Montagu pushed his sport across the globe. His was the first international organization to let an African and an Asian city host (Cairo in 1939 and Tokyo in 1956). Under Montagu’s “benevolent monarchy” table tennis had the full attention of a government, and not a Western democratic government shackled by institutions of checks and balances. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was top-down Communism, pushing a Soviet template onto China’s recent past. Such money, labor, and dedication poured into a small sport have never been equaled.
At first, China behaved like their fellow Communists, who saw sport as politics by other means, distracted by all the variety of options. The East Germans were engineering athletes to compete in every Olympic competition. The Soviet Union was aiming to confront America in basketball, ice hockey, and track and field. China would look at speed skating, gymnastics, soccer, swimming, and volleyball. But they would soon come to concentrate very deliberately on the “little-ball sports,” and the little-ball sport that other Asians were having success with was obviously Ping-Pong.
American diplomats were concerned with the termite theory, a cousin of the domino theory that would draw them into Vietnam: if you didn’t keep the termites out of the Western world’s institutions, such as the United Nations, they would infiltrate and render them useless. Thanks to Montagu, table tennis was such an unlikely avenue for China’s arrival on the international political stage that even in the 1970s, after the rapprochement through Ping-Pong, the extent of its role still wasn’t recognized.
The initial outreach to China was made entirely on Montagu’s own initiative. He wouldn’t confess his overtures to his fellow ITTF members for a full year, until the minutes from a session in Vienna in 1951 revealed that “correspondence had taken place with China.”
Montagu was eager to bend the rules, if not to break them outright, in order to make the ITTF the first international sporting organization to welcome Communist China into the fold. He wanted Chinese players in Bombay for the 1952 World Championships, and even after the deadline for application had long since passed, wrote to say that he was open to considering their first letter to him as a fully formed membership application.
To Montagu, it was confusing. Why were the Chinese lagging in accepting his invitation? It was hard to believe that the Chinese, momentarily in lockstep with Soviet Russia, would not have had multiple assurances of Montagu’s Communist credentials. The reason had more in common with Groucho Marx than Karl: the Chinese were worried about becoming a member of the one club that actually wanted them. One of the issues was their own skill level. If they simply appeared at a World Championships and were thrashed on the table by the likes of the United States and Great Britain, then how would that reflect on the glory of New China?
Montagu didn’t understand that the Chinese were thinking very seriously of table tennis as a possibility to show themselves to the world at their best. According to Sun Tzu, the only battles that should be fought are those that will be won. The desire to participate had to be balanced with the old Chinese adage that “family shame should not be made known to outsiders.” If they were going to finish last, it would be better to wait before participating. Bombay was passed by, but Japan’s taste of victory in the World Championships there was noted with extreme interest.
Montagu and the top ranks of China’s Central Committee, all graduates of the now-dissolved Comintern, were well aware of how to send signals publicly to those you wished to deal with privately. In 1951, Montagu sat down to write a long pamphlet published as East West Sports Relations.
Montagu presented his true offer to the Chinese. “Sports relations are well worth while in the interests of peace. They constitute an activity which in itself implies friendship and understanding, and above all, they penetrate the barrier to intercourse between nations which those interested in worsening relations seek to maintain.” The tacit message was that table tennis would be a perfect instrument of Communist propaganda, the human face to give Beijing the appearance of warmth no matter how cold or calculating the Chinese government intended to be.
It seemed as if the argument was made, but Montagu closed his pamphlet on the worst possible note. For all his reading on China, he was yet to understand the depth of China’s obsession with regaining Taiwan. But Montagu reminded his readers that you didn’t need to be a nation to be a member of his organization. “Any de facto sports body administering a given territory may be accepted and . . . further, where there are more than one such in any country, both must be accepted if they apply.”
To China, this was an outrage. The whole point of its stance, in both sport and politics, was to prove how ridiculous it was that Taiwan should ever be allowed to represent China. In Montagu’s version, there was room for both Taiwan and China. To Mao Zedong there was only one China. Taiwan was merely a missing province that would one day click back into place.
