Visitors will descend on Washington’s National Zoo on Friday to witness the cheery unveiling of two pandas on loan from China. Fans can pose for selfies or livestream on social media under the hashtag #DCPandas.
But in China, the government has sent a chilling message to panda fans to watch what they say online. Some online influencers have been arrested or questioned over what the authorities called “rumors” and “radical fan culture.”
The police have targeted people who have advocated for animal welfare or criticized overseas exchanges like the one that brought pandas to Washington. But state media has also published warnings about broader panda fandom. The moves come amid Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s crackdown on internet fan culture.
China has millions of panda fans, many of whom have taken up the cause of animal welfare in a country where aggressive breeding tactics have injured bears and led to cubs being prematurely separated from their mothers. For years, the authorities tolerated their online activism and criticism, which targeted both Chinese and foreign zoos.
No more. Last month, the police in Sichuan Province said they had arrested 12 people for smearing panda experts, inciting violence and spreading false information about pandas, including two that used to live at the National Zoo.
The authorities have accused panda influencers of harassing staff at Chinese breeding centers and growing rich from livestream donations. The police claim to have uncovered panda-focused “radical animal protection gangs” in three provinces, according to state media.
In a bid to rein in internet culture, Mr. Xi has waged a war on online fandom, comparing enthusiast groups to “evil cults.” The authorities have detained sports fans for smearing Chinese athletes, apprehended people who swarmed airports to greet celebrities, and suspended K-pop fan accounts.
A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not answer questions sent Wednesday morning.
The crackdown shows how fragile discourse is in China, even when the subject is pandas.
“These civilian ‘patriots’ were sometimes encouraged or tolerated by the government,” said Xiao Qiang, a researcher on internet freedom at the University of California, Berkeley. “But when official narratives have new needs,” he added, “panda fans can also be punished and arrested.”
Online influencers maintain playful social media pages, where users connect around their favorite animals. These communities exploded during the pandemic, as people stuck at home turned to reels of the animals munching on bamboo. One panda, He Hua, has more than 880,000 followers on the platform Weibo. A panda renowned for mischievous escape attempts, Meng Lan, has about 380,000.
Panda enthusiasts even secured policy changes. Their activism helped prompt the national forestry bureau to improve standards for panda enclosures and ban people from paying to hug pandas.
When the Beijing Zoo bolted metal plates onto the windows of Meng Lan’s enclosure last year, to prevent escape, activists flooded government hotlines and social media with complaints. The zoo removed the plates and announced that it would renovate the space.
It helped that advocacy was often tinged with nationalism, like campaigning for the return of a scrappy panda from Memphis Zoo in 2023.
The National Zoo has been a frequent target. The zoo’s application to import the pandass Bao Li and Qing Bao elicited nearly 38,000 comments to the American government, some of them written partly in Chinese. Many commenters mentioned the zoo’s history of using invasive artificial breeding techniques.
“Pandas are a symbol for China,” said Mr. Xiao. The activism is “a unique combination of propaganda and protection of a specific species” that can help “promote a political narrative,” he said.
But the government’s careful dance with panda fans is over. The arrests last month followed the detention in June of four people who had trailed a panda expert at a breeding center in western China, shouting that he was a traitor for working with overseas zoos.
In December, state news agency Xinhua warned fans not to “let irrational misplaced love damage the panda protection field,” calling on them to “create a good environment for the development of giant panda protection research on the basis of science, rationality, and peace.”
The authorities in Sichuan accused a surprising demographic group, the middle-aged, of spending too much time online.
The police said that one woman spread “more than 60 rumors and defamatory videos involving giant pandas since August 2023.” They accused a couple of spreading misinformation on their livestreams for money. The authorities did not release the people’s full names.
While a few panda fans have resorted to extreme measures, most others have reasonable requests, said Sarah Cheng, a Chinese volunteer in Singapore with the group Panda Voices, which has organized international campaigns for panda welfare.
“They just want the pandas to live better,” she said. “They want them to have bamboo shoots and proper bamboo to eat.” But many of their concerns, she said, “have largely gone unaddressed or dismissed.”
