LU LU paces up and down in a small concrete enclosure, showing no interest in a video he can see just outside his pen. He may have been excited by the panda pornography the first time he watched it, but he certainly isn't now. It probably doesn't help that the soundtrack is malfunctioning. Pandas like the noise and smell of sex much more than the images.
Still, Lu Lu's keepers at the panda research centre at Wolong in Sichuan province, set among misty mountains covered in bamboo, rhododendrons and fir trees, believe that adult panda movies may have helped the conception of his daughter, Ying Ying, last year. One of a pair given by the Chinese leadership to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong's handover from Britain to the communist mainland, she is now a star attraction at a theme park in the territory, and a symbol of new hope for China's panda population.
China's record of protecting its rare species has been desultory. In the world's first extinction of a large vertebrate for half a century, the Yangzi river dolphin was recently declared to have been wiped out (notwithstanding a reported sighting in August 2007). The South China tiger is close to disappearing in the wild (official claims in October of the first wild sighting in more than 30 years have been widely derided in China as false).
Pandas might have expected to get better treatment. With their winning combination of scarcity and cuddliness, they are a national symbol, a powerful instrument of foreign policy and a potent brand. Empress Wu of the Tang dynasty gave pandas to Japan in the 7th century. Mao Zedong's gift of Ling Ling and Hsing Hsing to President Richard Nixon in 1972 broke the ice between the two cold war rivals and gave birth to the term “panda diplomacy”.
Yet in the 1980s there were fears of imminent extinction, and much debate about why. At first many said the panda was an evolutionary dead end: it had bad genes and was hopeless at sex. If that was the case, protecting it was going to be tough. But increasingly scientists have put the blame on people, who exacerbated a problem caused by the life-cycle of the high altitude bamboo that is the panda's staple diet. In the 1980s, it burst into flower and died, as it does every 30 to 80 years; but human activity had deprived the pandas of access to lower altitude species that would once have served as a back-up.
Since then, China has begun to tackle the problems of both wild and captive populations. The captive panda breeding programme has undergone a remarkable transformation. Long-held beliefs about the animal's reproductive capacities have been shattered. No longer are desperate keepers feeding Viagra to underperforming males (that did not work anyway). Researchers have given up ideas of cloning them. Good old-fashioned sex is now doing the trick, accounting for some 80% of births at Wolong. That's thanks to better habitats (larger areas help), better nutrition (more fresh bamboo) and new techniques for assessing when the female is in heat (only three or four days a year).
In 2006 Wolong had 17 cubs and Chengdu, capital of Sichuan and location of the other main panda-breeding centre, had 12—record crops for both institutions. As a result, a new problem has emerged: overcrowding. Wolong's new-born panda cubs lie in rows in bassinets, as in a maternity hospital. Last year some of the younger pandas fell sick, possibly because disease spreads easily between animals in close proximity. Wolong officials say all recovered. But the China Daily, a state-controlled newspaper, quoted an unnamed expert as saying that two died after a disease outbreak this year. Wolong is building new quarters farther away to scatter the captives more widely. It aims to keep births to around a dozen a year.
Life for wild pandas has been improving too, partly by accident. In 1998 floods along the Yangzi left thousands of people dead and millions homeless. Logging, which deprives river banks of water-absorbing tree cover, was blamed for exacerbating the disaster. The government banned tree-felling across a wide area, including much of the pandas' habitat.
Counting wild panda numbers is a difficult and controversial science, relying on estimates based on examination of droppings. The third and latest government survey, conducted between 1999 and 2003, put the population at 1,596. This was up from 1,114 in 1988 but was still short of the 2,459 pandas counted a decade earlier.
Given improvements in survey methods, experts warn against drawing firm conclusions from comparisons of the three sets of results. Many believe, however, that numbers in the wild are on the rise. Hu Jingchu of China West Normal University says there may be more than 2,000 now. Some researchers believe there may be considerably more. In 2006 Chinese and British scientists led by Michael Bruford of Cardiff University and Wei Fuwen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences published research on droppings found at Wanglang reserve in Sichuan. They concluded that there were 66 pandas living in that area, more than twice as many as the 2003 census suggested, implying a total wild panda population of 2,500-3,000.
Flush with pandas, Wolong is now experimenting with ways of releasing them into the wild. A male was set free in 2006. It was injured, apparently by another panda, re-released, and later found dead. Experts believe it fell off a tree during a fight. Another panda is likely to be released in the coming year, this time a female (thought less likely to get into trouble). The hope is that pandas can be released into small isolated wild populations that are in danger of being weakened by in-breeding.
In another eight to ten years, says Li Desheng of the Wolong reserve, China should have around 300 captive pandas of sufficient genetic diversity to ensure the indefinite survival of the species (there are now about 220). Efforts are now being made to identify the genetic make-up of the captives to ensure the best possible mating matches. Artificial insemination will still sometimes be necessary, but better and safer ways of doing this are being developed. The process normally involves the use of general anaesthetic, which is risky. Hong Kong's Ocean Park is working on a technique for training males to provide semen samples while wide awake.
More pandas do not bring down the price for foreign zoos, though, because China controls the supply. Since the height of the bamboo crisis in 1984, China has ceased handing out pandas free as a gesture of friendship to other countries. Western zoos now have to pay $1m per pair annually (plus another $600,000 if a cub is born) to keep them on what is normally a 10-year loan. Favoured countries may get better deals. Thailand's Chiang Mai Zoo is an exception, having secured a pair in 2003 for $250,000 a year, to the chagrin of its Western counterparts.
The money is still very useful. The number of panda reserves has increased to more than 60 from 13 in the early 1990s, with the area covered roughly tripling from 6,000 sq km in the same period. Hiring and training staff, replanting forest and bamboo and moving farmers away from panda habitats is costly. So too is breeding and looking after the captive population.
Sichuan province is increasingly keen to cash in on its black-and-white gold dust and has plans to tighten its hold over the brand (two other provinces, Shaanxi and Gansu, also have wild pandas, but considerably fewer). In 2006 the Sichuan Panda Strategic Planning Office was established. The provincial legislature adopted a five year economic plan calling for a “panda brand strategy” aimed at boosting the revenues of Sichuan's leading companies. Draft measures are said to call for panda-branded goods and services to contribute 5% of Sichuan's GDP growth in 2010 and 15% by 2020. The idea is for these to use a common panda logo.
Tourism will be the driving force. Having gained some respite thanks to better protection of reserves from loggers, farmers and hunters, pandas now face an onslaught from the country's fast-growing middle classes in search of new leisure destinations. To help tour buses, the winding narrow road up to Wolong is being widened and straightened (the boom of dynamite echoes up the gorge whose peaks are home to rarely seen wild pandas). Tourist numbers to Wolong are likely to rise from 60,000 to 180,000.
The Wolong reserve has taken a 20% share in a local state-controlled tourism company; which raises questions of whether the pandas' and the tourism industry's interests are perfectly aligned. Experts disagree. Zhang Hemin, Wolong's director, argues that pandas are not as afraid of human beings as is generally believed. They have even been known, he says, to cross roads and wander into urban areas (though few of Wolong's panda experts have seen one in the wild). Others say human noises and smells scare pandas, even at a distance. The Sichuan government says it is promoting “eco-tourism”, but Fan Zhiyong of WWF, a conservation group (and a big contributor to panda conservation in China), is sceptical. “I sometimes ask, what is eco-tourism? Nobody can give me good answers,” he says.
This article appeared in the Christmas Specials section of the print edition under the headline "Black and white and red all over"