, it seems like a friend is giving you something, but it turns out that something is not actually a gift, but rather a trade that both parties benefit from. This essay explores the issue of the stability of panda diplomacy as soft power. The meaning of a panda is not intrinsic to the animal itself, but is created through state institutions, news coverage and public response to it, and as Smith, Chen and Yuan (2025, p. 293) conclude, it is the public's response and not the intention of the exchange that determines its meaning. Three cases elaborate this argument. Scotland illustrates the consequences when the financial aspects of a panda loan are made public. The U.S. is the example of the consequences of a panda's reintroduction in the midst of strained U.S. relations. In the case of South Korea, it is what can happen when a panda gets too popular. Research Theory Generally, soft power is described as persuading someone to desire what you desire without resorting to force. This is a matter of persuasion and co-option, as opposed to hard power, as Barr (2011, pp.24-35) puts it. Nye (2009, pp.15–40) makes a related point about cost. Today, in an environment of rapid image transmission, negative images and tarnished reputations come at a genuine political price for governments to control. This is well illustrated by Melissen (2005, p.3). The case of Abu Ghraib was not a short-term embarrassment for anyone involved. It influenced the perception of the U.S. in the Islamic world for years thereafter. That's why the primary method states are seeking to cultivate soft power is through public diplomacy and not through force. This is more than just an effort to broadcast information at foreign audiences, but to engage them conversationally and culturally without pressure, according to Melissen (2005, p.4). That transition is not as clean as it sounds, though. There are also cases of public diplomacy becoming too closely linked to the foreign policy objectives of a state, as shown by Melissen (2005, p.15). He praises the Bush administration's tactics as a "velvet fist in an iron glove. Public diplomacy for the War on Terror rendered even benign messages as a form of coercion in the eyes of audiences in an Islamic world. But if the politics are clearly apparent behind a soft campaign, then it can be seen as hard power. The same dynamic is present in panda diplomacy, as a gesture of friendship is imbedded in a much more difficult set of political and financial dealings. This space is no longer controlled by states alone. Ang, Isar and Mar (2015, pp.369, 372) They argue that states no longer control cultural exchange the way they used to. Government-driven cultural diplomacy is now just one part of a much wider web of cultural flows. Hocking makes a related point using a concrete image (in Melissen, 2005, pp.28–43). People can carry an anti-Starbucks placard while drinking a Coke. Audiences can absorb a country's cultural products while still rejecting the politics of the government that sent them. Hocking sums this up as "soft power is soft." Its outcomes depend on how audiences choose to read it and not on what the sender intended. Clarke (2016) develops this same idea from a different angle. States hold some of this power, he argues, but institutions, media and audiences hold the rest of it, and all of them play an active role in judging and discussing cultural behaviour. A cultural symbol, on this view, means whatever the people receiving it decides it means. Hocking also introduces a third category worth naming here, since it sharpens what panda diplomacy actually is. Drawing on Mead, he describes "sticky power." As the influence built through economic entanglement rather than attraction or coercion (in Melissen, 2005, pp.28–43). It matters because panda loans are rarely just cultural gestures. As the Scottish case shows, Edinburgh's pandas arrived bundled with a much larger UK–China trade deal. That bundling has less to do with soft power in Nye's sense and more to do with sticky power, since it works through economic dependence dressed in a soft image. Even where a state does try to build soft power through culture the results are not guaranteed. Barr's concept of the "vehicle fallacy" presents this (2011, pp.24–35). Spending money on a soft power resource such as a panda loan is often mistaken for actually achieving influence but the two are separate outcomes and one does not guarantee the other. China's own experience shows this very clearly. Lee (2016) argues that Chinese public diplomacy shifted after 2013 when Xi Jinping moved the country from Deng-era caution toward direct participation in global debates. Yet Lee also shows that this effort keeps running into the same problem. There are persistent gaps between what China says and what it does. As an example, its own commentary on the South China Sea ignored neighboring states' well-documented anxieties in a way that undercut