SAN FRANCISCO — After joining Chinese leader Xi Jinping for dinner last year, San Francisco Mayor London Breed accompanied him to the airport to bid him farewell. There, on the tarmac, she made her request: pandas.

Her city’s zoo was faltering. Tourism was suffering, and she faced a tough reelection campaign. A pair of pandas from China would be a political and public relations win.

What ensued were months of informal negotiations, with Breed — a politician with no foreign affairs or security experience — becoming a diplomat of sorts. She went to China, where she met the vice president and a deputy foreign minister, her calendars and emails show. She traveled with the editor of Sing Tao U.S., a pro-China newspaper that registers as a foreign agent in the United States, according to other records and photographs from the trip.

All of this was organized by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, a group that U.S. intelligence officials have concluded seeks to “malignly influence” local leaders. Unlike traveling Washington politicians, Breed received no CIA briefing about what counterintelligence threats she might face in China and how officials there might try to manipulate her.

If Breed wanted pandas, China had an interest in the meeting, too — as a way to cultivate a relationship with the mayor of one of America’s most technologically important cities. There is no evidence of any quid pro quo or wrongdoing, but intelligence officials say China is increasingly looking to wield influence in local governments as its sway in Washington diminishes.

One lever it has, documents and interviews show, is pandas.

Chinese officials have sought to use pandas to cultivate relationships, shape policy on Taiwan and soften China’s image abroad, a major goal of Xi. Panda exchanges provide Chinese leaders rare, high-profile opportunities to rebrand their country.

This has long been the case. During panda negotiations with Omaha and with Oakland in the mid-2000s, Chinese diplomats tried to scuttle a Nebraskan trade deal with Taiwan and to persuade a California member of Congress to stop criticizing Beijing, U.S. negotiators said. When those efforts failed, China denied pandas to both cities, they said.

But intelligence officials say China’s outreach is on the rise locally, where officials often do not have the training or intelligence briefings needed to deflect it.

In September, federal prosecutors charged a former aide to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul with taking payoffs for securing Chinese influence in Albany. Also this year, a former aide to New York City Mayor Eric Adams came under scrutiny after collaborating with groups linked to China’s government.

Local officials in the U.S. and Europe are also struggling to make sense of a network of unofficial Chinese police outposts that have popped up unexpectedly.

As relations between Beijing and Washington have cooled and high-level delegations have slowed, diplomacy at the local level has taken on increased significance.

“Every mayor wants to have the publicity of getting pandas,” said David Towne, former panda negotiator for American zoos. “Pandas become the bait.”

Pandas are the face of wildlife conservation. Zoos pay about $1 million a year to rent them from China and breed them in captivity, in hopes that pandas will someday be released into the wild. China is supposed to use the money to protect the wild species.

But a New York Times investigation this year revealed that after three decades, China has actually captured more pandas than it has released. Aggressive artificial breeding has injured and even killed pandas. China has steered millions of dollars toward building infrastructure, such as apartments and roads, as U.S. zoo administrators and regulators looked the other way.

Zoos have an incentive to keep the program running. Pandas bring crowds and merchandise sales. China, too, has a stake in the exchanges.

“Pandas are an interesting piece of the propaganda and influence-seeking puzzle because they’re seemingly innocuous and fuzzy and huggable,” said Orville Schell, who directs the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York.

As Lee Simmons, former director of the Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium in Omaha, put it: “Almost every Chinese ambassador was a panda salesman.”

The Chinese Embassy in Washington said pandas had “promoted people-to-people exchanges between China and the U.S. and enhanced the friendship between the two peoples.” It criticized anyone who “maliciously associated and unreasonably slandered China-U.S. cooperation on giant panda conservation without factual evidence.”

Breed’s office declined to say whether the mayor had concerns about her trip’s organizers or about the newspaper that is registered as a foreign agent.

“This was a trip designed to boost tourism, which ultimately would benefit San Francisco’s economy,” her office said in a statement.

Breed announced this spring that two pandas will arrive in San Francisco next year.

The Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries portrays itself as nongovernmental. But it is an arm of the Communist Party, charged with overseeing outreach to foreign local governments.

In 2022, the U.S. director of national intelligence warned statehouses and city halls that China had “stepped up its efforts to cultivate U.S. state and local leaders in a strategy some have described as ‘using the local to surround the central.’ ” Intelligence officials cited the friendship group as part of that effort.

California is home to two Chinese consulates and many people of Chinese descent. The state’s long-standing ties with Beijing, a relationship sometimes called “Chinafornia,” have yielded positive changes, such as cooperation on climate change.

But it has also exposed state and local governments to security risks, experts say.

Before congressional delegations go to China, officials typically receive CIA briefings that discuss how Beijing might try to exploit visits, said Dennis Wilder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University and former CIA official focused on East Asia. Travelers are also warned about cybersecurity risks.

But, Wilder noted, “at the local level, there’s no mechanism for this.”

In its statement, Breed’s office said she had received a briefing from the State Department. However, Wilder said those are less thorough than CIA intelligence briefings.