Ping-Pong Diplomacy

ED: We’re talking about the history of American athletics on the world stage, and we’re going to turn now to another unexpected moment from that history. Teams from around the world had gathered in Nagoya. Japan for the 1971 World Table Tennis Finals. Table tennis, or ping-pong often evokes thoughts of basement rec rooms for Americans. But the sport was a big deal in Japan and China.

Nevertheless, these championships were an unlikely setting for a major diplomatic breakthrough between two of the Cold War’s biggest enemies. As Bruce Wallace reports, however, that’s exactly what happened.

BRUCE WALLACE: If you’ve heard anything about the events in April of 1971 that became known as Ping-pong Diplomacy, you’ve probably heard about this. Matches were winding down for the day, and a US player stumbled onto the Chinese team’s bus thinking it was going back to his hotel. There were a few tense moments and then the American strikes up a conversation.

His Chinese counterpart, the country’s best player, hands him a gift, a silkscreen with an image of the Kuang Shan Mountains.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: It’s this wonderful moment where these two athletes, one from communist China, and an American hippie from California, had this accidental meeting in the back of a bus, create this friendship, but that’s just not the true version of the story.

BRUCE WALLACE: This is Nicholas Griffin, author of a book called Ping-Pong Diplomacy.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: For the Chinese, this was a really methodical approach. The only person who didn’t know what was going on was Glenn Cowan, the American hippie.

BRUCE WALLACE: Beijing had stage-managed the event. Mao had been building China’s ping-pong team into a powerhouse. It became the vanguard of his soft power approach to improving the country’s image abroad.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: This was a very deliberate policy through the 1960s. So they would send the team out to countries they were interested in establishing foreign relations with, even before they had foreign relations. You could call them sporting ambassadors.

BRUCE WALLACE: On the surface, relations between China and the US in 1971 were as bad as they’d ever been since Mao came to power in 1949. But Nixon and Mao had both secretly started seeing the other as a way out.

China with a US ally could cool down a growing Soviet threat and China might give the US leverage in their stalled peace talks with the North Vietnamese. Of course, neither side could officially acknowledge this unless Mao and Chinese premier Zhou Enlai reasoned. They could first manufacture a very public, very friendly, and very benign exchange between the two countries, which brings us back to the bus in Japan.

Glenn Cowan and his Chinese counterpart stepped down from it and are surrounded by a scrum of journalists. One asked Cowan if his team would be interested in visiting China. The long hair says sure, and two days later, they were headed to Beijing for some friendly matches.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: The Americans had no idea what was about to happen to them. One day, they’re in America, then there in Japan for a few days for the tournament. And 48 hours later, they’re the first American delegation to enter communist China. I mean these guys know nothing about China, and there’s no reason they should.

FEMALE SPEAKER: We flew to Hong Kong, we took the train to the border, and we walked across the border before we got on another train.

BRUCE WALLACE: Judy [? Bohinski ?] was, at 15, the youngest of the US players.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Walking across the border was like being in a movie. There was this really dramatic, patriotic music playing. And it just looked different and everything smelled different. And it was just like something that I’d never seen before.

BRUCE WALLACE: The arena in Beijing was packed for their exhibition games with the Chinese. But the crowd was different than the ones [? Bohinski ?] was used to in the US.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Here, it’s just people are very individual. They scream, they yell, they clap at all different times. In China, at that time in 1971, It seemed like everything was in unison. Everybody clapped at the same time or stopped at the same time.

BRUCE WALLACE: [? Bohinski ?] won three of her four matches and says it was totally obvious that her opponent was letting her win. The team was also whisked around the country– walking on the Great Wall and petting water Buffalo at a commune. [? Bohinski ?] says everywhere she went, she saw pictures of Mao and signs with different political slogans.

FEMALE SPEAKER: There were some that were in English. And I remember one well, because I have a picture of myself standing in front of the sign. And it said, “People of the world, unite and defeat the US aggressors and all their running dogs.”

And when we asked, why did you have the sign, and they would say, oh, well, they make a distinction between our government and our people.

BRUCE WALLACE: What [? Bohinski ?] and her teammates didn’t see as they toured the country was how this trip was playing back home.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: The coverage it gets is extraordinary. On the first day that the American team is in China, there’s not one, two, three, four, there five articles in The New York Times and none of them are in the sports section. They’re carried on the front pages of every newspaper in the world. So the American team are catapulted to fame, but they’re the only ones who don’t know what’s happening. Because, of course, they can’t read any of this press because they’re in Communist China.

FEMALE SPEAKER: As soon as we left China, we went out the same way we came in. We took a train to the border, walked across the border, got onto another train. And on this train, it was jam-packed full of reporters. And every square inch of that train was full. And we were getting elbows in the face and cameras just right up in our face.

BRUCE WALLACE: And this global press attention is exactly what Mao and Nixon needed.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: The wonderful thing about this and why it worked so incredibly well is that it seemed utterly benign to Western press. I mean, it was ping-pong, how preposterous. But what it does, is it changes the way Americans think about the Chinese rapidly.

BRUCE WALLACE: News of happy American kids hanging out with their Chinese counterparts had been beamed around the world. A photo of Judy [? Bohinski ?] and Zhou Enlai shaking hands had been on the cover of newspapers everywhere. Maybe the Chinese weren’t so scary after all.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: So what it does, is it creates this enormous amount of maneuvering room for the politicians to carry out their desires. Because, ultimately, Mao and Nixon had been thinking along very similar lines for just over a year until that point. What it needed was a catalyst, and ping-pong was that catalyst.

BRUCE WALLACE: Three months later, Henry Kissinger flies to China for a secret meeting with Zhou Enlai. In early 1972, Nixon makes his trip to China, all because they decided to give ping-pong a chance.

BRIAN: That piece was reported by contributor Bruce Wallace. We also heard from US ping-pong player Judy [? Bohinski ?] and from writer Nicholas Griffin. He’s the author of Ping-Pong Diplomacy: the Secret History behind the Game that Changed the World.