Welcome to America, Yun Chuan and Xin Bao — the two giant pandas that soon will be on display at the San Diego Zoo after departing the People’s Republic last week.

Their arrival marks the first time in two decades that Beijing has granted Washington new loans of the furry sensations, which President Xi describes as “envoys of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples.”

Before flying from their home country via a chartered jet June 26, the pair of pandas received a celebratory farewell attended by American and Chinese dignitaries at the Bifengxia base of the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda. Seven thousand miles later, Yun Chuan, a male, and Xin Bao, a female, made it to San Diego, ending a panda-drought that started when the historic zoo was forced to return its two pandas to China in 2019.

More pandas will soon head to the Golden State. Mayor Breed of San Francisco said in April that his city would soon receive pandas for the first time following a yearlong advocacy campaign. That agreement, and the San Diego one, followed extensive talks between Mr. X and President Biden on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in November. Announcing the exchanges, Mr. Xi said, “we will do our best to meet the wishes of the Californians.”

The presence of pandas on American soil speaks volumes to the state of Sino-American relations. Beijing suggests it’s moving to mend fractures between the two superpowers by way of “panda diplomacy,” a practice which dates back to President Nixon’s visit to the People’s Republic in 1972. It appears to be seeking to secure economic and cultural ties amid rocky geopolitical relations — and an uncertain path ahead for Washington.

A researcher of US-China relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, Jasper Boers, raises the possibility “that Xi is thinking about his relationship with Newsom, who is a likely contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination,” he tells the Sun.

This kind of “sub-national diplomacy” suggests a reversal of China’s refusals to renew its panda contracts in recent years. Last year, three pandas headed home from Smithsonian’s National Zoo at Washington, marking the end of more than 50 years of Chinese pandas being housed at the zoo. Four pandas are set to leave Atlanta’s zoo next year after their loan agreement expires. 

The trend is global: Britain lost its last two pandas in December, and so too will Australia next year if an existing agreement is not extended. Yet Russia gets to keep its two giant pandas after President Putin signed a 15-year contract with Mr. Xi in 2019.

“My suspicion is that with intensifying rivalry, some part of the foreign minister thought withdrawals to punish U.S., Australia, others was a neat idea,” the founding dean of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Graham Allison, who served as assistant secretary of defense under President Clinton, tells the Sun. “But when discovered how counterproductive this was, Xi reversed.”

Take it from China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Wang Yi, who asserted during a speech in Beijing where he promised the return of pandas to America by the end of the year: “China-U.S. cooperation is no longer a dispensable option for the two countries or even for the world, but a must-answer question that must be seriously addressed.”

As much as China might publicly push for peaceful coexistence, though, it’s unclear if “panda diplomacy” will thaw a possible Cold War 2.0 with America. 

“Anti-China sentiment is now so deeply entrenched among the American political class and the foreign policy establishment, that the Pandas are unlikely to have even a marginal positive impact on softening America’s growing hostility to, and fear of, China,” a professor of intelligence and national security at Texas A&M’s school of government, Christopher Layne, tells the Sun. 

He draws a comparison to the cultural exchanges that took place between the great rival powers during the height of the Cold War: An American pianist won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, the Bolshoi ballet performed throughout America, and paintings from what was then Leningrad were exhibited at New York City. 

“Certainly, some good will came from these exchanges,” Mr. Layne says, “but no serious international relations would argue that they had any appreciable effect on ending the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States.”

At the very least, Californians will be happy to meet Yun Chuan and Xin Bao after they acclimate to their new home at San Diego over the next few weeks and enter the public eye. For panda-lovers across the country, the cute and cuddly exports are, indeed, “envoys of friendship.”