Two giant pandas recently landed in Atlanta, a week after Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met in Washington.

The summit produced no immediate breakthrough on trade deals, Taiwan or AI, but it did produce something cuddly for the American public: a pair of giant pandas, Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, which are on a ten-year loan to Atlanta’s zoo. Both were born in 2020 at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, the showpiece of a decades-old conservation effort.

China treats the giant panda as a national treasure and retains ownership every one it lends abroad. Sending a pair is a mark of favour: the bears draw crowds and signal Beijing values the relationship. When relations cool, the loans often seem to lapse and the pandas return to China. This is panda diplomacy.

From gifts to rentals

Some trace the practice to the Tang dynasty, when Empress Wu Zetian is said to have sent a pair of bears, believed to be pandas, to Japan, between 624 and 725 AD. The better-documented history begins in 1941, when Chiang Kai-shek’s government sent a pair to New York’s Bronx zoo as thanks for American aid.

But it was Mao Zedong who turned the gesture into policy. In 1957 he sent a panda, also called Ping Ping, to the Soviet Union, and by 1982 China had given away 23 pandas to nine countries. The most famous pair, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, were sent to Washington to commemorate Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing. They drew more than 20,000 people to the Smithsonian national zoo on their first day and an estimated 1.1 million in their first year.

Under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, gifts became rentals in 1984, and pandas went on short, lucrative tours. The Los Angeles zoo paid US$100,000 (£75,500) a month for a pair during the 1984 Olympics.

Not everyone was charmed. Conservation groups such as The New York Zoological Society viewed the tours as money-making ventures. In 1988, when the Toledo zoo hosted a pair for 100 days it attracted protests. A judge barred the zoo from charging visitors extra to see them. In 1993 the US Fish and Wildlife Service stopped issuing new import permits. When it resumed in 1998, the new rules said a significant share of the money should protect wild pandas in China.

The result is today’s arrangement: long-term “research” loans, usually for ten years and up to US$1 million a year, with any cub born abroad remaining Chinese property. The rules changed, but the loans still follow Beijing’s interests. University of Oxford researchers found that loans after 2008 often coincided with trade deals. Malaysia received Xing Xing and Liang Liang in 2014 to mark 40 years of ties. And as relations with Washington soured, its pandas flew home in November 2023.

A conservation story

China set up its first panda reserves and banned hunting in the early 1960s. When a mass die-off of bamboo happened in 2005 and pandas starved, rescuers brought many into captivity. The Chengdu base opened in 1987 with six rescued wild pandas.

A national panda programme followed in 1993. Today there are 67 reserves and a Giant Panda National Park. Wild numbers rose from 1,114 in the mid-1980s to 1,864 by 2014, and in 2016 pandas were moved off the endangered list.

The Chengdu base, a tourist magnet, breeds pandas for display and diplomacy. Releasing them is the job of a separate state body, the China Conservation and Research Centre for the Giant Panda (CCRC). Its scientists say releases are replenishing fragile wild populations. they claim that this makes every zoo panda, including those lent abroad, a lifeline for wild ones. Some are sceptical about this claim.

Two decades of releases

The CCRC began moving pandas to the wild in 2003. Its first, Xiang Xiang, was found dead within a year. Of the dozen released since then, ten have survived, while more than 700 remain in captivity.

The only permanently released panda known to have had a cub, Luxin, was born wild.

Since 2017, previously captive females moved to the forest temporarily to mate with wild males, then returned to captivity, have produced 14 cubs, 12 of them surviving.

Bears for summits

Chinese scientists say the pandemic slowed its rewilding project, but its lack of success has drawn criticism from those who believe it should have had more emphasis and investment.

So far the attempts to replenish the wild panda population have not been as successful as many had hoped, and only small groups of giant pandas survive.

