Digital landscapes of care: exploring digitally mediated care with Giant Panda Fubao

Digital technologies are reshaping human–wildlife relations, yet their spatial logics remain under-examined. This article proposes the digital landscape of care: a multi-species, multi-scalar assemblage where online practices, physical sites and non-human agency converge. Using Fubao–the first giant panda born in South Korea–as a case, it combines two years of digital ethnography, a large social-media corpus from Xiaohongshu, Weibo and Bilibili, and fieldwork at Wolong. Short videos, ‘daka’ pilgrimages, gift exchanges and transnational storytelling weave keepers, distant supporters and pandas into an affective network. This care network reflects human affective attachment and care practices toward Fubao, while also showcasing Fubao’s own agency of being a caregiver through her animal nature, interactions with keepers and digital mediations. Further, these mediated practices foster broader care relationships among humans united by their connection to animals. Although algorithmic ‘cuteness’ fuels grassroots stewardship and policy lobbying, the same platform logics that prioritize Fubao tend to overshadow lesser-known pandas. By examining the digital-reality tension intersecting multiple stakeholders in panda conservation, this study uncovers a bottom-up form of panda diplomacy and shows both the promise and the limits of digital affect for conservation, arguing that effective wildlife governance must pair algorithmic visibility with scientific guidance and participatory oversight to turn online empathy into tangible multi-species benefit.