This April marks the 50th anniversary of U.S.-China “ping pong diplomacy.
Fifty years ago, U.S. athletes set foot on Chinese soil in a fiery friendly ping pong match that thawed relations between the United States and China.
Fifty years later, the U.S.-China relationship has been exacerbated by calls for a domestic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics.
What has changed over time is the U.S.-China relationship; what remains the same is the entanglement between sports and politics.
Serendipity 50 years ago
Fifty years ago, the 31st World Series was held in Nagoya, Japan. On April 4 of that year, Glenn Cowen, a 19-year-old American table tennis player, missed his shuttle bus to the stadium and boarded the Chinese team’s bus. But the bus was quiet, and no one dared to talk to the American with USA on his jersey.
“Any Chinese person who comes into contact with a foreigner is considered a traitor, a traitor, a spy,” the now-deceased Chinese table tennis legend Zhuang Zedong recalled in a 2008 interview with Reuters about what it was like on the bus.
But after a few minutes of silence, Zhuang Zedong decided to go up and say hello. He pulled out a piece of Hangzhou brocade from his bag and gave it to Cohen, telling him through an interpreter, “Although the U.S. government is not friendly to China, the American people are all good friends of the Chinese people. I send you this silk scarf to witness the friendship of the Chinese people to the American people.”
After the Chinese team bus arrived at the stadium, the moment the two men shook hands with smiles on their faces was captured by Japanese reporters waiting there; the next day, the photo made the front page of major Japanese media and was immediately reprinted by the Associated Press and other world media.
According to many media reports, the photo also made it to the Reference Materials, which is dedicated to China’s top brass, and Mao Zedong, upon learning the news, said, “This Zhuang Zedong, not only is he a good ball player, he can also run diplomacy.”
Immediately before the closing of the World Series, the U.S. table tennis team suddenly received an invitation from the Chinese team to visit China.
On April 10, a plane carrying nine U.S. table tennis players, four American journalists and two accompanying family members landed in British Hong Kong. Accompanied by the loud music of “East is Red,” the 15 Americans crossed the bridge on foot and entered Chinese territory from Hong Kong.
“Eight days of red carpet visits, red carpet treatment,” said Judy B. Kerry, a member of the National Committee on United States China Relations, in a webinar Wednesday (April 28) marking the 50th anniversary of ping pong diplomacy. Judy Hoarfrost recalled during a webinar held Wednesday (April 28) by the National Committee on United States-China Relations to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Ping-Pong diplomacy. At 15 years old, she was the youngest athlete on the U.S. delegation, and her decision to visit China had to be approved by her parents. She visited famous sites such as the Great Wall and the Forbidden City with the team, attended banquet after banquet, and was entertained by Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, as they watched the ballet “The Red Queen. The American players played friendly matches against Chinese table tennis players in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
Holfrost said she won three of the four games played, despite the fact that the Chinese table tennis players were far superior to the American players at the time.
“It was called ‘friendship first, competition second’ at the time,” she said.
Pete Millwood, an Oxford University historian who is writing a book on the history of U.S.-China diplomacy in the 1970s, told VOA that it was Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai himself who ordered Chinese table tennis players to follow the “friendship first, competition second” principle.
For Holfrost, her most memorable memory was shaking hands with Zhou Enlai at the Great Hall of the People. The Associated Press camera captured the moment, and Holfrost learned upon her return that her handshake with Zhou Enlai had already appeared in the American media.
Fifty years ago, on April 14, Zhou Enlai, who met with the U.S. table tennis delegation at the Great Hall of the People, told Holfrost, Kane and a group of other American athletes, “You have opened a new chapter in the relationship between the people of China and the United States. I am confident that this new beginning in our friendship will be supported by the majority of the people of our two countries.”
Shortly after that meeting, President Nixon then announced the lifting of a series of travel and trade bans against China.
In July of the same year, President Nixon’s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger made a secret visit to China.
In February of the following year, President Nixon became the first U.S. President to visit China since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The U.S. and China signed a joint diplomatic communiqué, the Shanghai Communiqué, in Shanghai, which began the normalization of U.S.-China relations and became an important prelude to the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1979.
Less than two months after President Nixon concluded his visit to China, he received an invited Chinese table tennis team in the Rose Garden of the White House. The Chinese delegation’s visit was well received by the American public, who bought tickets to watch the friendly table tennis match between the United States and China.
The National Committee on U.S.-China Relations was a major contributor to the return visit of the Chinese delegation.
Doug Spelman, former U.S. Consul General in Shanghai, served as interpreter for the return visit in 1972. At this seminar of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, he recalled that many Americans on the street told the media that they were happy to see the Chinese ping pong players visit the United States and hoped it would bring peace to both peoples.
A necessity 50 years ago
In the late 1960s, the U.S. and China were still generally at war with each other, Spemming said at the seminar. But against the backdrop of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, both the United States and China wanted to join forces with each other to counterbalance the Soviet Union. Long before ping-pong diplomacy began, the U.S. and China each signaled their willingness to improve relations in different ways: from Nixon’s easing of travel and trade restrictions on China between 1969 and 1970, to high-level communication between the U.S. and Chinese embassies abroad, to Mao Zedong inviting American journalist Edgar Snow up to the Tiananmen Square on the day of the National Day ceremony in 1970. And so on.