On the other hand China’s attempts to mix trade and conservation in zoos continues to create significant public relation successes. Each new announcement of new pandas heading to a foreign zoo attracts international attention and symbolises a renewed trading and foreign policy relationship between two nations. Something that Beijing will no doubt want to keep building on.

Chee Meng Tan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Who comes to mind when you think of someone emotionally intelligent? Someone who can read a room, defuse an argument, and who knows exactly what to say when a friend is struggling? For many people, that person is a woman. It’s such a widely held belief that popular psychology treats it as fact.

We decided to put that assumption to the test. Our new study, co-led by Dr Vera Hampel and co-authored with Leon Bach, reviewed nearly three decades of research, from 1995 to 2023, across 76 countries and more than 600,000 people. We wanted to answer a simple question: are women really more emotionally intelligent than men? The headline answer is yes, on average, women score higher.

But the more useful finding is the type of emotional intelligence women seem to excel at, and what it potentially costs the people who have it.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognise, understand and regulate emotions in yourself and in others. When we looked at each element of emotional intelligence, the female advantage turned out to be concentrated in the “others’ feelings” half of the equation.

This means recognising what someone else is feeling, understanding why and helping them manage it. A child has a meltdown, a colleague goes quiet after their idea gets dismissed in a meeting, a negotiation gets tense. Plenty of men are excellent at this too, and plenty of women aren’t; these are averages across hundreds of thousands of people, not predictions about any one person in the room.

Is that gap simply biology? We can’t rule biological or hormonal factors out entirely. But two patterns in our data point elsewhere. The female advantage is far smaller in children than in adults, and this gap has been narrowing across the three decades our data spans. That’s not what you’d expect from something fixed at birth. Although the data in our study cannot tell us the exact reasons these differences emerge, this pattern aligns with what you’d expect from something shaped through practice.

There’s a plausible source for that practice, too. Other research has found that parents use a wider vocabulary of emotion words with daughters than sons, and more often encourage girls to reflect on and articulate their feelings.

Boys, meanwhile, are more often steered toward managing emotions by suppressing them. Their sisters are encouraged to work through it with other people – exactly the kind of social and emotional skill our data shows women excel at.

Put simply, girls appear to get more practice reading and responding to other people’s emotions, starting early in life. Like any skill built through repetition, whether it’s learning a new language or picking up a new instrument, the more you practice, the more natural it becomes.

In fact a 2019 meta-analysis of 58 studies found that emotional intelligence can be trained. Gender didn’t seem to impact the effectiveness of learning how to be more emotionally intelligent.

That’s good news. If emotional intelligence is a trainable skill rather than a fixed trait, the gap isn’t destiny. That means men can benefit from these skills too, including in negotiations and at work.

But there’s a less comfortable implication, too. If women’s advantage here goes unrecognised as a skill and gets treated instead as “how women are”, it becomes very easy to take for granted. The colleague who’s good at defusing tension becomes the one who’s always expected to do so. A capability quietly turns into an obligation: unpaid and unrewarded.

This plays out in the workplace every day. Organisations benefit when employees manage team tension, support stressed colleagues and smooth over conflict. It is work that keeps a team functioning but almost never shows up in a performance review.

Two practical shifts need to follow our study findings. First, employers should name this work and reward it, in reviews and in promotion decisions. Second, invest in developing these abilities in all staff.

The same logic holds outside the office. In families and friendships, the person who remembers a friend is having a bad week and checks in without being asked, who notices when someone stops responding in the group chat, who always asks a family member about their day is doing real work too, and that work is often taken for granted precisely because it looks effortless.

None of this means women don’t have a real strength here. Our data shows a female advantage in emotion abilities. But a strength that’s assumed rather than trained, and expected rather than shared, isn’t something to reinforce. It’s untapped potential for men. The person everyone turns to when things get hard isn’t lucky or simply built that way: they’ve probably had more practice.

What we haven’t done is give everyone else that same opportunity or incentive to practice, or made clear emotional intelligence was a skill worth building in the first place.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.