A special delivery landed in Atlanta on Sunday, three days after Xi Jinping, China’s leader, said his country would soon dispatch “envoys of friendship” to the United States.
Two giant pandas, a male named Ping Ping and a female named Fu Shuang, touched down at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on Sunday morning, according to Zoo Atlanta. The bears traveled on an overnight FedEx cargo flight from a breeding center in Chengdu, in southwestern China.
The delivery of the animals was a gesture of good will from Beijing and came on the heels of Mr. Xi’s visit to the White House last week, the first in over a decade. The Chinese leader met with President Trump and announced that China would send the bears to Zoo Atlanta.
The zoo said last month that it had reached a research agreement with the China Wildlife Conservation Association, one of two groups in the country that researches pandas and lends them overseas.
According to Chinese state media, the pandas will be on loan for 10 years. Both were born in China in 2020.
During the three-day visit to Washington last week, Mr. Xi described the bears as a symbol of friendship between the United States and China.
The lavish ceremonies masked the heightened tensions between the two countries, including over trade practices and Chinese military activity around Taiwan and in the Pacific region. Beyond Mr. Xi’s promise of pandas, the summit ended with few tangible diplomatic outcomes.
Zoo Atlanta is one of a handful of institutions in the United States that have hosted pandas over the past half-century, continuing a Chinese tradition of panda diplomacy that stretches back to President Richard M. Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972.
After the first lady, Pat Nixon, told China’s premier, Zhou Enlai, that she loved the animals, Chinese officials sent a male-female pair to the National Zoo in Washington.
Over the next 20 years, the two produced five cubs (none of which survived) and drew crowds of millions, according to the zoo. The program’s success also inspired Chinese officials to send more pandas — the ultimate symbols of soft diplomacy — to zoos in San Diego and Memphis, as well as to ones in other countries.
Ping Ping and Fu Shuang’s arrival on Sunday increased the total number of giant pandas in the United States to six.
In 2024, the Chinese authorities sent a pair to the San Diego Zoo and another to the National Zoo, ending a monthslong spell during which there were no pandas in the United States.
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