Back in England, it occurred to Montagu that the Cold War would be something different altogether. If the cost of open conflict had brought nations to either defeat or Pyrrhic victories, then it was increasingly obvious that “hot wars” would be avoided. If, however, the wars remained cold, then intelligence work would be important in the silent battle between cultures. That meant that propagandists like Montagu were more vital than ever. Instead of prisoners, Communism would need converts.
In London in the spring of 1946, after he had returned from Nuremberg, Montagu reconvened the ITTF with the intent of reviving the World Table Tennis Championships as soon as possible and lobbied hard to include Russia in the next tournament, since without the participation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), “no international organization can feel itself to be really world-embracing.”
As Montagu resumed his table tennis travels, he was followed by MI6. The sport was, as ever, confusing to Britain’s representatives tailing Montagu. He was the first person who had passed through postwar Vienna with journalistic credentials who had never approached British Public Relations for help with clearances or transport. By the end of the year, MI6 realized that his entire swing through Eastern Europe “ran smoothly” because Soviet authorities were taking care of him wherever he went. Thanks to Montagu, British intelligence now believed that England’s “table tennis players had been politically influenced by Russian agents.”
This combination of surfing on Soviet hospitality and evangelizing must have seemed like a bright red flag. Surely British intelligence would close in on him? But Montagu wasn’t the last Soviet spy in England. All the reports from field agents back to MI6 were addressed to H. A. R. Philby, better known as Kim, the most prized of all Russian moles. Philby had been appointed to the same XX Committee that Ewen Montagu had belonged to during the war. The man leading the hounds in the chase for Ivor was another of the Kremlin’s foxes.
An entirely new possibility occurred to Ivor Montagu as the forties concluded. Maybe his father’s obsession with the Far East had left him a fuller legacy than he’d first thought. Why had Montagu not tried to involve himself with Asia? Why limit himself to the continents of Europe and America? He may have gambled with the Film Society and had limited success. But table tennis was still under his control. Perhaps he should be thinking even more broadly than involving the Soviet Union in the game. Perhaps table tennis might play a part in spreading Communism across Asia.
PART TWO | The East
CHAPTER 11 | Table Tennis Bandits
When Edgar Snow left the city of Xi’an, in China’s Shaanxi Province, in 1936, the young American journalist had to walk for a week across plateaus and through high mountain passes before he reached the Communist Party’s revolutionary base in the north. He was chasing one of the scoops of the century—the first interview with the mysterious Mao Zedong. Most of the country was held by Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Party, who were still seen by the Western world as the surest bet to hold China together against her two great problems: domestic strife and a rising Japan. Chiang had dismissed Mao Zedong as a “bandit leader,” soon to be enveloped by the Nationalist Party.
Chiang’s rosy words were belied by his military orders—Mao was a very real concern to him. By the time Snow left Xi’an, Chiang had already mounted a series of extermination campaigns against Mao’s Communists. The survivors had walked for thousands of miles across rivers and mountains in the famed Long March. For the moment, they were contained in the mountainous regions near the town of Bao’an, in Shaanxi Province, trying to present their case to the world. They called for a united front to fight the Japanese, but in truth, they, like Chiang, had their eye on the bigger prize: the uncontested rule of China.
Within two years. schoolboys across the Western world would embrace Red Star over China, the sympathetic book Snow would write about his journey to the Communist enclave, taking it as proof that Mao was a serious contender in China’s future. For now, Snow was more concerned with staying alive. He had crossed over Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist lines without permission. Seven thousand miles from his home in Missouri, Snow, who spoke little Mandarin, trudged into the unknown, having been inoculated against smallpox, typhus, cholera, and the bubonic plague.
When Snow finally appeared at the revolutionary camp, he was greeted by a “heavily bearded” Zhou Enlai. Behind the beard smiled “a face so striking that it bordered on the beautiful.” By 1936, Zhou Enlai had openly committed himself to sharing the same fate as the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong. Mao was the philosopher; Zhou Enlai, the ever-active executioner of reality.
