2023-12-26 19:58:54
All of Chengdu’s merchandising revolves around the giant panda: t-shirts, caps, keychains and countless stuffed animals. There’s a 15-metre plastic panda climbing over the Prada building in the city centre, and another made of bamboo walking on a tightrope across a river.
There are also real ones. Those are at the giant panda research base, a sanctuary 10 kilometers from the city center that is one of the main tourist attractions in southwest China’s vast Sichuan province, where Chengdu is located.
20 years ago, this was an inland city under construction in which just over five million people lived. Today, its entire area, including the rural areas bordering Tibet, has more than 16 million inhabitants. More than 40% of the urban area has forest cover and a large-scale system of interconnected parks and ecological trails is being built. Within two decades, this megacity is expected to be the center of a 17,000-kilometer network of green roads, the largest in the world.
Chengdu wants to become a new model of green development promoted in China: a city within a park. But the main international attraction will continue to be the pandas.
Chinese conservatives say 75% of the more than 1,800 giant pandas that live in their habitat are found in Sichuan, and more than two hundred of them can be visited in the Chengdu park. In the last three decades, the number of pandas in the reserve has increased 12-fold, from 18 in 1994 to 237 today.
One of the most interesting parts of this place is the breeding center where the baby pandas rest. There are large stained glass windows that separate the puppies from the visitors. The smallest ones, who are barely two months old, are in incubators. Adults, on the other hand, can be seen without glass in between.
The park reproduces its natural habitat in detail, with more than 10,000 bamboo clumps that represent 90% of the center’s vegetation. “The research and breeding base was set up in 1987 with six sick pandas that we rescued from poachers,” explains Luo Cai, one of the researchers.
Three decades ago, hunted for their skins and in demand as the main attraction in the best zoos, giant pandas were smuggled out of China towards the United States and Japan.
A symbol of conservation success
Naturalist George Schaller published a book in 1994, The Last Panda, in which he described this animal as a species plagued by poaching, habitat loss and poor management. At the time, he predicted that “poachers would eliminate the panda long before inbreeding became a problem.” In a recent interview with National Geographic, Schaller said that, if he were to write a new book, it would have to be something about the positive future of the panda.
“In the 1980s, the panda was in serious danger of extinction, with fewer than 1,000 individuals. But thanks to the government’s protection policies, these animals are now a global symbol of the success of how a species can be conserved, even doubled, if the right policies are implemented,” says Luo, from the Chengdu reserve.
In 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), citing a steadily increasing population, said the giant panda was upgraded from an endangered species to vulnerable. Something that was not shared by many Chinese scientists and officials, as well as animal rights organizations, which defend that the panda’s recovery is not guaranteed, especially due to widespread deforestation
Destruction of panda habitat
“The conversion of forests to agricultural areas, the collection of medicinal herbs, logging, bamboo harvesting, and activities such as hydropower development, as well as mining and road construction, fragment bear habitat.” pandas. These factors contribute to the isolation and reduction of populations that cannot migrate from one space to another due to the presence of human settlements,” reads a WWF report.
This international organization has been collaborating with the Chinese government to expand a network of 67 panda nature reserves covering an area of more than two and a half million hectares in the southwestern mountainous regions, where the authorities deployed around 4,000 rangers who have placed cameras throughout the forests to record the behavior of animals.
In research parks like Chengdu, The goal of conservationists is to reproduce and raise pandas in captivity to release them in isolated reserves of Sichuan that strengthen wild populations. So far, 14 pandas have been released. Of them, nine have survived.
When Chengdu hosted the World University Games with young athletes from around the world, the local press often shared photographs of athletes visiting the reserve, especially to meet Ya Ya, a 23-year-old female whose return to China from a zoo in the US caused a wave of nationalism in the Asian country.
Ya Ya and her male partner, Le Le, arrived in the United States in 2003 at the culmination of the best moment in relations between both countries. It was a loan for 20 years. The “panda diplomacy”international analysts called it.
But the many open fronts between the two colossi of the geopolitical chessboard have transformed that friendship into a totally antagonistic relationship. And the return of the pandas to China became another problem.
Le Le died suddenly of heart disease in early February, fueling suspicions of mistreatment at the Memphis zoo where the couple was kept. Then, the Chinese public, concerned about Ya Ya’s physical condition and the conditions in which they were in the United States, demanded his immediate return to Chengdu.
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