The morning of Feb. 28, 2013, was foggy and then windy in Beijing, where Zhuang Zedong, 45, kept running between the hospital entrance and the morgue to pick up guests who came to attend the farewell ceremony.
It was his father, Zhuang Zedong, aged 73, who had won three consecutive men’s singles titles at the World Table Tennis Championships, who received the farewell. Many celebrities came: Pu Cunxin, Chen Luyu, Chen Che …… but only people from the sports system were missing, even Zhuang Zedong’s teammates and students …… Some people privately said they received a notice: they were not allowed to attend Zhuang Zedong’s funeral.
No one is willing to publicly confirm whether this notice is true or not, but they are all absent from the farewell party because of “various reasons”, including those who have booked their tickets.
“His Life, this life ‘brilliant and magnificent’, certainly live up to these four words.” Zhuang Biao told reporters.
Behind the “first signal”
Zhuang Biao was originally called “Zhuang Biao”, a name given by his father. When he was 3 years old, Lin Biao had an accident and many names with “Biao” in them changed their names, and he was no exception.
By the Time he was born, his father, Zhuang Zedong, was already a highly regarded champion, and in the 1960s, “New China” had few international sporting achievements and few international sports organizations recognized the country – except for table tennis and the International Ping Pong Federation. Zhuang Zedong’s “triple crown” was elevated to the same level as national self-confidence.
In a national tournament at that time, Liang Goliang, a young athlete from Guangxi, was beaten 3:0 by Zhuang Zedong, and his first reaction was “very happy and honored to play against the world champion”. Another teenager from Guangxi, Wang Shi, who later became chairman of the board of Vanke Group, also idolized Zhuang Zedong. After Zhuang’s death, he tweeted, using words like “national pride”.
Such high praise came not only from the championship, but also from Zhuang’s most famous keyword in his life, “ping pong diplomacy. At the 31st World Table Tennis Championship held in Nagoya, Japan in 1971, Zhuang dared to contact and interact with American athletes, thus breaking more than 20 years of Sino-American bad blood and starting the political journey of contact and eventual diplomatic relations between the two powers.
On the morning of April 4, 1971, Cohen, a 19-year-old college student and a player on the U.S. table tennis team participating in the World Series, boarded the wrong bus that took the Chinese team from their place of residence to the training venue, and upon discovery had to stand awkwardly in front of the bus. Zhuang Zedong, sitting on the right side of the first row, took the initiative to shake hands with Cohen and welcomed him through an interpreter, and finally gave him a Hangzhou brocade embroidered with the scenery of Mount Huangshan.
The brocade, which is actually in every Chinese table tennis team’s bag, was specially prepared to be given to foreign athletes.
The coach, Zhuang Jiafu, who was sitting next to Zhuang Zedong, did not move, and was a little nervous, but not too scared, he recalled: “I saw it in the newspaper at the time, how many times the Chinese and American ambassadors met in Poland. I knew that nothing big could happen. The President has said that we have to distinguish the American people from the American government ……”
Sitting behind Zhuang Zedong, was Liang Goliang, who was beaten 3:0 by him. Off the bus, Cohen dragged him to “practice” a little. Liang Goliang asked the team leader, okay? The team leader nodded, and the two of them practiced in front of a table. “To be honest, he’s actually a third or fourth-rate player.”
Liang Goliang was not harsh in this assessment. At the 31st World Championship, Cohen did not win any medals, and has not represented the U.S. team in international competitions since. But that didn’t matter anymore. The next day, he bought a sweatshirt in return to Zhuang, and a large photo of the two shaking hands appeared in various media around the world. Then came the details that would go down in history: the U.S. table tennis team asked to visit China, and M granted permission at 11:00 p.m. late at night; the following year, the Chinese table tennis delegation returned to the U.S., and U.S. President Richard Nixon visited China ……
“To be precise it should be like this: both China and the United States wanted to get closer to each other, they just hadn’t found the opportunity for a while. He (Zhuang Zedong) bravely sent the first signal.” Wan Bo’ao, president of the Chinese Biographical Literature Association and former director of the Human Resources Development Center of the State General Administration of Sports, who has been friends with Zhuang for decades, said.
In retrospect, sending the “first signal” carried a great risk. In those days, Chinese diplomats pretended not to see the U.S. ambassador at the United Nations, and an American relative in the Family was likely to be designated as a spy.
When the U.S. table tennis team requested a visit to China, neither the sports system nor the diplomatic system dared to make a decision, and they kept asking Zhou Enlai for permission. M woke up late at night and told his staff: “Hurry up, invite!
