For decades, American zoos have raised tens of millions of dollars from donors and sent the money to China for the right to host and display pandas. Under U.S. law, those funds were required to be spent protecting pandas in the wild.
But the Chinese government instead spent millions on apartment buildings, roads, computers, museums and other expenses, records show. For years, China refused even to account for millions more.
Regulators with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees the payments, have for two decades raised concerns about this with American zoo administrators and Chinese officials alike. The U.S. government, on three occasions, froze payments to China over incomplete record keeping, documents show.
Zoos, too, have known that the money was not always going toward conservation. But they worried that if Fish and Wildlife cut off the money altogether, China could demand the return of its bears. Zoos count on pandas for visitors, merchandise sales and media attention.
Ultimately, the regulators allowed the money to keep flowing and agreed not to check the spending in China so thoroughly, according to records and former officials.
“There was always pushing back and forth about how the U.S. shouldn’t ask anything,” said Kenneth Stansell, a former Fish and Wildlife official who traveled to China throughout the 2000s to discuss pandas. He said his Chinese counterparts argued that “it shouldn’t be of any concern to the U.S. government.”
None of this has been revealed to the public.
Where Did The Money Go?
Zoos in the United States pay about $1 million a year to get pairs of pandas from China, an arrangement that regulators allow under a provision of the Endangered Species Act. Animal-rights groups have sued over similar payments for elephants, rhinos and tigers, saying that regulators were distorting the spirit of the law.
Pandas have so far escaped such scrutiny.
Panda rentals have been touted as a major conservation success. But a New York Times investigation found that what the program has done best is breed more pandas for zoos. And the conservation money at the heart of the program has been spent in ways that zoos do not reveal when fund-raising.
The Times used two decades of financial reports, internal correspondence, photos and archival records to track more than $86 million from American zoos to a pair of organizations run by the Chinese government. Zoos elsewhere in the world have contributed tens of millions of dollars more. In wildlife conservation, that is a huge sum, far larger than what zoos have spent in overseas donations for any other species.
Zoos approve which projects get financed and then list them in annual reports to the Fish and Wildlife Service. Those records show that funds were allocated to build apartment buildings far from nature reserves. China also bought computers and satellite television for local government offices and built at least three museums with the money, according to the records.
And American money helped transform a panda breeding center in western China into a bustling attraction that, according to an architect’s plans, may soon welcome as many visitors as Disneyland.
Those payments represent only what was documented. Zoo administrators have at times struggled to persuade their Chinese partners to disclose the spending.
“You had to take their word,” said David Towne, who until 2016 was the director of a foundation representing American zoos with pandas. “China felt it was not our business — that we got the pandas, and we shouldn’t tell them how to spend the money.”
Early agreements gave zoos the right to verify funding on the ground. But contracts signed recently by the National Zoo in Washington and by the San Diego Zoo make no mention of checking how money is spent.
American zoo administrators have acknowledged, in letters to regulators, that the numbers do not always add up.
Zoos in Europe, which also rent pandas, reached a similar conclusion. At Edinburgh Zoo, where two pandas lived until last year, an administrator said in 2021 that its money couldn’t be tracked because “the funds from all zoos are pooled,” according to meeting minutes. As a result, the Scottish zoo could not identify any “specific works, projects or outcomes” that it had funded.
This has been a problem for decades. When Fish and Wildlife officials asked Memphis Zoo in 2007 to identify which Chinese areas would benefit from $875,000 allocated for panda monitoring, the zoo had no answer. It wrote in an annual report that its Chinese partner had provided “NO ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.”
In a statement to The Times, the zoo acknowledged problems.
“Memphis Zoo was not able to control the funding that was sent to China as, once it was there, it was no longer in the hands of Memphis Zoo officials,” the statement said. “And there was not always information provided regarding the funding once in China.”
Melissa Songer, a conservation biologist at the National Zoo, which recently welcomed two new pandas, said that China had put donor money to good use. “They have done so much in terms of setting aside protection and doing all the right things — stopping logging, investing,” she said. “And part of that money is coming from zoos around the world.”
The National Zoo did not answer written questions about funding. The San Diego Zoo declined to comment. China’s national forestry bureau and its zoo association, which together oversee panda exchanges, also did not respond to questions.
China has indeed expanded its network of nature reserves, and some American money was allocated for patrol trucks, small ranger stations, equipment and other items needed to protect land, records show. Mr. Stansell, the former regulator, said that, on visits to China, he did see some conservation projects. And Mr. Towne, the former panda foundation director, said that, even in the absence of hard evidence, he saw signs of progress, including more professional staff working in the reserves.
But pandas live on only a portion of that land, and their habitat is shrinking. China has built roads and developed tourism in and around nature reserves, piercing the natural habitat and leaving pandas isolated in ever-smaller populations, Chinese and American scientists have concluded.
Their report estimated that wild pandas have less territory to roam than they did in the 1980s, before the influx of funds from foreign zoos.
“It’s in everybody’s interest to portray these conservation efforts as great successes,” said Kimberly Terrell, who traveled to China while working as director of conservation at Memphis Zoo.
“There was never any real evaluation of the programs,” she added. “In some cases, it was really hard to see the connection between those programs and giant panda conservation.”
