[Animals] China welcomes home Ya Ya, the not-so-fluffy panda, amid acrimony and accusations

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a Ya the panda arrived in the U.S. 20 years ago as a fluffy gesture of China's friendship with America. But she returned home Thursday the subject of online nationalistic fervor.

News of her touching down in Shanghai was welcomed by Chinese social media users and some animal welfare activists who have been vocal in their concerns about Ya Ya’s care and condition at the Memphis Zoo in Tennessee, as well as her symbolic role in world affairs.

 

The zoo has denied mistreating the 190-pound panda, but her return trip to China marked the culmination of an intense online campaign that has mirrored the growing tensions between Washington and Beijing. 

Ya Ya’s trip was closely followed online, and people shared screenshots tracking the animal’s flight path into Shanghai.

Vanessa Mai, a 22-year-old English student from Guangdong who told NBC News she had signed up to a campaign to save Ya Ya, said the panda was “getting a lot of exposure now and she will definitely be better off in China.”

 

Some animal welfare groups have questioned her condition and complained that her fur looks mangy and she looks thin. They have also blamed the zoo for the death in February of Ya Ya’s mate, Le Le  — both contentions denied by the zoo as well as Chinese officials.

 

An image from Chinese broadcaster Phoenix News was also po[CENSORED]r among Chinese social media users. It shows the bear relieving herself before the trip — and leaving muck as an apparent gift for keepers.

For decades, China deployed the iconic black-and-white animals in the service of so-called panda diplomacy. But this four-legged soft-power play by Beijing does not come free for recipient nations.

 

“They rent pandas for $1 million a year, usually on 10-year contracts,” said Stanley Rosen, a professor of political science and international relations at the University of Southern California’s U.S.-China Institute. “If a cub is born, that’s another $400,000 given back to China, all of which is put into conservation efforts.” 

 

Despite the effort and money that keeping Ya Ya cost the zoo, and assurances from Chinese officials that she was in fact being treated properly, some Chinese social media users and animal rights groups around the world continued to raise concerns about her welfare.

 

“Refuse the meaningless panda diplomacy,” one person wrote on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo, where over 400 million users have responded to the #Yaya topic.

“Don’t let them be uprooted from their homeland again,” another wrote.

 

Even the hawkish state-run Global Times tabloid, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, has weighed in — linking the panda to Chinese-American relations, which have hit a low point amid tensions over Taiwan, the U.S. downing of a Chinese surveillance balloon and Beijing's growing assertiveness internationally.

 

“If this had not happened during a period when Washington is intensifying its containment and suppression of China, this matter would not have caused such a stir,” it said in an editorial. “Whether it’s a corn-milling plant, a crane, or an unidentified flying object, anything with a ‘China’ tag could be seen as a ‘threat’ by the U.S.”

Ya Ya, who is 22, arrived in Tennessee on loan from China in 2003, which China and the U.S. maintained much more cordial relations.

 

[https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/panda-yaya-china-memphis-zoo-diplomacy-washington-beijing-geopolitics-rcna81566]