Zhou Enlai had been born into a wealthy family. Like Ivor Montagu, he was pushed into the right schools to serve an empire. Like Montagu, he was to butt heads with father figures, learn several languages before his midtwenties, and develop a lifelong love of Ping-Pong. Zhou Enlai was the most emblematic of all the leaders who would soon emerge to rule China—once from greatness, now from nothing, he would both suffer and inflict suffering. He would become a master of compromise for the sake of whatever Mao saw as progress. The numbers of those who would be sacrificed would be extraordinary.
Zhou Enlai had approved Snow’s invitation for a reason. As a young man, thirsty for success, Snow could be influenced. The more access he was given, the better. Snow interviewed more than a hundred commanders, soldiers, and workers and was treated to long sessions with both Mao and Zhou Enlai.
Compared to Chiang Kai-shek, the Communists, Snow realized, were operating on a shoestring. With not a single airplane at their command and many more men than rifles, the Communists were desperate to protect their limited equipment. Their great show for the young American seemed like an illusion. At the bleat of a horn, a thousand camouflaged cavalrymen transformed themselves “into a vast piece of farmland covered with green foliage.”
The revolutionary base that Snow was visiting was both a troop barracks and home to the Red Army University. Students averaged eight years of fighting experience—and three wounds each. It was “probably the only seat of ‘higher learning’ whose classrooms were bombproof caves, with chairs and desks of stone and brick, and blackboards and walls of limestone and clay.”
As he walked around the camp that first week, Snow noticed that some of the cadets were playing basketball, lawn tennis, and table tennis by the river. The fact that the Communists were dedicated sportsmen wasn’t a coincidence. Sport was an essential part of everyday life because it was already enshrined as Communist policy. Mao’s very first published essay wasn’t about militarism or Marx, it was about tiyu, usually translated as “physical culture” or sport. The stigma of being “the sick man of Asia” had haunted all of China’s youth. The Japanese triumph over the Russians in 1905 had awakened a sense of possibility of what Asia was capable of, but China’s pathetic capitulation to the Japanese in Manchuria in 1931 was evidence of their relative weakness. Mao believed that frailty or strength was a choice that began with the self; he was determined to harden his own body, first through hikes and then through swimming.
It’s hard to emphasize how revolutionary this idea was, and how localized. That same year, Montagu’s friend the poet W. H. Auden came to China and noticed at once the split in how sport was thought of. In Guangdong he watched the American and British sailors play soccer on the docks, “hairy, meat-pink men with powerful buttocks.” They were watched by “the slender, wasp-waisted” Chinese, who didn’t participate. All sports and all combat were for the laboring classes.
Snow moved slowly through the limited Communist-controlled area. One night, he arrived late at a station called Wu Ch’i Chen. There was no time to prepare quarters for the journalist. Instead, he was put up at a Lenin Club—a communal area for meetings or play, in this case a cave with a dirt floor, whitewashed walls looped with colorful paper chains, and a portrait of Vladimir Lenin. He lit the day’s last cigarette and unrolled his bedding on a Ping-Pong table, a metaphorical
premonition of the future of Sino-American relations. The man and the sport would be two of Mao’s most consistent instruments to express his foreign policy intentions, and both would be used constantly up to and including the dramatic moments of 1971.
Wherever Snow went across Communist-controlled China, he encountered Ping-Pong. It had arrived in Guangdong shortly after reaching Japan. The British set up a tournament between the ports of Macao, Hong Kong, and Guangdong in 1930. In 1935, it had moved farther up the coast, and a Hong Kong team traveled to Shanghai in 1935 to “take part in an All-China meet.” It had been played in the usual manner in British and German and American clubs, and then leaked out into the wider community. Snow was amazed that the game had reached revolutionary bases in the center of the country.
“Many people had been amused to hear about the Reds’ passion for the English game of table tennis,” he wrote:
It was bizarre, somehow but every Lenin Club had at its center a big Ping-Pong table, usually serving double duty as dining table. The Lenin clubs were turned into mess halls at chow time, but there were always four or five “bandits” armed with bats, balls, and the net, urging the comrades to hurry it up; they wanted to get on with their game. Each company boasted a Ping-Pong champion, and I was no match for them.
