Japan says goodbye to Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei amid conflict with China

TOKYO: Countries have gone to war over oil fields and mineral deposits. Empires have clashed over rivers and sea lanes. Donald Trump has worked himself into a lather over tariff rates. But only in the peculiar theatre of modern geopolitics can two major powers find themselves locking horns over large, lumbering black-and-white bears that spend most of their day eating bamboo and napping—animals for which governments pay $1 million annually for loaning them from the Chinese. That’s panda diplomacy in 2025.

On Sunday, thousands of Japanese citizens queued for up to three and a half hours in the winter cold outside Tokyo’s Ueno zoo, not to protest or celebrate, but to say goodbye. The objects of their affection: twin giant panda cubs named Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei, who are being packed off to China on Tuesday.

Their departure will leave Japan without a single panda for the first time since 1972, the year Beijing and Tokyo ended decades of hostility and normalised diplomatic relations. That the bears are leaving now, at this particular moment, is no accident.

Some 108,000 people entered a lottery for one of just 4,400 slots to see the pandas one last time. Those who won wept openly as they pressed against viewing barriers, phones held aloft to capture final photographs. 

The scenes of public grief might seem overwrought for the departure of zoo animals. But in the coded language of Asian diplomacy, the return of the pandas carries unmistakable weight.

The People’s Republic of China has wielded giant pandas as instruments of soft power since Chairman Mao’s government came to power in 1949. The practice, known as panda diplomacy, involves loaning the endangered bears to foreign countries as gestures of goodwill, friendship or more cynically, to grease the wheels of trade negotiations. China retains ownership of every panda it loans abroad, including any cubs born in captivity overseas. Host countries pay roughly $1 million per year per pair for the privilege.

The timing of panda loans has often coincided with significant diplomatic or economic milestones. In 2011, when two pandas arrived at Edinburgh zoo in Scotland, Britain was deep in negotiations with China over lucrative contracts to supply salmon meat, Land Rover vehicles and energy technology. The bears arrived; the deals were signed. Everyone smiled for the cameras.

But panda diplomacy cuts both ways. As loan agreements expire, typically after ten years, though extensions are common, many countries have found their pandas recalled to China without replacement. The message is clear without being spoken: when relations sour, the pandas go home.

Which brings us to Japan’s current predicament. Relations between Tokyo and Beijing have deteriorated sharply in recent weeks after Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, declared that her country would intervene militarily if China attempted to seize Taiwan by force.

For China, which views the self-governed democratic island as a renegade province that must eventually be “reunited” with the mainland, by force if necessary, Takaichi’s statement crossed a red line. China’s foreign ministry issued furious denunciations. Earlier this month, Beijing tightened restrictions on exports of rare earth products to Japan, materials crucial for manufacturing electronics and advanced technology.

Against this backdrop, the departure of Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei reads less like routine zoo administration and more like a diplomatic slap. The cubs were born in 2021 to parents Shin Shin and Ri Ri, both of whom were loaned to Japan specifically for breeding research. Under the terms of such agreements, all cubs born abroad belong to China and must eventually return. But whether Japan will receive replacement pandas, whether the cycle of panda diplomacy will continue or simply end, remains shrouded in uncertainty.

For now, Japanese panda enthusiasts face a future without the bears that have been fixtures at Ueno zoo for more than five decades. The crowds on Sunday seemed to understand they were witnessing not just the departure of two animals, but the closing of a chapter.

In the surreal calculus of international relations, perhaps we are. Countries signal their intentions through warships and tariffs, through diplomatic cables and economic sanctions. But sometimes the message arrives in the form of a truck pulling away from a zoo, carrying two sleepy pandas back to China, leaving an empty enclosure and a queue of weeping citizens behind.