When Zhuang Biao was a little older, he learned that the authorities had initially qualified his father’s behavior as a “diplomatic incident”. The embassy in Japan had already decided to send him Home overnight and hold him accountable, but they didn’t dare to do so because of the impact. “If he’s not a minister of merit, he’ll be a prisoner when he returns. He must have gone to prison.” Looking back, if it wasn’t for this “handshake”, my father would probably only be written into the history of sports.
“Champion, grab it for me!”
Zhuang was then hand-picked by Zhou Enlai to head the Chinese table tennis delegation to the U.S. and successfully completed his visit. Not long after his return to China, he was promoted to deputy director of the National Sports Commission. Zhuang Zedong was only three years old at the time. By the time he could remember a little, it was common to see his father arguing with his mother, aunt and uncle.
His mother, pianist Bao Hui buckwheat, now 73, arrived before the farewell ceremony began. She was assisted by Zhuang Biao, who walked into the hall as hundreds of guests watched. A little later, she left early with the help of a relative. It’s been 28 years since their divorce.
“My mother’s side of the family has a clearer judgment of politics: the whole person, you follow him?” Zhuang Soaring recalls. The Qing dynasty’s father became a favorite of Jiang Qing and became involved in political struggles; his mother was adamantly opposed but to no avail. Gossip about my father began to circulate throughout the country: “Heaven is not afraid, earth is not afraid, but Jiang Qing calls in the middle of the night.”
Regarding the relationship between Zhuang Zedong and Jiang Qing, Guo Xiaolin, a former reporter for the People’s Daily and Guo Xiaochuan’s daughter, mentioned in the “afterword” of the article “Guo Xiaochuan, Wang Meng and Zhuang Zedong” that
When I interviewed Zhuang Zedong on March 10, 2008, …… he mentioned in passing his impression of Jiang Qing: “Jiang Qing is actually quite majestic, she is like an elder to us.” Some people asked Zhuang Zedong about the rumors with Jiang Qing to his face. Zhuang flatly denied it, saying only that once he caught a sparrow in Jiang Qing’s office and was spanked by her, saying, “Champ, catch it for me!”
In December 1974, at the age of 34, Zhuang Zedong became the director of the National Sports Commission and quickly put forward slogans such as “Don’t be professional, serve the workers, peasants and soldiers”. Although he was always grateful to Zhou Enlai, he could not change the fact that people saw him as one of the “Gang of Four”. Liang Goliang saw on TV: at Zhou Enlai’s funeral, Zhuang Zedong and Jiang Qing were standing side by side, “he was laughing there”.
“You say my father has made people whole, do you think so? That era under certainly rectified, but certainly not on a large scale, not bloody.” Zhuang Soaring recalls.
When Bao Hui buckwheat gave birth to her second child in the hospital, Zhuang Zedong “like a big leader”, pacing, with an entourage into the ward to take a look and went out, “said to receive foreign guests. Zhuang Biao still remembers that after the Tangshan earthquake, his mother pulled two children and three elderly people in their seventies and built an earthquake shelter under a traffic light on Wangfujing Street, where they lived for more than two months. In the memory of Zhuang soaring, his father did not go to see a single glance.
Zhuang Biao studied piano with his mother since he was a child, then joined the band ADO and became Cui Jian’s keyboard player. He had little interest in table tennis.
“At the end of the Cultural Revolution, Zhuang Zedong fell from grace and was imprisoned and censored for four years. During the four years, Bao Hui buckwheat wrote numerous complaints for him. The results finally came down: “serious political mistakes were made, but they were handled according to the internal contradictions of the people”, and he was expelled from the Party and dismissed from public office.
After the dust settled, the two divorced. Most reports say that Bao Huixiao initiated the divorce, while Zhuang Zedong, Zhuang Biao said, initiated the divorce.
When Bao decided to marry him, it was at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution when Zhuang Zedong was being beaten and fought every day.
For Zhuang Zedong, his father’s “residual shade” lasted until many years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, when he received a phone call from the Central Conservatory of Music in 1987 informing him that he had failed the exam, so he could take his file back. He took the file and suddenly wondered: what was in it? When he opened it, the street office had written a note: “The student’s father made serious political mistakes during the Cultural Revolution, and I hope your school will give it serious consideration when admitting him.”
“Must win”
The only intersection between Zhuang Zedong and his father in sports was Go.
In 1998, the brother of Zhuang’s second wife, Atsuko Sasaki, came from Japan to see his sister and brother-in-law. It was agreed that he would arrive at 7 p.m. and go out for dinner. Zhuang soared to his father’s house at 5 p.m., and his father suggested a game of go. “You always watched you play chess when you were a kid, and I don’t know what kind of game you actually played, my father said. Well, come on. My father’s chess style belongs to twist and kill in one piece before it’s set up.”
The first game Zhuang Biao played seriously and soon won. He noticed that his father did not look right. In the second game he won again.