The issue for Montagu, and soon enough for Nixon and Kissinger, was what to do about Chiang Kai-shek, ensconced on the island of Taiwan, who stubbornly continued to insist that he represented the mainland despite having been driven from its shores. The international perspective was divided neatly on political lines. The Americans acknowledged Chiang Kai-shek, while Moscow and the Communist Bloc recognized Red China.
Regardless of his false step, Montagu received a visa to travel to China within months of publishing East West Sports Relations, even though the Korean War still raged on China’s borders. Ostensibly, Montagu was traveling as the British representative of the World Peace Council, a Communist front that attracted a large following in the West.
Montagu had already embroiled himself in the war’s propaganda, a move that must have been appreciated by the PRC. The Chinese and North Koreans had accused the United States of conducting germ warfare on Korean battlefields. The outraged Daily Worker insisted that one village in the northeast of China “woke up to find themselves surrounded by large numbers of small rat-like animals called voles” that were suffering from the plague. Eagle-eyed witnesses had seen “eighteen types of insects” released from American warplanes. Both the International Red Cross and the World Health Organization dismissed all accusations against the United States, but Montagu was handed samples of these voles and insects at the World Peace Council in Prague and presented them to his old stomping ground, the British Museum. The vole, the museum finally reported, wasn’t native to Manchuria. It turned out it was Russian—perhaps a not-so-distant cousin of the voles Montagu had carried back dead from the Caucasus thirty years before. The possibility that the Soviets had provided Russian voles weakened, rather than strengthened, the North Korean case.
Montagu’s 1952 visit to China was timed for October 1, the PRC’s third birthday. Buildings in central Beijing were shrouded in bright red banners, and Montagu and some of his fellow delegates were ushered into the VIP section on top of Tiananmen Gate to stand near Mao and Zhou Enlai and the party’s Central Committee. The World Peace Council wasn’t always so welcome around the world, suspected of being a “Trojan Dove” where the word “Peace” was a veneer for “Communist.” But here in Beijing, council representatives were able to listen to “the thunder of tanks, guns and bomber aircraft,” a reminder of the Korean War. At night, lanterns illuminated the political slogans that seemed to cover the capital, and fireworks crackled from one side of Beijing to the other.
Montagu had been speaking ceaselessly across England and Europe before his trip to China, but often to drab little gatherings of thirty or forty people, like a provincial book tour. Now the speakers were treated to the biggest crowds of their life: fifty thousand people gathered “under the golden roof of the Imperial Palace,” all chanting “Long Live Peace! Long Live Peace!” Montagu heard that “unemployment has been abolished. . . . Most of the 20 million former idle landlords have land and serve as an additional new labor force.”
Nothing but peace and plenty was reported about New China for ten solid days. Meals were “as sure as the sunrise.” Back in
England, the Economist took a more mordant view: “One would like to hear Mr. Ivor Montagu, who has been representing the ‘World Peace Council’ . . . construe the Chinese poem specially composed and circulated for the anniversary, and which contains the interesting line: ‘We love peace, and smash all our enemies into pieces.’ ”
What the Chinese Communists really wanted from Montagu was advice—not about peace but about Ping-Pong. Montagu was invited to take a short trip to the outskirts of Beijing on October 12. He would have been impressed by the crowd of seven thousand gathered to watch the All China Table Tennis Championships. During the opening ceremony, the teams, divided by province, paraded before Montagu wearing their various colors. Montagu rose to address the crowd and talked of the possibility of success for China in table tennis, noting “the exploits of Hong Kong players in Bombay” earlier that year. He concluded his talk with the hope that China would soon be competing with the rest of the world.