Communism insisted that everything was political—art and film, food, talk, and leisure. Even poker was politicized; every card Snow saw was marked with slogans like “Down with Japanese Imperialism” and “Down with the Landlords.” Basketball was taken as an obvious symbol of teamwork. Athletics were overtly political—instead of discuses or shot putts, the soldiers hurled ersatz hand grenades. All footraces were conducted with pack and rifle. By 1936, perhaps it’s fair to say that table tennis was about the only thing on a Red Army base that wasn’t politicized.
Ping-Pong was the one game that everybody played. Zhou Enlai had been an avid rider until, in 1939, he fell from his horse and shattered his right arm. Part of the prescription for his recovery was table tennis. Zhou Enlai would often play against Mao. Even the legendary Zhu De, the beloved founder of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), played “a good game of table tennis.”
Zhu De was considered Mao’s other half. But whereas Mao was a conniver, a balancer of personal ambition, risk, and revolution, Zhu De was simply adored. In an age when the Chinese countryside was connected more by rumor than radio, Zhu was seemingly superhuman. Chiang Kai-shek had inadvertently stoked the belief, having printed detailed reports of his death on several occasions. By the late 1930s he was said to fly, see for miles, create dust clouds before a battle, and be immune to bullets. A year before Superman first appeared in the States, American readers were introduced by Snow to Zhu De. And like Clark Kent, when he was sitting around the revolutionary base in Yan’an, Zhu De could disappear among his troops and pass for a peasant.
Zhu De had once been the great gamble of a poor family—the favored son of a landholding peasant who had been pushed through the rigors of mandarin academia at the beginning of the twentieth century with aspirations to gain a post in the bureaucracy of the fading Qing dynasty. Instead, he had been among China’s first revolutionaries and had driven his brothers into the army, only to have them both die in their first week in service. The guilt kept him from his parents. Like many of the Communists who’d come to rule China, he’d shipped himself off to Europe in the middle of the 1920s to escape the brutal crackdowns on the Communist Party. For a while, he had wandered through France and Germany, sitting in museums and attending Beethoven concerts with fellow Ping-Pong enthusiast Zhou Enlai.
When Zhu De returned to China to continue the revolution, he was famed for walking without shoes and sharing his horse with his soldiers. The temptation was to think of him as a basic man, an army man, but he impressed his American biographer, Agnes Smedley, as a deep thinker. In the Communist synthesis between politics and all else in life, he was the first to turn his army into an agent of ideology—wherever his soldiers went, they painted slogans on tree trunks, walls, and cliffs. When he captured a town built around its sewing factory, he’d had his men stitch their own uniforms, including the famous red star on their gray cloth caps. They talked Communism, wrote Communism, and wore Communism. The same red star was posted over the entrance to their Lenin Clubs, where the evening discussions took place around the Ping-Pong table.
Snow was to name his book Red Star over China; one of those rare works whose publication did as much for the subject as for the writer. When Snow was in Shanghai, surrounded by the Japanese in 1938, he gave permission for his book to be translated into Chinese. It was printed and sold from under the counter in areas controlled by Chiang Kai-shek with the innocuous title Random Notes on a Journey into the West.
Far East scholar Owen Lattimore described Red Star’s effect as “a fireworks display.” Thanks to Snow, thousands of young Chinese were inspired to head off into Communist-controlled areas. He had created the myth of Mao that Mao would build on: Mao the glorious freedom fighter, eager to drive the Japanese from China, champion of the poor. It was a myth that would take decades to unwind.