(Dr. Terrell, now a scientist at Tulane University in Louisiana, settled an unrelated gender discrimination lawsuit against the zoo in 2018.)
The Fish and Wildlife Service said it takes federal law “very seriously” and requires “sufficiently detailed financial accounting data” from zoos with pandas.
Dan Ashe, the agency’s former director, called the funding disagreement between China and the United States “a technical matter.” Mr. Ashe said that he had approved new reporting standards to maintain a program that he felt significantly benefited conservation. “We had to come up with a solution,” he said.
Mr. Ashe now heads the industry association for American zoos.
A Secret Compromise
In 2010, Mr. Ashe led a delegation of senior American wildlife officials to China for a high-stakes meeting.
The panda-rental program was on the verge of falling apart, records show. If he could not reach an agreement with his Chinese counterparts, pandas in Atlanta, Memphis, San Diego, and Washington might have to return to China.
The program’s finances had been rocky from the start.
Early money had gone to what Zoo Atlanta called a “drastic expansion and construction” of a panda breeding center in Chengdu, western China. Millions more went toward infrastructure in and around nature reserves, including roads, buildings, and water hookups — money that regulators questioned. One National Zoo project, a mixed-use building with apartments and office space, was 30 miles from a nature reserve.
“While we understand the need for establishment of an infrastructure in China, we feel strongly that construction of facilities alone will not accomplish the goal of enhancing the survival of pandas in the wild,” regulators at the Fish and Wildlife Service wrote to the National Zoo.
The zoo industry pushed back. “Conservation activities in the wild cannot occur if the infrastructure does not exist,” the industry group currently headed by Mr. Ashe, now called the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, responded.
The Fish and Wildlife Service ultimately approved most of the funds.
Then, in 2003, regulators froze money to China because of a lack of documentation, records show. But they soon gave in to Chinese demands for less detailed reporting.
“The service thought that was a reasonable way to move forward to keep the program going,” Mr. Stansell, the former agency official, said.
Back and forth it went for years, with the Chinese groups sometimes withholding information or spending money on projects with only loose connections to conservation, and American regulators periodically freezing funds.
Zoo Atlanta submitted a funding proposal for a 27,000-square-foot building, 48 sets of office furniture and 50 miles of road, along with computers and a copy machine, for “nature reserve infrastructure projects” in the northwestern Chinese province of Gansu, records show. Zoo Atlanta declined to comment, saying it did not have information on old projects.
So, when Fish and Wildlife officials landed in Beijing in 2010, years of money issues were coming to a head. The Chinese groups had stopped reporting their spending altogether, and the American regulators had frozen $12 million in payments over two years, according to internal National Zoo documents.
The zoo’s employees acknowledged that they couldn’t verify spending and fretted about losing their pandas. “The goal is to find a compromise,” they wrote.
“This is a good opportunity to ‘update’ the process,” another document read.
The zoos disclosed none of this publicly. “All of that money goes back into conservation research in China,” Don Moore, a National Zoo administrator, told ABC News that year, even as the zoo’s payments were frozen.
Ultimately, the zoos got the compromise they wanted. Fish and Wildlife regulators agreed to reduce oversight. Going forward, zoos could approve Chinese funding proposals directly, rather than sending them to the agency for review, Mr. Ashe said in an interview.
“What it did was put the accountability in the right place,” he said. The zoos are “accountable to demonstrate that they are reporting significant and meritorious conservation projects, not the Chinese.”
Panda Disneyland
Even with more lax reporting requirements, problems persisted.
Three of the zoos paid for office equipment for local government forestry bureaus.
Other money went to captive pandas, rather than to pandas in the wild. Memphis Zoo earmarked hundreds of thousands of dollars for animal enclosures, bamboo and veterinary facilities at Shanghai Zoo.
In 2017, a Chinese government group failed to show how the San Diego Zoo’s money had been spent, records show. In a letter to regulators, the zoo blamed a change in leadership at China’s national forestry bureau.
Animal-rights groups and scholars say that the heart of the problem is lax enforcement of the Endangered Species Act.
“It’s really alarming that they’re approving these things in the first place,” said Delcianna Winders, an animal-law professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School. “And then there’s no follow-up to track that the money is actually going to what it’s supposed to be going to.”
The Fish and Wildlife Service said that the donations were “an important tool to support conservation of endangered and threatened species.”
American zoos continue to advertise that they are saving a species in the wild. But in western China, where the wild panda ecosystem is more fragmented than ever, panda tourism is booming.
The Chengdu breeding center, which American zoos helped renovate two decades ago, now has 11 million visitors a year and its own IMAX theater. It is a zoo in its own right, one that controls a third of the world’s pandas. The campus is so large that tourists take shuttle buses from one end to the next.
On a visit in August, visitors thronged through the gate at 7 a.m. to catch a glimpse of the pandas before they retreated to air-conditioned enclosures.
The center is planning a satellite facility, its second. When complete, the complex expects to host 20 million annual visitors, more than Disneyland, according to an architecture firm’s plan.
The development is part of a larger Chengdu tourism push that includes new resorts and an international panda festival. The Chinese state news agency Xinhua said the goal was to “fully tap the brand value, cultural value and economic value of the giant panda.”
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