Then Montagu sat in the VIP section and watched the best table tennis players in China compete. His report was simple and depressing: “They weren’t much good.” It was what the Chinese had feared; in the usual pattern of twentieth-century Asia, the Japanese had got the jump on them. That year, out of the blue, a Japanese man had just become the first Asian to win the World Championships. It was accepted by the Chinese with a mixture of jealousy and encouragement. If the Japanese could achieve victories in war and now in table tennis, then why couldn’t China, fighting the US to a stalemate in Korea, also triumph in sport?
Ivor Montagu preferred the presence of politics in Ping-Pong to be subtle, but the Chinese didn’t agree. Instead, the ITTF was one of their earliest forums to lay down the law that they would soon pursue in more formal circumstances around the world. Yan Fumin, in the capacity of China’s first ITTF representative, made a solemn statement at the 1953 meeting in Bucharest that the Chinese Table Tennis Association was a national organization, not a regional one.
This was not a hair-splitting moment in a minor organization. It presaged the thinking that would dog all countries’ interactions with China. Taiwan was the intricate knot that would recur during Ping-Pong diplomacy in 1971. Kissinger and Nixon wouldn’t unwind it all at once, but loosen the strings and pass it to the future. Montagu was too wily not to accede to Chinese wishes. After all, this was the dream come true; in a way, he had been thinking too small, trying to nudge Russia into taking table tennis seriously. China was three times the size and wasn’t going to drag its feet. Montagu, always thinking like an idealist, always acting like a cynic, acceded from the beginning to Chinese demands. Taiwan would be kept at bay for decades to come. They had every right to join, Montagu would tell the Taiwanese, but only if they accepted the name “Taiwan Province of the People’s Republic of China.” The strategy had been dictated directly to him by Zhou Enlai.
The Chinese knew very well the size of the favor Montagu had done them. “This was,” said an official, “a historical opportunity for us. . . . Mr. Montagu was a very open minded person.” Open-minded and also an undoubtedly strange man in Chinese eyes. Who else would have insisted on rowing into the middle of the Summer Palace’s lake in 1952, then stripping to swim in four feet of murky water? He was followed so closely by solicitous security that “after twenty yards I gave in miserably and have never had the heart, or the unkindness, to repeat the experiment.”
CHAPTER 13 | The Rise of Asia
The table tennis table at Tokyo’s Tenth High School gym had survived the bombing. There was a hole in the roof, the windows were boarded up, and every morning the table would be covered in a thin layer of white dust blown in through the cracks by passing American jeeps, the rumbling reminders of the lost war. In 1949 the gym was tended to by Ichiro Ogimura, one of the smallest students in the school, who swept it clean every recess. Ogi, as Ogimura would be known for the rest of his life, had no interest in politics for the moment. At seventeen, he cared only for table tennis. He was slowly becoming one of those obsessives whose preoccupation and drive were so intense that they could change the world around them. They pushed against the limits of their current situations and craved change, until, in a flash, it arrived. Ogi’s progress would be watched quietly but intently by the highest levels of Chinese government, now trying to build a new foundation for the world’s most populous nation. In the long run, it would afford Ogi a unique view of how China worked and become the basis of a friendship between Ogi and China’s new premier, Zhou Enlai.
At the end of the war, Ogi was just a spindly, wide-eyed student. He had a good reputation as a baseball pitcher in middle school but he knew he wasn’t going to grow much more, and only the taller boys were encouraged to keep playing in high school. If he couldn’t be a professional, then what was the point? Instead, he calculated that the new world, dug out of Hiroshima ash, would be one where there would be a time for sport and that table tennis was fated to rise in Asia. It was a large leap of logic to make. He was part of a small group that had petitioned the school principal for a new table tennis table. “This is a boy’s school,” said the principal. “Table tennis is for girls.”
The sport had arrived in Asia via Japan in 1902, part of that first wave of unregulated Ping-Pong enthusiasm that had emanated from England. A university student had returned to Tokyo from Europe with three Ping-Pong sets. Within a year, at Japan’s Fifth National Industrial Exhibition, a sport store showed Ping-Pong equipment that had been manufactured locally. The game grew up in a vacuum. Since there were still no written rules to follow, the Japanese muddled along, playing on a much smaller table and with a lower net than Europeans. As ever, Montagu had a hand in the change, packing his rule book in his parents’ cases on their trip to Tokyo in 1927 so that the Japanese could begin to move in step with the international body.
