New York's Rich Are Obsessed With Importing Pandas

How importing cute Chinese guest workers on temporary visas became a cuddly “Kumbaya” dream for New York’s rich and powerful.

- Carl Swanson

“Children love pandas!” declared Representative Carolyn Maloney with the giddy conviction of a politician getting behind something incontrovertible.

Up on the 18th floor of the soon-to-be-gutted, now-owned-by-the Chinese monument to American Greatness the Waldorf Astoria, a crowd of 450 was deep in thrall to a strange panda fantasia—one that has drifted through the city’s power elite like a wishful-thinking, public-spirited psychedelic reverie over the past few months (intensified, in a way, by the anti-Establishment election).