Ping-pong diplomacy 50th anniversary Cui Tiankai Chinese Communist Party official media blowing the warm wind between the United States and China U.S. scholars: the challenges are numerous and difficult to return to the old way

Ping-Pong diplomacy paved the way for Mao Zedong and Nixon to meet.

Xinhua’s official microblogging site wrote “Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai personally made the decision to promote Sino-US ‘ping pong diplomacy’, using a small silver ball as a medium to open the door of friendship between the Chinese and American people and start the process of ‘breaking the ice’ in Sino-US relations. ” CCTV published a photo of Chinese table tennis player Zhuang Zedong with U.S. representative Cohen. The Chinese Communist Party’s official media played a “warm breeze” between the United States and China.

In 1971, the U.S. table tennis team, originally participating in the 31st World Table Tennis Championship in Nagoya, Japan, was invited by the Chinese table tennis delegation to visit mainland China, which was the first visit between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China in 22 years since the Republic of China’s Chiang Kai-shek regime lost the mainland in 1949 and moved to Taiwan. “The relationship between the two countries was extended from a sporting to a diplomatic level. Then Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai met with delegations from the United States, Canada and Colombia at the Great Hall of the People, and athletes from both countries toured the Great Wall and visited Tsinghua University.

In July 1971, Kissinger, then U.S. national security advisor, made a secret visit to China to pave the way for Nixon’s 1972 visit to China to meet with then Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong. At the end of 1971, the People’s Republic of China replaced the Republic of China as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, which Chiang Kai-shek criticized as “the Chinese and the traitors are not two”.

NPR quotes Orville Schell, director of the Center for U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, a local think tank, as saying that the Democratic and Republican parties are now pressuring President Biden to curb the economic and military expansion of the Chinese Communist Party, but the challenges are too great to return to the old ways.