After joining the Chinese leader Xi Jinping for dinner last year, Mayor London Breed of San Francisco accompanied him to the airport to bid him farewell. There, on the tarmac, she made her request: pandas.
Her city’s zoo was faltering. Tourism was suffering and she faced a tough re-election campaign. A pair of pandas from China would be a political and public relations win.
What ensued were months of informal negotiations, with Ms. Breed — a politician with no foreign affairs or security experience — becoming a diplomat of sorts. She went to China, where she met the vice president and a deputy foreign minister, her calendars and emails show. She traveled with the editor of Sing Tao U.S., a pro-Beijing newspaper that registers as a foreign agent in the United States, according to other records and photographs from the trip.
All of this was organized by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, a group that American intelligence officials have concluded seeks to “malignly influence” local leaders. Unlike traveling Washington politicians, Ms. Breed received no C.I.A. briefing about what counterintelligence threats she might face in China and how officials there might try to manipulate her.
If Ms. Breed wanted pandas, China had an interest in the meeting, too — as a way to cultivate a relationship with the mayor of one of America’s most technologically important cities. There is no evidence of any quid pro quo or wrongdoing, but intelligence officials say that China is increasingly looking to wield influence in local governments as its sway in Washington diminishes.
One lever it has, documents and interviews show, is pandas. Chinese officials have sought to use pandas to cultivate relationships, shape policy on Taiwan and soften China’s image abroad, a major goal of Mr. Xi. Panda exchanges provide Chinese leaders with rare, high-profile opportunities to rebrand their country.
This has long been the case. During panda negotiations with Omaha and with Oakland in the mid-2000s, Chinese diplomats tried to scuttle a Nebraskan trade deal with Taiwan and to persuade a California congresswoman to stop criticizing Beijing, negotiators for the American side said. When those efforts failed, China denied pandas to both cities, they said.
But intelligence officials say that China’s outreach is on the rise locally, where officials often do not have the training or intelligence briefings needed to deflect it.
In September, federal prosecutors charged a former aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York with taking payoffs for securing Chinese influence in Albany. Also this year, a former aide to the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, came under scrutiny after collaborating with groups linked to China’s government.
Local officials in the United States and Europe are also struggling to make sense of a network of unofficial Chinese police outposts that have popped up unexpectedly.
As relations between Beijing and Washington have cooled and high-level delegations have slowed, diplomacy at the local level has taken on increased significance.
“Every mayor wants to have the publicity of getting pandas,” said David Towne, former panda negotiator for American zoos. “Pandas become the bait,” he added.
Pandas are the face of wildlife conservation. Zoos pay about $1 million a year to rent them from China and breed them in captivity, in hopes that pandas will someday be released into the wild. China is supposed to use the money to protect the wild species.
But a New York Times investigation this year revealed that after three decades, China has actually captured more pandas than it has released. And aggressive artificial breeding has injured and even killed pandas. China has steered millions of dollars toward building infrastructure such as apartments and roads as American zoo administrators and regulators looked the other way.
Zoos have an incentive to keep the program running. Pandas bring crowds and merchandise sales. China, too, has a stake in the exchanges.
“Pandas are an interesting piece of the propaganda and influence-seeking puzzle because they’re seemingly innocuous and fuzzy and huggable,” said Orville Schell, who directs the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York.
As Lee Simmons, former director of the Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium in Omaha, put it: “Almost every Chinese ambassador was a panda salesman.”
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not comment on whether Beijing had used pandas to push its political interests. It said that pandas had “promoted people-to-people exchanges between China and the U.S. and enhanced the friendship between the two peoples.” It criticized anyone who “maliciously associated and unreasonably slandered China-U.S. cooperation on giant panda conservation without factual evidence.”
Ms. Breed’s office declined to say whether the mayor had concerns about her trip’s organizers or about the newspaper that is registered as a foreign agent.
“This was a trip designed to boost tourism, which ultimately would benefit San Francisco’s economy,” her office said in a statement.
Ms. Breed announced this spring that two pandas will arrive in San Francisco next year.
Panda Influence
The Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries portrays itself as nongovernmental. But it is an arm of the Communist Party, charged with overseeing outreach to foreign local governments.
In 2022, the American director of national intelligence warned statehouses and city halls that China had “stepped up its efforts to cultivate U.S. state and local leaders in a strategy some have described as ‘using the local to surround the central.’” Intelligence officials cited the friendship group as part of that effort.