Until the Japanese joined Montagu’s ITTF in 1929, there were no prizes for winning tournaments in Japan. Instead, the “names of the winners are inscribed on a window in the shrine of Emperor Meiji.” There was never a charge to attend a game in Japan, and there was no entrance fee for players. The Ministry of Education paid all expenses. That seemed to lessen its acceptability. As in Europe, it began its life generally disdained. Through sheer persistence, Ogi and his small group of schoolmates finally persuaded their principal to buy the table.
They had an unlikely ally in their quest for the acceptance of Ping-Pong: General Douglas MacArthur. He agreed to lend his name to “The MacArthur Cup” for table tennis in 1947. Out of gratitude, the players drew brightly painted pictures of the general on one side of their paddles instead of the customary wrestlers and glamour girls. Across the sea in China, the American general would soon be known as Mac the Devil and Mac the Madman, thirsting for Asian blood.
The school’s new table tennis table was well loved. Ogi and his classmates heard that polishing the table with the soles of sneakers made the ball bounce better. They bought a bottle of amyl acetate so they could seal the tiny cracks in Ping-Pong balls. Ogi kept a diary, noting the scores of every match he ever played, even in practice. At the bottom, he wrote, “You’re going to be a genius among geniuses.” He had lived through Japan’s occupation of Manchuria, the expansion of war, air raids, nuclear attack, surrender, and occupation. “Sport,” he wrote, “was a kind of salvation.”
In the fall of 1950, a year after Montagu had readmitted Japan into the ITTF, Ogi found his way to a new table tennis hall that opened in Tokyo, close to the Musashino Hachimangu shrine, where tattoo-covered gangsters would come to dance at festivals. Salarymen stopped by the cypress-wood hall at the end of the day before commuting home. They played beside greengrocers and railwaymen, doctors and schoolchildren. It was part of the classless ambience of which Montagu was still dreaming, though the only place such men were equals in Tokyo was within the club.
Ogi’s father had died when he was two. His mother baked bread that he helped sell outside the station at Mikita. He kept some in his pocket and ate as he played. When Ogi paused
midgame to pop the bread in his mouth, he didn’t chew, but savored it as he played, like Charlie nibbling at his candy bar long before he enters the chocolate factory. By the time he was eighteen, Ogi was ranked only sixth in Tokyo, which he saw as a severe disappointment. His mother worried constantly about him; she had wanted him to be a diplomat. He only wanted to play table tennis. Eventually, thanks to China, he would become both.
Ogi remained obsessed with becoming the world’s best. He had even figured out a way to overcome his natural physical weakness, which he explained to a friend during a brief bout with pneumonia. “Apparently, all the cells in the human body are replaced with new ones after ten years. Someone who’s born strong might have an advantage to start with, but we’re all responsible for what our bodies are like in ten years’ time.”
Ogi brought a new standard of devotion to the world of Ping-Pong. He ran for an hour each morning, carrying in his right hand a stone he reckoned was the same weight as a table tennis racquet. He jumped from the squatting position for a kilometer and then hit a ball against a wall from five feet. He skipped rope, lifted dumbbells. He went to billiard parlors to study spin. A friend called his self-imposed routine “torturous . . . terrifying.” Everywhere he went, he carried with him The Book of Five Rings, a book on strategy written by Japan’s master swordsman. In his mind, he translated the work into table tennis.
Nineteen fifty-two was a year of liberation for Japan. In September, the government signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty, and the American Occupation was over. Almost simultaneously, the worst player in Japan’s national table tennis team won the World Championship in Bombay. Ogi watched two players in action, one a symbol of the future and one the past.
Ping-Pong Diplomacy Page 7