Congresswoman's crusade to get pandas in New York may succeed

New Yorkers like to think they live at the centre of the world. Whatever you are looking for, be it artefacts excavated from ancient Egyptian tombs or ingredients for Ethiopian food, you can probably find it in the Big Apple.

For New York Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, however, the city cannot rest on its laurels just yet; there remains an intolerable hole in its collection: a pair of giant pandas.

"How can you not love a panda," asks Maloney. "They are black, they are white and they are Asian. They represent the diversity of the city."

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Maloney says her love of the bears began after her two daughters developed an obsession when they were young. Now, though, her youngest has given up a childhood dream of becoming a panda preservation scientist and enrolled in business school instead.

For years, Maloney has been trying to persuade China to offer New York a pair of its national treasures, her focus having sharpened last summer, when she travelled to Sichuan province and saw real pandas for the first time. During that trip, she met Li Xiaolin, president of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, to make her request in person. Later, she approached Chinese Vice-Premier Liu Yandong over the matter.

That seemed to get the ball rolling. In May, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo sent a letter to Li to show his support for the panda plan. In October, Chinese Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai sent a letter to Maloney telling her Beijing no longer offered pandas to foreign countries as gifts but would consider loaning a pair for cooperative research, and China was willing to establish the first such research project in New York.