In the third game, Atsuko’s brother had already arrived. It was the first time Zhuang Biao and he met, and it was time to go to dinner, but his father wouldn’t let him go: No, we haven’t finished playing yet! Shobogawa hurriedly lost a game to him. Father lectured him: You have to play well.
I said, “Let’s go eat. No, I’m still losing, let’s play again. I lost another game, and I didn’t leave – I didn’t win, I had to win.”
After the fifth game, my father won, and everyone finally went out to eat. Zhuang soaring a look at the table, more than nine o’clock.
“Have to win you, extreme good win, I just played one game with him, I will never play with him again.” After a while, Chuang Soi said, his father finally told him: You play better than me.
“My father, that man, never knew what it meant to be afraid in his life, and he was extremely good mentally. Just fit to be a good athlete.” Zhuang Biao also sometimes talks table tennis with his father. The father’s ball path never seeks to look good, as long as the result. “The ideal is to snap twice and (the opponent) goes to pick up the ball. Defeat under him, very suffocating.”
“Just results” was also the style of that generation of Chinese sports, when the 26th World Ping Pong Championship final in Beijing in 1961 saw Chinese players take the top four places in the men’s singles. Vice Premier He Long, who was in charge of sports, decided to let Zhuang Zedong win. Because he was from Beijing, “he could represent the capital, and in addition was young”. Xu Yinsheng and Li Furong from Shanghai were ordered to give the ball.
China then used the rules and let Li Furong give up the ball for two consecutive sessions, allowing Zhuang Zedong to become a triple winner and keep a copy of the St. Bride’s Cup, which represents the highest honor in the world of ping, in China. In his later years, Zhuang Zedong did not like to mention much about this experience, even with his own son.
In 2004, the “San Ying Cup” table tennis tournament, organized by the Chinese Ping Pong Association, was held in Zhongshan, Guangdong Province. Chen Shaoji, then chairman of the Guangdong Provincial Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), participated in the tournament, beating Xu Yinsheng and Xu Shaofa, another former national player, in succession. The third one was Zhuang Zedong’s turn.
“That man (Chen Shaoji) often finds world champions to practice against, and the ball plays very evil. I told him (Zhuang Zedong), you have to give the sports system to compete ah. Otherwise he should go back and brag: I beat three world champions!” As the executive vice president and secretary-general of the “Three Old Men” Association, Wan Bofu recalled that Zhuang Zedong gave an “ahhh” at that time. In that match, he finally defeated Chen Shaoji.
In his later years, Zhuang Zedong was as defiant as ever. He actively engaged in business, collaborated with others to establish several table tennis clubs, and served as honorary chairman of the Chuang Zedong International Cultural Cooperation Company, bringing his agent around the country to give speeches. His inscriptions and group photos have become commercial elements with a price tag. One of his favorite inscriptions is: “Love Ping will win”.
“He’s a man who can be said to be transparent.” Zhao Fangfang, general manager of the Shanxi Zhuang Zedong Table Tennis Club, exclaims: Zhuang Zedong and he have been working together for ten years and have never signed a commercial contract or asked how much profit is made, “We are a gentleman’s agreement and rely on mutual trust.”
On the other side: Zhuang Zedong also did not come to Shanxi once every two months to coach and observe members playing, as they had verbally agreed. “Strictly speaking, he is not fit for business either.”
This comment also came from Zhang Qihuai, a Beijing lawyer who provided legal services for Zhuang Zedong. In his later years, Zhuang Zedong was occasionally hired by pharmaceutical and health care companies to do advertisements, but he basically signed all the contracts. Zhang Qihuai reviewed these contracts and found that there were always three characteristics: little money, long hours, and trap clauses that could not be released. He took a lot of effort to help Zhuang Zedong to cancel one by one.
The cooperation between Zhuang Zedong and his agent Jiang Baijun broke down in 2008, and most of the “Zhuang Zedong Table Tennis Clubs” also closed down.
A meeting of the minds
At 9:30 a.m. on February 28, 2013, the farewell ceremony began. Zhuang stood beside his father’s body and shook hands with each guest. He stood second to the first, a short, chubby old woman wearing glasses, his stepmother Atsuko Sasaki. This Chinese-born Japanese woman, a fan of Zhuang’s table tennis, married him in 1987 at the height of his disappointment. She voluntarily renounced her Japanese citizenship and resigned from The Japanese company she worked for to become a housewife.
“Auntie Atsuko took very good care of my father.” Atsuko, who was a family member, was called an “iron man” by one of the hospitals during her father’s four years of cancer in his later years, said Shobay.
