I once heard a story about a young student who landed a doctorate to study giant pandas in the wild. After two years in the field, he still hadn’t seen one. Even if it’s only apocryphal, this tale captures an undeniable truth: giant pandas are incredibly elusive, which makes them incredibly hard to count. Yet this week, China’s State Council is expected to update its estimate of the number of pandas left in the wild. [UPDATE ON 22/1/2015: The announcement, supposedly due to be made at this briefing on 21/1/2015, has been postponed until further notice.]

Every decade or so since the 1970s, China has had a go at counting pandas. The first census, conducted between 1974 and 1977, alighted on a figure of 1050 to 1100 pandas. The second survey, carried out between 1985 and 1988 with input from WWF, came up with 1,120 plus or minus 240. The third, between 1998 and 2002, gave us 1596 pandas.

This is what 1600 pandas looks like. Over the last several years, WWF has been exhibiting 1600 papier-mâché pandas around the world, a nod to the 1596 pandas that China estimated during the third “National Survey” of giant pandas between 1998 and 2002. Here they were, last week in the Publika Shopping Mall in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Photograph: Munhoe Chan/Munhoe Chan/Demotix/Corbis

This sequence of figures – 1050, 1120, 1596 – suggests a trend. Unfortunately, the methodology changed from census to census making it meaningless to compare panda numbers from one survey to the next. In the 1970s, for instance, some 3000 people wandered across the panda’s range looking for animal signs. In the 1980s, the survey was performed by a small and stable team of 35. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the focus was on panda poo, using the length of the bamboo fragments contained therein to minimise pseudoreplication (e.g. counting two jobbies as two pandas when it was just one panda that had done a double dump). Even with this precaution, I have always through that 1596 was a curiously specific number for a census based on counting poo.

What about analysis of DNA in panda scats, I hear you ask? In 2006, a team of geneticists carried out a pilot study in the Wanglang Reserve in Sichuan Province, using DNA extracted from poop to assess the accuracy of the bite-size method. The DNA identified 66 different individuals, more than twice the number estimated using the traditional bite-size approach in the same reserve just five years earlier. “If similar disparities between traditional and molecular census estimates are found for the other key giant panda reserves…there may be as many as 2,500–3,000 giant pandas in the wild,” the researchers concluded.

Given all this, it’s very hard to know how many pandas are left in the wild or, indeed, whether their numbers are decreasing or increasing. Mercifully, the method used in the current census (I’m told it’s a combination of the bite-size approach and molecular analysis) should allow a direct comparison to the 1998-2002 census. That said, we still need to be careful about what China tells us about the status of its “national treasure”. After all, the panda is a ferocious political beast and some results will be more welcome to the Chinese administration than others.

To illustrate what I mean, here are three possible scenarios:

The survey shows there are fewer than 1596 pandas. This will be awkward for China’s elite, who want to claim that all their support for panda conservation has paid off (e.g. stiff penalties for the capture of wild pandas, a logging ban, the Grain for Green policy and the rapid increase in protected areas dedicated for panda conservation). The survey shows there are more than 1596 but fewer than 2500 pandas. Politically, this is the ideal result (see above and below). The survey shows there are more than 2500 pandas. This might sound like super news, yet it would result in the giant panda being downgraded from “Endangered” to “Vulnerable” on the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species. This would be a considerable loss to the political capital to be made from the giant panda. (Ailuropoda melanoleuca currently qualifies as “Endangered” because it meets the criterion C2a(i) in the 2001 Categories & Criteria (version 3.1) by virtue of a population is estimated at “fewer than 2500 mature individuals”).

For what it’s worth, I suspect there really are somewhere between 1500 and 2500 pandas left in the wild and if this is what China announces, I will be cautiously optimistic. But I will still find it difficult to suppress the following cynical thought: “They would say that, wouldn’t they?”

For more on the intertwined fortunes of the giant panda and modern China, see my book The Way of the Panda (Profile Books, 2010).