Decoding the News

Recalling the Pandas

David Bandurski

David Bandurski

On January 28, twin giant pandas Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei touched down at Chengdu Tianfu International Airport, returned from Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo after Beijing announced it was recalling them — leaving Japan without a Chinese panda for the first time in decades. The departure was a visible symbol of a diplomatic crisis that has pushed Sino-Japanese relations to their lowest point in years.

The diplomatic fallout traces back to November last year, when Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi — reelected this month with a historically strong mandate — became the first sitting Japanese prime minister to publicly state that an attack on Taiwan would justify Japan’s exercise of collective self-defense. For China’s leadership, Taiwan’s status is a question of sovereignty on which any outside comment is regarded as “interference.” Responding to Takaichi’s remarks, China lodged a complaint with the United Nations, postponed a trilateral summit with South Korea, restricted rare earth exports, cancelled flight routes, warned Chinese tourists and students away from Japan — and, of course, recalled its pandas.

The Chinese government’s response to Takaichi’s remarks has operated on two distinct registers simultaneously, centering on the CCP’s particular application of “friendship” and “culture.” In covering Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei’s return, CCTV described the pandas’ parents as “envoys of Sino-Japanese friendly exchange” (中日友好交流使者) and credited the twins with having “continuously built a bridge of friendly people-to-people relations” and made “positive contributions to increasing friendship between the peoples of the two countries.” The coercive context — a classic example of Panda diplomacy — went unmentioned. China Daily‘s Tokyo correspondent meanwhile framed the pandas’ absence as an opportunity: Japanese fans were encouraged to visit China under its visa-free policy and “experience its rich natural ecology and cultural charm firsthand.”

That warmth was nowhere evident when Foreign Minister Wang Yi addressed the Munich Security Conference last week, invoking Japan’s wartime history and warning that “if Japan doesn’t truly repent for its wrongdoing, history will only repeat itself.” Japan’s foreign ministry formally protested the remarks, calling them “factually incorrect and ungrounded.” Two days later, a spokesperson from China’s embassy in Tokyo dismissed Japan’s protest using a familiar qualifier: “Japan’s so-called protest distorts the facts, turns black and white upside down, and is pure sophistry,” the spokesperson said.