its own persuasiveness. Soft power outcomes as suggested by this depend on trust and consistency as much as on the symbols a state deploys. Nisbett's research points to one reason these gaps keep appearing. Cultural projects are often designed to serve institutional interests instead of the stated goal of open exchange. Her analysis of British cultural policy documents found that they function less as genuine strategies for engagement and more as justifications for the funding, survival and growth of the organizations that produced them (Nisbett, 2013b, p.84). A related study found that cultural diplomacy initiatives are typically valued for what they can achieve rather than for the exchange itself with culture treated as a tool for reaching other aims (Nisbett, 2013a). Panda diplomacy aligns with a trend where loans are routinely bundled with trade talks and conservation agreements so that once the main goal comes to light is when a panda's image shifts from a friendly gift to a well-planned strategic asset. Part of the problem is that the word "diplomacy" itself is used loosely making cultural boundaries hard to draw (Nisbett, 2013a). Nisbett's own interviews with staff at Arts Council England, the British Museum, the British Council and the UK's culture ministry found no shared understanding of what terms like cultural diplomacy actually mean in practice (Nisbett, 2016). If people working inside these institutions cannot agree on where cultural exchange ends and political strategy begins. It is not surprising that the public reads ordinary events such as the routine end of a loan agreement as deliberate political signals. Cultural programs also tend to follow government priorities and focus on politically favored areas which suggests that many projects serve state interest as opposed to genuinely open cultural communication (Ang, Isar and Mar, 2015; Bell, 2016). State communication also tends to assume too much about how its audience will behave. Older models of cultural imperialism assumed a fairly direct line from message to audience with foreign publics absorbing Western cultural products more or less as intended (Tomlinson, 2002, pp.1–33). Ang, Isar and Mar (2015, pp.374–375) show this same one-way assumption running through cultural diplomacy specifically. Rawnsley (2018) argues this assumption no longer holds. He treats the audience as the most powerful actor in the whole process as it is the audience and not the state that decides whether to accept a message at all. This argument also matters here because it helps keep soft power and cultural diplomacy from blurring together. Rawnsley criticizes surveys such as the British Council's own soft power reporting for treating cultural attraction, admiration for a country's landmarks or traditions as if it were the same thing as soft power. Real soft power based on his views comes from political behaviour and institutional credibility and not from culture alone. A state can be widely admired for its culture while still failing to build any actual political influence and the two should not be measured as though they were one outcome. Globalization adds an extra layer. Appadurai (1990, pp.295–296) argues that global culture does not move in one direction from a single source. Rather, it creates his "disjunctive" form of order that allows for the assimilation and reworking of forces beyond a society. A similar argument was made by Mirrlees (2013, p.19-58) in the case of global entertainment media. Cultural products seldom move without changes from their country of origin. They are received, adapted and reinterpreted differently, according to local media systems and politics. To have any settled meaning, cultural symbols must go through the local media, local politics and local social norms. None of this happens on neutral ground. Nisbett (2016) states that soft power is reliant on the resources of a state and its institutions. This gives more developed countries with more cultural resources an enduring edge, as she attributes to the wealth of the imperial past. This kind of cultural exchange, apparent as generous as it might seem, does not have a level playing field. Each of the three case studies described below looks at the confluence of strategy, trust, media and differential power that is found within the panda diplomacy dichotomy. The Scottish Panda Case: From Symbolic Friendship to Public Cost Debate Edinburgh Zoo's giant pandas Tian Tian and Yang Guang joined a Scottish collection of household names when they arrived in 2011. Early coverage emphasized the enthusiasm that the public had. Visitors were reported to be in long lines and the terms used linked the pandas to the friendship of Britain and China. The loan was promoted as a joint effort that would be presented as mutually beneficial rather than being seen as a trade. The deal was marketed as a joint effort to help conserve rather than as a commercial proposition.