Milwaukee told VOA that Zhou Enlai and Nixon had several highly classified communications as early as 1970, but the momentum of their contacts was cut short by the Chinese due to the U.S. military operations in Cambodia at the time. And China’s invitation to the U.S. table tennis team to visit China in April 1971 was the first major public sign of a thaw in relations between the U.S. and China after 20 years of hostility.
“That visit by the U.S. ping-pong team to China was orchestrated in large part by the highest levels of Chinese leadership to send a signal to Nixon and to the American and Chinese people that the Chinese leadership was still interested in dialogue with the United States,” Mieved said.
In his recent article in History Today, Mivid said Mao was far more enthusiastic than Nixon about repairing U.S.-China relations. At the time, Nixon shared that intention, but also feared a domestic political backlash.
Mieville also noted that the U.S. ping pong team’s visit to China caused a sensational reaction among American society and a high level of public enthusiasm, so that visit also showed Nixon that there was broad public support in the United States for improving U.S.-China relations.
Although the invitation to that visit was made by Mao himself, and Zhou Enlai was actively involved in the decision to send the Chinese table tennis team to Japan to create opportunities for Chinese players to engage with the Americans, they did not control everything, Mieville said. After all, those American athletes at the time were ignorant of the political considerations of both governments, and their actions in Japan and China were not dictated by either government.
“Without the spontaneous action of American players like Cohen, this plan of Mao’s would not have been possible,” says Mieville, “nevertheless, it is no accident that ping-pong diplomacy was part of Beijing’s plan to rebuild U.S.-China relations.”
Sports and politics are closely entwined
Today, 50 years later, the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing are just nine months away. But today, some political figures and human rights groups within the United States are actively calling for a U.S. and international boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics as a way to pressure Beijing on human rights issues. In addition, according to a poll conducted last month by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the U.S. public is split almost 50-50 on whether to boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics: half of Americans (49 percent) support a boycott, while nearly half (46 percent) oppose it.
In response, China’s Foreign Ministry said it opposes the politicization of sports.
“What I find interesting and confusing is that the same Chinese pundits and officials who have punished the NBA for expressing views on human rights in Hong Kong are now saying that sports should not be a platform that is tied to politics, that the two should be completely disconnected,” Zack Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington think tank, said in a statement. Zack Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington think tank, told Voice of America, “China was boycotting the NBA at the time in a way out of things that had political overtones, so it’s odd that China is now saying you can’t boycott the Olympics because of political issues.”
And just as Zhou Enlai told Chinese athletes to “put friendship first and competition second,” sports and politics have been closely entwined throughout the history of Chinese diplomacy.
“In other words, it was (Zhou Enlai’s) request to put the diplomatic and political value of sports above the outcome of the game,” Mieville said.
Miwed told VOA that sports have always played an important role in the diplomacy of the People’s Republic of China since its founding in 1949. At the beginning of the new China, China’s sports exchanges with the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Hungary and other Eastern European countries were used to cement relations with the socialist camp.
By the 1970s, ping pong diplomacy initiated exchanges and contacts between the U.S. and China. after the Chinese ping pong team returned to the U.S. in 1972, China welcomed U.S. swimmers, divers and college basketball players in 1973 and U.S. track and field athletes in 1975. Similarly, China sent its own basketball team to the United States in 1975, followed by Chinese volleyball and soccer teams in 1976 and 1977.
Mivid also mentioned that China also developed relations with South Korea through tennis diplomacy and exchanges in other sports in the 1980s, paving the way for the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1992.
Table tennis, the first Chinese sport to win a world championship, has always been an important diplomatic tool for China, and Yung Guotuan won China’s first world gold medal at the 1959 World Series in West Germany. Mao Zedong thus declared that table tennis was China’s “spiritual nuclear weapon”. In addition to using table tennis tournaments as a platform for diplomatic contacts with countries around the world, China has also sent table tennis coaches around the world. Chinese table tennis coaches continue to train players from all over the world today.
The success of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing was the ultimate example of the important role of sports in China’s foreign relations.
And just as international dissatisfaction with China’s repressive policies in Xinjiang and Hong Kong is currently being expressed through calls for a boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics, Beijing has no shortage of experiences using sports as a medium to express political protest.
In his 2019 opinion piece published in the Washington Post, Miwed cited the example of the Chinese table tennis team’s 1972 trip to the United States, which was postponed by Zhou Enlai because the date of the Taiwanese team’s visit to the United States overlapped with the date of the Chinese team’s scheduled visit.
“By postponing this high-profile visit, China served to remind Washington that it was opposed to engaging with the United States, which was also dealing with Taiwan,” Mieville wrote, “and that the real signal Beijing was sending was that it expected Washington to shift official diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. “
And the most recent example of this occurred in 2019, when Beijing suspended Houston Rockets manager Daryl Morey from broadcasting NBA games and demanded the league fire Morey over his tweets in support of the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
NBA president Xiao Hua (Adam Silver) refused to make any punishment to Morey, saying he respects Morey’s freedom of speech. But he also expressed his understanding of the Chinese public’s views and positions on the Hong Kong issue.
