Houston Community News >> China Halts Panda Gifts
9/26/2007-- China has halted
its time-honoured goodwill gesture of giving highly endangered pandas to foreign
countries, local media reported on Thursday, citing a Chinese wildlife official.
China would only lend pandas for the purposes of "breeding and biological
research", Chinanews.com quoted Cao Qingyuan, State Forestry Administration
spokesman, as saying.
"The Chinese government has stopped giving pandas as gifts abroad. We will only
be conducting research with foreign countries," Cao said.
The giant panda is one of the world's most endangered species and is found only
in China. An estimated 1,600 wild pandas live in nature reserves in Sichuan,
Gansu and Shaanxi provinces.
The pandas, which risk extinction in their native mountains and bamboo forests,
have been loaned and given outright to a number of countries as goodwill gifts
and symbols of friendship.
Detractors have accused China of using "panda diplomacy" to push its political
agendas and of reaping exorbitant loan fees from host countries.
On Saturday, Spain's Madrid zoo welcomed a pair of pandas loaned by the Chinese
government. Last week, China agreed to send a pair of pandas from its Wolong
nature reserve in southwestern Sichuan province to Adelaide zoo in Australia on
a 10-year loan.
Cao said China would give pandas as presents only to Hong Kong, which was
returned to China in 1997, and to Taiwan, the neighbouring self-ruled island
China considers its own.
"This is an activity of sending pandas between brothers," Cao said.
In April, China sent a second pair of pandas to Hong Kong to mark the 10th
anniversary of the former British colony's return to Chinese rule.
China has offered several times to send pandas to Taiwan but has been repeatedly
rebuffed. One Taiwanese lawmaker once likened them to Beijing's version of the
Trojan horse, "meant to destroy Taiwan's psychological defenses".
Contributed by Reuters