Mr. Xi has overseen an effort to rebrand his country through overseas propaganda, or what he calls “telling China’s story well.” Under his watch, China has produced a spate of pro-Beijing documentaries and media channels centered on pandas.
In Edinburgh, which until recently was home to pandas, the Chinese government-backed Confucius Institute worked with school officials in the Scottish capital to teach a unit called “Beyond the Panda.” The program included maps showing Taiwan as part of China.
The Chinese friendship group has also organized panda-related events with American politicians and Chinese propaganda officials. The group did not respond to a request to comment.
Pandas are “one of the few tools that China has left for winning public excitement in the U.S. and building soft power,” said Kyle Jaros, an expert on U.S.-China ties at the University of Notre Dame.
‘Chinafornia’
California is home to two Chinese consulates and many people of Chinese descent. The state’s longstanding ties with Beijing, a relationship sometimes called Chinafornia, have yielded positive changes, like cooperation on climate change.
But it has also exposed state and local governments to security risks, experts say.
Before congressional delegations to China, officials typically receive C.I.A. briefings that discuss how Beijing might try to exploit visits, said Dennis Wilder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University and former C.I.A. official focused on East Asia. Travelers are also warned about cybersecurity risks.
But, Mr. Wilder noted, “At the local level, there’s no mechanism for this.”
In its statement, Ms. Breed’s office said that she had received a briefing from the State Department. Mr. Wilder said that those are less thorough than C.I.A. intelligence briefings.
Across the San Francisco Bay, in Oakland, politicians spent nearly a decade trying to get pandas for the city’s zoo. Henry Chang, a former deputy mayor, said that he had met with a vice premier and several other senior Chinese officials, adding that they had made what he saw as increasingly unreasonable demands.
In a 2008 meeting with the Chinese ambassador in Washington, Mr. Chang said, he brought along Representative Barbara Lee. The meeting was ostensibly about pandas, but an aide pressured Ms. Lee to stop criticizing China’s activities in Africa, Mr. Chang said. Ms. Lee had sponsored a resolution the year before calling on China to use its influence in Sudan to end the genocide there.
“They were more interested to talk to Barbara Lee about the Africa problem than to talk about pandas, to tell you the truth,” he noted.
Ms. Lee’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
The Oakland Zoo built a $1 million panda enclosure and donated $375,000 to a panda breeding center in Chengdu, southwestern China, Mr. Chang said. The pandas never came.
Officials in Omaha had a similar experience that same year, said Dr. Simmons, the former zoo director there. Plans for pandas went awry after the state cut a $400 million agricultural trade deal with Taiwan. Dr. Simmons said the Chinese ambassador had asked him to scuttle the deal.
When he did not, China declined to send the bears. “The Chinese were very unhappy with Omaha,” Mr. Towne, the former American panda negotiator, said.
In San Diego, a Chinese diplomat wrote to Mayor Todd Gloria in late 2023, requesting a meeting about pandas and “mutually-beneficial cooperation.” The mayor agreed to meet at the zoo, which an executive there suggested as a discreet location, emails and calendar records show.
When San Diego finally got pandas, in June, Mr. Gloria flew to China for their departure. While there, he said in an interview, he met with a deputy foreign minister in Beijing.
Mr. Gloria said that he understood it was a “fraught time” for U.S.-China relations but that he was cleareyed about the relationship.
“I could control what I am a part of,” Mr. Gloria said. “Through engagement, you gain understanding. You’re able to collaborate.”
But Beijing’s talking points crept into the panda welcome ceremony in San Diego — and not just into the Chinese ambassador’s speech. Paul Baribault, a zoo official, talked about the institution’s commitment to a “shared future,” a signature foreign policy concept of Mr. Xi that sees China and other countries competing with the United States for influence.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California talked about “common humanity,” another buzzword of Mr. Xi’s government.
San Francisco is still waiting to hear when its pandas will arrive. Ms. Breed lost her re-election bid in November, but her successor, Daniel Lurie, said that he hopes to bring pandas back to the city.
A city report recently described the San Francisco Zoo as “unsafe for the animals and visitors.” The city is auditing the zoo’s finances, which administrators say could jeopardize hopes for pandas. But there are no indications that China has changed plans.
In a brief interview with The Times after the San Diego ceremony, Xie Feng, China’s ambassador to the United States, said: “The American people, they are so fond of pandas.”
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