The Mobile Panda: From Political Signifier to Ecological Icon

• In Event: Border Crossing Activism in the Asian Anthropocene

Abstract

In 2008, when Ma Ying-jeou was elected Taiwan's president, China sent a pair of beautiful pandas to him as a gift. On the surface, the Taiwanese government decided to exhibit the pandas to aid conservation and scientific research, largely concealing the geopolitical tensions between the Mainland and Taiwan. All of this changed in 2013, when the birth of the cub Yuan Zai triggered an unprecedented media sensation. The Chinese media called Yuan Zai a "national hero." Taiwanese environmental and animal activists had something else in mind. The panda sensation of 2013 incited a new conservation discourse around the dwindling numbers of endemic animal species in Taiwan. For example, while there are nearly 1,600 pandas in the world, there are less than 200 Formosan Black Bears. Other endemic species in Taiwan, the Mikado Pheasant and the Leopard Cat, also appeared in the media. The flourishing of these images raised awareness about the politics of nuclear power, endangered species, and excessive industrial development. The gesture of the panda gift was not returned. Rather, as I show in this paper, it incited a new politics of animal care, especially around the future of the Formosan Black Bear. The mobility of the Panda, as a gift of friendship, has given rise to a distinct form of Taiwanese environmentalism, where issues of multi-species care, human-animal futures, and critiques of industrial and nuclear development create spaces for a new politics of ecological hope.

Author

• Yuan-chih Lung, Institute of Science, Technology and Society, Tsinghua University