Snow’s book was read very closely. Those aspiring revolutionaries who decided to make the trek to Communist-controlled areas were taking an enormous risk. Entire families had been executed on suspicion of Communism. Zhu De’s wife was beheaded and her head mounted on a pole in Changsha. Mao’s own wife and his eldest son were both shot for aiding Communist agents. But what made a good Communist, according to Snow? Suffering, thought, self-restraint. And was there joy to be had? Yes, in comradeship. Communists weren’t all solemn. Snow had written of Zhou Enlai dancing and Zhu De playing basketball and table tennis. If table tennis was good enough for Mao, good enough for Zhou Enlai, then it would be good enough for the thousands of youths slowly making their way to the Communist outposts in central China.
Red Star over China became a huge seller in London; published by the same house as Ivor Montagu’s works, it required five reprints in the first month. There followed a string of intrepid foreign journalists, often women, in search of Mao and his Red Army. Among them was Ilona Sues, a Polish-American who was originally in China as Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s press secretary during the brief period of the United Front, when Mao’s Communists and Chiang’s Nationalists were supposedly working together to defeat the Japanese.
One day, to her surprise, she was introduced over lunch to Peng Dehuai, soon to be Mao’s minister of defense. By the end of the meal, she had decided to make a “friendship expedition” to the Communists’ Eighth Route Army. Could she bring anything with her that was needed? The Communist Party’s chief military strategist asked for paper for their schools, flashlights, batteries, toothbrushes, and toothpaste. “Any candy?” she offered. “Cigarettes?” Peng shook his head disapprovingly at these frivolous suggestions. “No, but if you would bring some Ping-Pong balls, there would be no end of joy.”
Snow’s book flourished again a decade later, when Mao declared the birth of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. Japan had withdrawn all troops in the glare of 1945’s blinding obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fighting against Chiang Kai-shek’s rear guard lingered well into 1950, even after he had retreated to Taiwan.
Ivor Montagu had followed “the China question” from afar for decades. In August 1937, he had been asked by the Comintern to hold a conference in support of Chinese unification against Japan. But despite his travels, Montagu had never been to the Far East. It was yet another division within the Montagu household.
His mother, who had visited Japan in 1927 and again in 1931, had several letters published by the Times in defense of Japan’s occupation of China. She strongly objected to journalists using the word “atrocities” because the numerous Chinese victims of a massacre in Shanghai had included many who “were soldiers in disguise.” She had pleaded for the British public to pity the Japanese soldiers who had been killed in the Chinese countryside. But she never questioned what the Japanese
were doing inside Chinese borders in the first place.
On New Year’s Day in 1950, when Londoners were waking up to one more year of drizzle and ration cards, Ivor Montagu sat down to write a letter to the founder of the Red Army, Zhu De, who had been honorary chairman of the Sports Society when Edgar Snow visited. The People’s Republic of China was twelve weeks old, and Montagu was determined to build the first cultural bridge between China and international sport.
In 1935 Ping-Pong had ranked twelfth in a list of potential national sports for China, behind jump rope and just ahead of home construction. Basketball was the clear favorite, followed by soccer. Montagu’s timing was exceptional. Preparatory meetings for a nationwide Sports Commission were already under way. “China must have her own athletes,” said Zhou Enlai to General He Long, who would head the new Ministry of Sports and Physical Culture. “Modern technology requires physical fitness.” Ten-minute gymnastic breaks twice a day were ordered for government offices, schools, and factories.
What the Chinese really needed was something that “would identify sport with the workplace.” It was the same dream Montagu had already had for table tennis, one of the few sports you could play without ever leaving the factory. Ping-Pong was perfect. The celluloid balls were so light that they flew best in windowless rooms without the slightest breath of air. But would the Chinese share his dream?
CHAPTER 12 | The Trojan Dove
Until the 1950s, Ping-Pong play had been driven forward by idiosyncratic individuals, obsessives with personal plans for world domination. In the background had always been Ivor Montagu, nursing and directing the sport. In 1945, Churchill announced the existence of the Iron Curtain, and in 1950, Montagu held the first World Table Tennis Championships behind that curtain. Montagu’s general secretary at the ITTF, Roy Evans, innocently wrote that such access “was regarded with amazement . . . we seem to have been very much in the lead in the countries where Russian influence is supreme.”
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