Figure 1: Yang Guang (L), the male panda, looks through the fence of his enclosure at Tian Tian (2023) [Online image]. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-23856890 (Accessed: 2 September 2026). That was the original framing, but it did not survive contact with the underlying arrangement. Buckingham, Jepson and David (2013, p. 2) have found that panda loans have been in business since 1984, when China began to phase out outright gifts and introduced a "capitalist lease model based on financial transactions," where prices can top six figures and merchandising income is shared. Pandas were leased at US$50,000 per month per animal to eight zoos between 1984 and 1987 (Buckingham, Jepson and David, 2013, p. 2, citing Imbriaco, 2006). Since 1991, CITES Appendix I requirements forced a shift from short-term commercial loans to long-term breeding contracts. Modern contracts generally include a $500,000 fine for a panda's death caused by human error, and China keeps ownership of any cubs born abroad (Buckingham, Jepson and David, 2013, p. 5). Edinburgh's loan is a perfect fit for this template. It was negotiated alongside a wider £2.6 billion UK–China trade package covering salmon exports, Land Rover vehicles and energy technology which was overseen at the level of China's deputy premier (Buckingham, Jepson and David, 2013, p. 4). The zoo's pandas were not simply a cultural gesture, but part of a larger commercial arrangement that the same source referred to as a guanxi relationship; panda diplomacy was part of a resource and trade deal more broadly (Buckingham, Jepson and David, 2013, p. 4). These facts were made public and then the media followed suit. The health care, veterinary, facility, lease, and training expenses of the Edinburgh loan became a regular feature in the news. This was more likely to be true when the total costs were in the hundreds of thousands of pounds per year. This change was significant because it took the pandas off the cultural agenda and onto the political and budgetary agenda. The Scottish Parliament's decision not to fund Edinburgh Zoo's request caused the zoo's director to call the loan a 'financial gamble' (Buckingham, Jepson and David, 2013, p. 5) which is a real example of exactly that. Some commentators started talking about panda spending being brought into question alongside funding for education, health and transport. The loan was drawn into discussions about public spending priorities, not treated as an obviously beneficial cultural exchange. Edinburgh clearly shows that cultural diplomacy is received rather than being simply transmitted. Because image projection's effects are unpredictable (Ang, Isar and Mar, 2015, p. 375), there is no certainty that viewers will read culture in the same manner as its author. Smith, Chen and Yuan (2025, p. 293) make a similar, but more pointed comment on pandas. In the present scholarship, panda diplomacy is viewed as effective because it is thought to create positive feeling among receiving publics. This is assuming too much, for it is the actions of the public, not the intentions behind the exchange that determine its impact. This is a case that is exemplified in Edinburgh. The concept of friendship and conservation, which the zoo presented, was not eradicated from the public sphere but rather lost its privileged status. Financial reporting and political commentary became more intense and viewers started to evaluate the loan from a cost-benefit perspective rather than a sentimentally motivated one. This also is a representation of the "sticky-power" dynamic discussed in the Research Theory section above. Edinburgh's pandas arrived bundled with a substantial trade deal, closer to Mead's account of influence through economic entanglement than to Nye's model of attraction through values and image (Hocking, in Melissen, 2005, pp. 28–43). In the strict sense, the panda loan was never a soft-power move. It was embedded in commercial dependency from the start. The Scottish case reveals what can happen when that embedding becomes visible. The symbolic register of friendship and conservation and the material register of cost, contract and trade were read together by the public and not one after the other and neither fully displaced the other. The American Panda Case: From Panda Withdrawal to Political Signal When the lease for panda loans expires, the return of the animal is mostly not received as a simple zoo procedure. How this moment is covered in the news often adds political meaning to what should be a routine event. This trend was evidenced during the giant panda Ya Ya transfer from Memphis Zoo back to China in April 2023 after the death of her patner Le Le at the same zoo in February. The return was framed by Memphis Zoo and the China Association of Zoological Gardens (CAZG) around Ya Ya's health and the end of the loan agreement. From the international view, the event was placed in a very wide political context where the transfer was linked to the decline in US-China relations after the 2023 spy balloon incident and ongoing trade disputes. On this basis, Ya Ya's return to China was not taken as a normal animal transfer. It was taken as a signal of diplomatic strain between the US and China.

