Pandas then, pandas now: Trump and Xi are well past Nixon-era magic

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping went out of their way to make their latest summit in Washington look warm. The White House ceremony was choreographed for smiles, handshakes and talk of cooperation, while Xi brought a particularly cuddly reminder of a very different era in US-China relations -- two giant pandas, Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, bound for Zoo Atlanta. Xi called the pandas an “envoy of friendship” and said they would arrive within days.

The gesture recalls the extraordinary role pandas played when the US President Richard Nixon opened the door to China in 1972. But the current relationship is a much harder one. The summit produced no diplomatic breakthrough, while Washington and Beijing merely extended their trade truce by two months, leaving the most difficult economic disputes for later.

A panda returns to an old diplomatic show


Pandas have an unusual place in the history of US-China relations because their political meaning began at almost exactly the moment modern relations between the two countries were being forged.

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When Nixon visited China in February 1972, the US and China had been estranged for more than two decades. The Cold War had hardened the division. The US had fought Chinese forces in Korea and still recognised the government in Taiwan as the real government of China.

Nixon's opening to China's supreme leader Mao Zedong was therefore not a sentimental exercise but a hard-headed Cold War strategy. The Nixon administration wanted a relationship with China partly because both the US and China distrusted the Soviet Union. Nixon's national security team explicitly viewed China as a counterweight to Russia. The strategy was to develop a dialogue with China and then use that relationship as a counterweight to the Soviets.

In April 1972, just weeks after Nixon's historic visit, two pandas named Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing arrived at Washington's National Zoo. First Lady Pat Nixon had mentioned her fondness for pandas to Premier Zhou Enlai during a dinner in Beijing. Zhou offered her two. The animals became an instant sensation. Nearly 24,000 people reportedly came to see them during their first weekend.

The pandas gave ordinary Americans something tangible to associate with an extraordinary diplomatic opening. They were easier to understand than the Shanghai Communiqué, the Taiwan formula or the complicated geometry of the Cold War. The pandas arrived as a charming face of a geopolitical realignment.

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The mainstreaming of China

The larger importance of Nixon's China policy was not that it made Americans love pandas but that the US and China began dismantling the barriers that had kept China outside much of the Western diplomatic and economic system.

The Shanghai Communiqué established a framework for managing the Taiwan dispute and created the basis for eventual normalisation. In 1979, the US formally established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China. The opening also helped alter the strategic balance of the Cold War and contributed to the wider US-Soviet détente.

Economic engagement followed gradually. In the early 1970s, even American officials regarded trade with China as relatively small in commercial terms. They nevertheless understood its political importance. Over the following three decades, a modest economic relationship became something far larger.

China's economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping, the normalisation of relations with the US and the country's eventual entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 drew China much deeper into the global economy. Western companies moved production to China on an extraordinary scale. American and European consumers became dependent on Chinese factories for everything from toys and textiles to electronics and machinery.

The China that Nixon encountered in 1972 was a poor, isolated communist state. The China that emerged from decades of integration was a manufacturing superpower with enormous foreign-exchange reserves, globally competitive companies and an increasingly sophisticated technological base.

That transformation is part of the irony of today's panda diplomacy. The US helped open the door to China's integration into the Western-led economic order. China subsequently became powerful enough to challenge parts of that order.

From partner against Moscow to strategic rival

The strategic logic that made the Nixon opening so valuable has largely disappeared. In 1972, Washington and Beijing had a common problem in the Soviet Union. Today, the US increasingly sees China itself as the principal long-term strategic competitor. The areas of friction are no longer peripheral. They include advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence, critical minerals, Taiwan, military power, industrial subsidies and the structure of global supply chains.

Yet the two economies remain deeply intertwined. That creates a strange quality in the current relationship. Washington wants to reduce vulnerabilities created by dependence on Chinese manufacturing and technology while Beijing wants access to Western markets and technology while building greater economic self-sufficiency. Neither side appears interested in allowing competition to become an uncontrolled rupture. The latest summit reflected that tension.

What pandas do and what they don't

Trump and Xi could present themselves at the Washington Summit as leaders capable of talking directly and maintaining a working relationship. But the economic agreement announced around the meeting was essentially an extension of an existing trade truce. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Washington and Beijing had agreed to extend the Busan trade agreement until January 10, two months beyond its scheduled November 10 expiry. He said the extra time would allow the two countries to see what they could achieve “on the economic front”.

The extension does not settle the central questions that have repeatedly brought the relationship close to another trade confrontation. Tariffs remain and the two sides still have disagreements over Chinese purchases of American goods. Rare-earth supplies remain a source of leverage and mistrust. Technology restrictions, particularly around advanced computing and artificial intelligence, are unlikely to disappear simply because the leaders have agreed to keep talking.

The arrangement therefore buys time rather than ending the dispute. Bessent himself has acknowledged that it is not clear whether a larger agreement can be completed by January.

This is where the Atlanta pandas come into picture. China does not casually send pandas abroad. The animals have long been closely controlled by Beijing and have become one of the country's most recognisable diplomatic symbols. Their presence in American zoos has often coincided with periods when Washington and Beijing were trying to maintain a cooperative relationship. Their withdrawal has acquired a reverse meaning when relations deteriorate.

Xi's decision to announce their arrival during the White House ceremony gives the gesture another layer. It says that despite the strategic rivalry, Beijing wants Americans to see a relationship that contains cooperation as well as confrontation.

The problem with invoking the Nixon-era panda story today is that the underlying relationship has been transformed. The US and China already have an enormous relationship. The hard reality today is how two powerful countries with conflicting strategic ambitions can coexist without allowing competition to destroy the economic ties that still benefit both. That makes the pandas less a diplomatic instrument than a diplomatic indicator. They show that Beijing and Washington still want channels of cooperation.

The Atlanta pandas may therefore accomplish something quite modest and also quite real. They can put a popular face on a relationship dominated by tariffs, export controls, military calculations and supply-chain anxiety. They create a small space in which cooperation is visible. That matters in a relationship where public perceptions can harden quickly. Mao's pandas arrived at the beginning of a transformation in US-China relations. Xi's pandas are arriving during an attempt to prevent that relationship from becoming permanently adversarial.