Thus have spawned endless thinkpieces arguing that the panda is an emblem of misplaced priorities, of our tendency to favor cuddly and charismatic species over those in greater need. In a world of vanishing wildlife, “Let the panda die” has become the ultimate Slate pitch.

These pieces all miss a crucial point: saving the panda isn’t really about saving the panda. It’s more about saving the panda’s world.

Benoit Tessier / Reuters

It’s a common myth that the panda is doomed because it’s an evolutionary dead-end—a lazy bear that eats a deficient diet of shoots and leaves, and sucks at sex. None of this is true. They are well-adapted for eating a plentiful source of food—bamboo—and in the wild, they have no problems with mating. Give them space and safety, and they’ll bounce back.

That’s exactly what China has done. Its mountainous bamboo forests were felled and fragmented to fuel the country’s rapid economic growth. In response, the government began creating nature reserves, where pandas were protected and poaching was prohibited. The first such reserve was established in 1958 but the total number has grown by half in just the last two decades. There are now 67 of them, covering 3.4 million hectares of land and protecting two-thirds of the panda population.

The government also trained reserve managers and anti-poaching patrols. It banned logging and launched a “Grain-to-Green program” to encourage farmers to plant trees. As a result, the forests rebounded. Between 2000 and 2010, they grew by around 3 million hectares per year, expanding the panda’s potential habitat by around 12 percent. And the bears have made use of these new opportunities.

Since 1974, the Chinese government has run an extensive survey of panda numbers once a decade. The latest census, carried out between 2011 and 2014, involved more than 2,000 volunteers who trekked over 4 million hectares, spotting pandas, scooping dung, and collecting bamboo fragments. Their efforts led to a final estimate of 2,060 wild pandas, half of which are mature adults.

That sounds low, but when compared to previous surveys, it suggests that the population is no longer declining. If anything, “it is widely believed that the population has stabilized and has begun to increase in many parts of the range,” says the IUCN. Hence the reclassification from endangered to vulnerable. Captive breeding programs and celebrity zoo animals didn’t save the panda; China’s policies did (although arguably the former helped the latter, given that foreign zoos with pandas essentially rent the animals from the Chinese government at $1 million a year.)

A rising tide raises all boats, and so actions that have saved the panda’s home have also benefited its neighbors. A recent study by Binbin Li and Stuart Pimm showed that panda reserves also overlap with the ranges for 96 species of mammal, bird, and amphibian that are found nowhere else in the world. From the Ningshan alpine toad to the Gansu hamster, a large menagerie of endemic animals shelters under the umbrella of the giant panda.