Figure 2: Ya Ya has a condition that makes her fur look thin and patchy, Memphis Zoo has said (2023) [Online image]. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-65229899 (Accessed: 2 September 2026). When states are competing for influence, even a small act such as a panda's return can carry political weight. People often expect cultural diplomacy to resolve or ease a conflict and build mutual trust based on the belief that culture can soften political tension. This belief becomes weak when states are continually and actively competing strongly for reputation and influence. This creates a strong competition for soft power which hardens attitudes instead of encouraging cooperation (Ang, Isar and Mar, 2015). This dynamic was publicly witnessed in the Ya Ya's case. Smith, Chen and Yuan (2025) show that Chinese social media reaction to earlier panda deaths abroad including that of Le Le's did trigger intense nationalist backlash on Weibo. The comments from users described panda loans using the term xiongmao heqin ("panda diplomatic marriage") to suggest the animals were being used as political pawns. There was a campaign by some Chinese netizens calling for panda loans to be suspended. The CAZG issued measured statements aimed at defending the loan programme. This mismatch between public sentiment from the Chinese netizens and the government response shows clearly how contested the meaning of a panda's return can become on both sides of the exchange and not just in Western end. Ya Ya's withdrawal and the reactions that followed shows clearly China's shifting approach to public diplomacy. Lee (2016) links the shift to 2013, when Xi Jinping’s leadership propelled China away from Deng Xiaoping’s doctrine of “hiding the light and nurturing obscurity.” From this approach, cultural symbols hold more value. A healthy and high-profile panda brings great reputational value, while the death or early departure of a panda heavily damages the national image (Yang and Lin, 2022; Smith, Chen and Yuan, 2025). Under these conditions, the loss of a symbol becomes significant political factor and not just taken as something incidental. The government's role in these deals makes this pattern stronger. Every panda loan is negotiated, managed, and renewed directly by the Chinese government. Their contracts include very specific financial terms among them fines for a panda's death through human error and Chinese ownership of any cubs born abroad. What makes a panda’s withdrawal to be seen as a political decision and not as a routine contract management is the state's involvement in these agreements. The public often uses the word "diplomacy" without a clear meaning. Nisbett (2016) reports based on her own interviews with staff at Arts Council England, the British Museum, and the British Council, that even practitioners inside cultural institutions do not agree on what terms like "soft power" and "cultural diplomacy" actually mean in practice. If experts are not able to distinguish these two ideas clearly then it makes sense that ordinary media audiences stick the more dramatic political explanation when a panda is withdrawn. Ya Ya's case goes on to expose how little control the state really has over its own message. The official statements from Memphis Zoo and the CAZG were focused on standard procedure and animal welfare. When political narrative was all over the news, those official statements were quickly dismissed. Rawnsley (2018) calls this a structural problem in public diplomacy. A credible message depends on whether a government is showing actions that reflects what is in the message being passed. Audiences do not simply receive an official message; they weigh it first and decide for themselves whether to believe it or dismiss it. The official story being passed related to Ya Ya's health which contradicted with what the media was telling. The media’s message was about diplomatic tension and that contradiction weakened the official credibility. The alternative news spread faster than the official one (Lee, 2016; Rawnsley, 2018). Due to this, the political version of Ya Ya's return reached a wider audience than the CAZG's own statements. This shows how easily a state can lose control over the meaning of its own gesture. The Korean Panda Case: Emotional Reappropriation and Narrative Limits China stirred a strong public reaction in South Korea when Fubao (Figure 3) was returned to China. The South Koreans' reaction was much stronger than other reactions experienced elsewhere when the panda was returned. Panda’s return in most past cases was treated as a routine zoo procedure or diplomatic matter.

Figure 3: Giant panda Fu Bao eats bamboo at Everland amusement park on 3 March 2024 in Yongin, South Korea, ahead of her return to China Chung Sung-Jun/Pool via Reuters (2024) [Online image]. Available at: https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1913297/s-koreans-bid-farewell-to-beloved-panda-fu-bao-ahead-of-china-return (Accessed: 2 September 2026). The return of Fubao's was described by many South Koreans as a shared loss and not just as an end to a diplomatic loan or another a routine animal transfer. News reports and online posts were full of emotional language and many people regarded Fubao more as a member of the family instead of a diplomatic symbol. During this time, the public conducted farewell gatherings, created protest signs, and their online posts were full of sadness and anger. All of this showed that local audiences had reshaped the meaning of Fubao and integrated it among themselves. She was no longer seen as cultural symbol controlled by the state but an emotional figure that was close to the feelings of the public. The reaction witnessed cannot be fully explained by diplomacy alone. It also revealed how exactly emotion works in mass communication where public feeling for a symbol often grows through constant simple images and shared emotional response. Huang and Wang (2019) studied posts that were related