The Chinese love panda bears. Well, who doesn’t? The adorable little (well, actually, they’re big) black and white creatures. Wouldn’t you like to hug one right now?

But the Chinese may have the edge on the rest of the world, in the realm of Panda Love, because pandas come from China.

So they have a right to be particularly panda-crazed. And they indulge that right.

Anyway, this makes a difference on my cable-TV provider. The NOW network. Which is anything but generous in its basic channel package. For instance, I get exactly one English-language all-news station — Al Jazeera,  the Qatar-based network that tends to be anti-American, pro-Arab anything, seriously anti-Israel and what a lot of Americans would consider soft on terror. (It also basically gives away its programming to anyone who will take it, which I imagine is why NOW shows it to me.)

Al Jazeera makes for an interesting source of news, to be sure. (An aside: After Barack Obama’s inaugural speech, the Al Jazeera talking heads trashed the speech on a variety of levels but were nearly apoplectic that he didn’t mention the Middle East even once! One American on the panel tried to suggest that the speech was meant mostly for an American audience, but the others ultimately were left to decide if Obama were just another U.S. president in Israel’s pocket, or whether he lacked the “moral courage” to speak up about the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza.)

But I digress. Back to pandas. And the Chinese craze for them.

They love them so much that, here in Hong Kong, on my ultra-limited cable package is … yes, The Panda Channel.

What it entails is almost painfully primitive:

As many as four cameras aimed at the four pandas in enclosures at Ocean Park, Hong Kong’s answer to Sea World, located on the other side of the Hong Kong Island mountains, in Aberdeen.

And that’s it. You just sit and watch the pandas.

No narration. No explanations. No information.

Just … the pandas. In their cages. Moving and eating. Or sleeping and doing nothing. A lot of sleeping and doing nothing. And then maybe a burst of activity — some thoughtful scratching.

The pandas are named Ying Ying, Le Le, Jia Jia and An An (I kid kid you not not).

If you watch long enough or often enough, you notice that sometimes The Panda Channel (or TPC, as we know it here) focuses on one panda for hours at a time. Perhaps the others are tired of being watched? Or are off doing a public appearance?

The height of panda activity appears to be when one of them eats. Bamboo shoots. Of course. That is genuine excitement, watching them stuff the greens into their mouths. Well, it seems like a pulse-pounding event if, in the previous hour, you’ve had a screen split into four parts showing four different pandas sound asleep on some rocks.

The one “refinement” to TPC is some background music that is added to the video. Traditional Chinese music. So it has a bit of a sound track.

And at the bottom of the screen, in case your panda Jones is not addressed by your at-home panda viewing, a note reminds viewers that “If you want to watch The Panda Channel via PCCW while you’re on the go …” and includes a phone number of the local phone provider (PCCW) that can hook you up with pandas on your phone.

Yep. This is Hong Kong.

Anyway, I can’t get CNN on cable. Or the BBC. I can’t see the History Channel or the Biography Channel or any of the movie channels. Not without paying extra. But I get a bunch of Euro sports, one station that shows reruns of old American TV, the guys ranting over at Al Jazeera — and The Panda Channel.

Which is all pandas, all the time. Or way, way more than I need to see of Ying Ying and his/her black-and-white pals.