From the New York Times (which I'm made at anyway lately, so here's a sneak-peek behind their stupid paywall. I'm not sure how accurate this really is - it's very hard to say for certain which individual dollars go to which programs - but it does seem like more transparency should be required for these programs. The money US zoos provide China is a lot for the zoos, but only a drop in the bucket for China. We've been told that the numbers of pandas in the wild are increasing, but again, how much of that is independently verified versus what we've been told by Beijing?
Paradoxically, I think if we as a society cared less about giant pandas than we do other species, that might break China's insistent grip on the species. Although I've recently learned that a French zoo is going to receive another highly-sought Chinese endemic - the golden snub-nosed monkey, much rarer than giant pandas in non-Chinese zoos - so maybe that's going to be the new hot-trend
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