to the panda from Chinese state media on Twitter and found that panda content produced the highest positive sentiment of any tracked topic related China with joy present in 90 percent of the posts and negative sentiment in only 1 percent. One video that featured pandas with their keepers received 206,000 views and thousands of shares with just the pandas and their keepers in it. They didn't really study Fubao or Korea but China's state media. This is an example of how repeated and close-up shots of pandas with their keepers consistently generate a good emotional response from viewers. The same was true of Fubao's daily life with her keepers in South Korea, which is why viewers felt they were able to know Fubao personally. Digital platforms facilitated the speed at which this message was spread as it was an emotional content which is prioritized by these platforms compared to any other content. Their algorithms promote it and push it to a large user base who in return reward it with likes, shares, and comments making it move really faster. In South Korea, this cycle helped messages about Fubao spread quickly where any users shared their own experiences of loss and grief in response to her return to China. As this activity grew, official explanations were dismissed over personal and emotional ones. It was very hard for the government to control its own account of returning Fubao once these individual stories dominated the conversation. Clarke (2016) draws on the Cultural Studies tradition to argue that audiences interpret and re-use cultural products for themselves, according to their own circumstances and sense of identity as opposed simply absorbing whatever a message intends. Stuart Hall's well-known model of "encoding and decoding" holds that people read media messages through their own experience and not simply as the sender intended. Applied to Fubao's case, this explains why many South Koreans treated her less as a visiting Chinese panda and more as one of their own. Once she had been folded into local identity in this way, the official statements about the terms of her return carried far less weight than the emotional account already established in public conversation. Fubao's case moves away from what cultural diplomacy usually aims for. Cultural exchange is often meant to build a shared feeling across borders, and Cheah (2006) argues that culture can support this kind of cosmopolitan sympathy between people of different nations. This is not how the emotional connection by Fubao was spread beyond the border. It focused instead only on the host country. At least at the emotional level, South Korean fans already had their expectations and feelings set high for Fubao which could not be fulfilled. This bond that was forged was within the space of local identity and belonging, not between nations. Real ethical issues have been raised when it comes to Panda diplomacy. Some feel that it is not morally correct to use animals as diplomatic tools at all, due to public attachment to the animals. A similar tension on the Chinese side was reported by Smith, Chen and Yuan (2025). Following the death of the panda Le Le in the U.S., Chinese social media commentators expressed dismay, and coined the phrase "panda diplomatic marriage" to criticize pandas used as political pawns. This made the Chinese authorities to respond very carefully with measured statements. This split is also visible in the case of Fubao, in which the public mood in the receiving country went beyond the government's depiction of the situation and even overtook it. The public response was directed largely by their distance from the political and legal details. Most people had no direct knowledge of the legal or diplomatic terms behind Fubao's return thus, they relied on media stories to understand it. Appadurai (1990) argues that the media builds a version of reality in people’s minds, what he calls "imagined worlds" that feels true even when it is really built on emotions and not facts. In Fubao's case, months of emotional news and posts about her made her return to China seem unfair to people when legally there was nothing unusual. It was just an end to a normal loan agreement. The emotional stories being consistently covered were more important to people than the legal facts. This is what shaped how many South Koreans understood the whole Fubao return situation. Conclusion While pandas are seen as an almost friendly gift and as goodwill diplomacy, it can easily change and take on other meanings once it faces money, politics, and emotions. This has been demonstrated through Scotland, the United States, and South Korea, and even though the means are different, the outcome is the same. The interpretation of a panda is done by the recipient, and not the giver. This is also true of other diplomatic gifts. Pandas show the restraints of diplomatic gifts. While a state may produce a well-thought-out gift, they cannot control the reception of the gift. China may view a gift of a panda as a sign of goodwill, but it cannot stop the recipient from interpreting it as a debt, a personal insult, or a hostile act. In this case, diplomatic gifts are never fully owned by a state; it is only partially owned, the rest is out of their control and is in the hands of the recipient.   Reference List Ang, I., Isar, Y.R. and Mar, P. (2015) 'Cultural diplomacy: beyond the national interest?', International Journal of Cultural Policy, 21(4), pp. 365–381. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2015.1042474. Appadurai, A. (1990) 'Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy', Theory, Culture & Society, 7(2–3), pp. 295–310. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/026327690007002017. Barr, M. (2011) Who's Afraid of China? The Challenge of Chinese Soft Power. London: Zed Books, pp. 24–35. Bell, E. (2016) 'Soft power and corporate imperialism: maintaining British influence', Race & Class, 57(4), pp. 75–86. 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