Boogeyman Diplomacy

When I’m sat at my computer, on the shelf behind me, sometimes visible on my Zoom calls is a 50-year-old stuffed toy panda. The toy was the first gift I received and it’s a legacy of Richard Nixon’s panda diplomacy with China. Détente with China was symbolised with a gift of two giant pandas, they arrived in Washington in the same month that I was born in New Jersey.

Forty five years later, at a Parisian trilateral “International Cooperation on artificial intelligence” summit involving China, US and France, I watched as a US state department official made a calculated snub to their Chinese counterpart, declaring that the US would not co-operate with China on AI while it remained authoritarian and unpicking the fruits of a nearly half-century of diplomacy.

My son was given a brown stuffed bear when he was born, and by the time he was four years old we lived in a Victorian house in Sheffield, one big enough to easily accommodate my Italian in-laws on their visits to see him. The house had a large garage that had served as a billiard room, and behind that was a pile of garbage dumped by previous occupants as part of an unfinished remodelling. It contained glass, nails, lead painted boards