In his article, Milwaukee affirmed Xiaohua’s handling of the incident. He noted that the history of U.S.-China sports diplomacy shows that it is best for the United States to stand firm on its positions and values when faced with Chinese pressure on political issues.
He describes in the article that when the Chinese table tennis team visited the U.S. in 1972, a small group of people also protested violently, and some even threw dead rats at the Chinese players. China protested about it at the time, but the U.S. organizers said that the legitimate actions of the American public were not under the control of the U.S. government. Although this concept of American politics was at odds with China, which was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, politically savvy Chinese officials understood that the Americans were telling the truth, so they usually expressed their displeasure verbally but went on with business as usual, Mivid said.
Another example cited by Milwaukee was when China threatened to cancel the U.S. volleyball team’s trip to China in 1978 on the grounds that the coach of the U.S. team held an Israeli passport. Beijing and Israel had no diplomatic relations at the time, and the two countries did not establish diplomatic relations until after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. But in the end the coach was able to get a Chinese visa.
“When politics gets involved in sports exchanges, the best way to respond to Chinese protests is to acknowledge the Chinese point of view and their right to express it, but to insist that such logic should also apply to Americans,” Miviad said in the article.
The dark side of sports cohesion
And Louisa Thomas, who writes sports criticism for The New Yorker, said in one of her 2019 articles that the social impact of sports is not always positive, and that the cohesiveness that sports brings has made it a favored PR tool for authoritarian governments.
From Hitler’s view of the Olympics as a window into fascist triumphalism to the Soviet Union’s development of a “national system” of competitive sports, Thomas argues that sporting events with their unifying effect have also become an opportunity for authoritarian states “to demonstrate national power and manipulate public passions. “
“Many thought that granting China the right to host the 2008 Summer Olympics would force the government to liberate civil society and improve its treatment of dissidents; instead, it mostly highlighted the attractiveness of such events to other authoritarian governments,” Thomas said in the article.
She cites the example of the Qatari government, which will host the 2022 soccer World Cup for which large numbers of foreign workers are building stadiums. But an investigation by the Guardian newspaper found that hundreds of migrant workers die of heat stroke each year in Qatar, and Amnesty International reported that many of the workers building World Cup stadiums are not being paid. And one of the countries that competed with Beijing for the right to bid for the Winter Olympics in the first place was Kazakhstan. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, the human rights situation in Central Asian countries such as Kazakhstan is regressing year by year.
Clare Egan, a Biathlon national team competitor who represented the United States at the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics, said in a recent interview with Voice of America that she was blown away by the unprecedented spectacle when she watched the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony 13 years ago. She has no doubt that the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics will be a similarly exquisite spectacle.
“The risk, however, is that on the one hand there is a beautiful opening ceremony, perfect sporting events and so on; and on the other hand, the human rights abuses that are being reported against Uighurs are being covered up. That’s the risk,” Egan told Voice of America, “so the important thing for everyone associated with the Olympics is that people shouldn’t ignore that other side, shouldn’t let the Olympic spectacle overshadow that other side. We need to use the Olympics as an opportunity to put those things in the spotlight and try to make things better for those victims,” he said.
Can “ping pong diplomacy” be renewed?
Fifty years ago, after 20 years of mutual “demonization” between the United States and China, the humanistic exchanges that began with ping pong diplomacy allowed the two countries to begin to humanize each other, several guests who experienced ping pong diplomacy said at this seminar of the National Committee on United States-China Relations.
Now, 50 years later, the U.S.-China relationship is cooling again. Polls show that from the government to the private sector, the U.S. and China’s perception of each other has been on a downward spiral.
Holfrost called on the U.S. and China to maintain humanistic exchanges and to keep listening and communicating with each other. She said at the seminar that the current great political divide among the American people made her realize that refusal to listen to the other side and to communicate is an important reason for the growing divide. She believes that humanistic exchanges between the U.S. and China can help the people on both sides to improve understanding and dialogue with each other, thus leading to effective communication at the government level.
Cooper told VOA that the purpose of promoting humanistic exchanges is to promote opportunities for cooperation by gradually reducing mutual distrust through better understanding among people. But he also pointed out that humanistic exchanges between the U.S. and China are now becoming increasingly difficult.
For example, he said, fewer Chinese scholars are entering the United States, partly because of tighter visa restrictions, but also because the Chinese government is placing more and more restrictions on the scope of their activities once they enter the United States.
Cooper also noted that Americans are indeed increasingly concerned about human rights and democracy in China and are beginning to question the value of humanistic exchanges between the two countries. The Chinese government’s policies in Xinjiang and Hong Kong have created a very negative impression among the American public, and as long as this situation continues, Americans will become increasingly concerned about the risks of visiting China, and fewer Americans will likely enter the country.
“Twenty years ago, U.S. universities were scrambling to open campuses in China’s big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, and today, so many of those campuses are running out of students because (American) students have become less comfortable traveling to China and living there,” Cooper said.
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