When they got married, Zhuang’s two years of experience as a high-ranking minister deterred the Marriage registry from taking on the multinational marriage. In the end, the highest level was alerted. Zhuang Zedong’s second autobiography is titled “Deng Xiaoping Approved My Marriage”. His first memoir, “Busting and Creating,” was not touched by the publisher because of the “double-opening” penalty. He wrote a letter to Wan Li, then director of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, asking for help, and Wan Li gave instructions that all Zhuang Zedong’s books would be allowed to be published in the future.
Zhuang Zedong’s short two-year political career brought him trouble that lasted for decades. During the Cultural Revolution, he became enemies with his teammates Xu Yinsheng and Li Fuyong, who were fighting for the glory of the country together. “After the Cultural Revolution, Xu and Li served as deputy director of the National Sports Commission and deputy director of the State General Administration of Sports, respectively.
“Because he (Zhuang Zedong) made mistakes during the Cultural Revolution, he was not invited to any of the events organized by the Chinese Ping Pong Association and the State General Administration of Sports.” Liang Youneng, who has been a coach of the Chinese table tennis team for three decades, revealed.
In 1996, a province hosted a table tennis tournament and invited Zhuang Zedong to present the championship trophy. When the final match came, he suddenly remembered Zhuang’s long-standing “Cultural Revolution” grudge against the sports system and was afraid: he was about to play in the National Games, what if it affected the relationship between the provincial and national sports commissions? I had to go and lie to him: “The power went out this afternoon, so I couldn’t play the final.” They temporarily bought a soft sleeper ticket back to Beijing and wanted to send him back to Beijing that night. Unexpectedly, there were too many people looking for Zhuang Zedong’s autograph in the afternoon, and Zhuang Zedong saw them out.
This situation was changed in 2002. Not willing to be lonely, Zhuang Zedong cooperated with a businessman to set up a table tennis club named after him. Zhuang Zedong asked him: “Dad, don’t you think we should invite our comrades from the war, Uncle Xu and Uncle Li, to the opening ceremony? Zhuang Zedong was silent for a long time.
A few months later, Zhuang Zedong, with the help of a friend from the China News Service, wrote a letter.
“Xu Yinsheng, Li Furong and other leaders of the China Ping Pong Association: On the occasion of the establishment of the Beijing Zhuang Zedong Table Tennis International Club, I sincerely invite and look forward to your presence …… In the past we were comrades in arms, and during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ because I made a In the past, we were comrades, but during the Cultural Revolution, I made a mistake that caused a gap and hurt our feelings. After so many years of hardship, I look back with deep regret. I hope to put an end to our gap in the last century, so that it is also a positive account of history.”
On December 20 of that year, Xu Yinsheng and Li Furong were both invited to the inauguration of the Zhuang Zedong Table Tennis Club, where the three shook hands. The media reported that they had “smiled at each other and put away their enmity.” “The only time I’ve been involved in that one is over the years. I went to see it and left, without saying hello to anyone.” Zhuang Biao said with a smile, “Other than that, I don’t participate in all his public activities.”
Standing in line and standing in the wrong line
“My father is a rather naive person politically speaking.” Zhuang Zetong said.
In an interview in his later years, Zhuang Zedong talked about standing in the wrong line during the Cultural Revolution. “(I think) the chairman’s wife was the most stable.” He then saw Jiang Qing as a backer who would never fall.
Xu Yinsheng, the lifetime honorary president of the International Ping Pong Federation, said on Weibo, “Zhuang, go well”; Li Furong, former deputy director of the State General Administration of Sports, visited Zhuang at his deathbed. However, they were still absent from his funeral ceremony, as were the majority of sports figures.
After the farewell ceremony, Zhuang escorted his father’s body to the cremation of his body at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery. The location was “arranged by the organization,” for which he was grateful. The other thing he wants to thank is that although his father died as a table tennis coach at the Beijing Children’s Palace, he was still reimbursed for the hundreds of thousands of yuan of medication for cancer treatment by the Ministry of Finance and the General Administration of Sports.
“Two years as an official, decades of bad luck” is Liang Goliang’s assessment of Zhuang Zedong. He was a benefactor of Zhuang Zedong’s kindness.
Before he went to Japan to participate in the World Ping Championship in 1971, Zhou Enlai asked Zhuang Zedong who could go to the World Ping Championship. Zhuang Zedong recommended Liang Goliang, who was ten years younger than himself. Liang played five World Series in a row, and became the longest player of that generation.
In an interview, Liang Goliang repeatedly mentioned that in 1969, when his mother had cancer, Zhuang Zedong took him on a bicycle ride through half of Beijing to look for a Medicine. In the end, his mother lived until 2004. “It’s something I remember him for the rest of my life.” For decades, he expressed his gratitude to Zhuang Zedong in front of and behind people.
Liang Goliang did not attend Zhuang Zedong’s memorial service. “No notice was received from ……,” he said vaguely. Two other long-time friends of Zhuang Zedong in sports were also not present.
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