Ping-Pong Diplomacy

by Nicholas Griffin

  During that same summer of 1957 when the three men had sat down for lunch, Mao launched the Hundred Flowers Movement. It was supposed to be a period of amnesty during which the government offered to willingly reform itself according to the criticism of its citizens. But the criticism had not been accepted by the government. Had the people gone too far? Or had the campaign always been a ploy by Mao to draw out critics of the Communist Party?

  Mao had said that he doubted that more than 5 percent of Chinese were “bad.” Privately, Mao told a colleague he imagined there were probably around four thousand reactionaries, yet more than half a million people were “deported to remote areas to do hard labour,” or worse. Rong Guotuan had heard that Hong Kong’s Ping-Pong pioneer, Jiang Yongning, already converted to the Communist cause, was among them. What if Jiang had said something? What if Rong were to say something?

  “Mr. Rong,” asked He Long, “would you be willing to return here and work in China?” Rong didn’t answer at once. “Ask for your parents’ advice,” continued He Long. “I don’t want some guy in Hong Kong saying we’ve held you here against your will.”

  “Rumors don’t worry me,” said Rong. “I know my father’s going to support me.” Outwardly He Long didn’t seem to be in any rush for Rong’s answer. He leaned over and told him, “Chinese sports will take at least five years before they reach a world-class level.”

  Less than a month later, when the Hong Kong team was announced for the Asian Championships in Manila, Rong was stunned to learn that he hadn’t even made the squad. He presumed it was because he worked in a union office suspected of Communist ties. Perhaps his meeting with He Long and Chen Yi had been reported. If he hadn’t been picked for the Asian Championships, he knew the odds of being included in Hong Kong’s team for the next World Championships were small.

  Rong’s fear was quelled. A quick trip across the Chinese border to skirmish with the Guangdong Province’s team led to a few more victories for Rong, and best of all, Rong discovered that Beijing had sent Jiang Yongning south. He hadn’t been arrested, looked happy, and seemed healthy. They met at the New Asia Hotel in Guangzhou, and Jiang encouraged Rong to move to China as soon as possible.

  That July, Rong’s best friend, Steven Cheung, left for Canada. They met one last time, a pair of penniless young men who knew it was unlikely they’d ever see each other again. An official letter had arrived from Marshal He Long; all that remained was for Rong to travel north. Rong asked Cheung to come to his tiny office in the library, where he gave him his favorite table tennis racquet. Like a true obsessive, Rong’s last gift was to show his best friend a new serve he had developed. As he pulled his hand back, it was impossible to tell whether he was putting topspin or backspin on the ball—a breakthrough he’d developed on his own in the union library. Rong admitted he’d have liked to head the same way as Cheung—to North America—but in truth, he didn’t have that choice.

  Had Rong’s ability been in any field other than table tennis, he would have followed Cheung—but he was in a position of unique irony: if Rong wanted to pursue any form of personal glory as a table tennis player, he would have to consider leaving a capitalist system and becoming a citizen of Communist China. If Hong Kong didn’t really want him, why not head north? China, he knew from the two marshals, was pouring money into table tennis. Why not at least be appreciated on a strong team?

  Most returning Chinese had to undergo a rigorous, nine-month political reeducation. Rong’s returning contemporaries were met at the train station in Guangdong and escorted to barracks where they would live eight to a room. The majority of returnees were poor young men from Hong Kong or Macao. They were fed rice and vegetables and expected to attend classes six days a week. Meat was a rarity. Before a month was out, many underwent a slow disillusionment. They weren’t encouraged to question their teachers, and they soon realized that the teachers were barely thinking for themselves but parroting phrases that they had learned. Obedience was mandatory.

  Rong’s reception in China could not have been more different. First, he was installed in a large house that used to belong to no less a figure than Chiang Kai-shek. Second, he was appointed a number-one ranker, which ensured access to the best food and housing. He would be paid one hundred yuan a month, compared to forty yuan for a laborer. Not a fortune by any means, but in New China, he had automatic status and appreciation that he believed that he could never have gained in Hong Kong. The government showed great concern for him. At the first sign of a tuberculosis relapse, he was sent from Beijing back to Guangdong and spent six months resting in a sanatorium.

  Rong Guotuan was known for his modesty, his hard work, and apparent shyness. But he obviously wasn’t feeling so modest when he rejoined the Chinese squad. “I think I can bring home a World Championship within the next three years,” he said. Rong was wrong; he’d become New China’s first-ever gold medalist in any sport within two.

  CHAPTER 16 | The Golden Game

  Rong seemed almost schoolboyish at the table in Dortmund, Germany, in long black trousers pulled up to his waist, a pair of new white sneakers, and a red-collared T-shirt. He looked like a throwback to the players of the 1930s and 1940s, while his opponents whisked around the table in their shorts and shirts. Most played fluid versions of the game, but Rong wound his body up early and quickly. Watching him was like watching a spring release with amazing regularity.

  Here was the Chinese team, now traveling ten strong with coaches, a much more sophisticated operation than before. Around them was the wonder of postwar Germany. A nation that had wrapped the world in war seemed rebuilt in fifteen short years.

  The irony would not have been missed by the officials. America had structured the recovery of both Germany and Japan to balance the twin Communist giants, Russia and China. There were new cars speeding down new autobahns. There was uncensored cinema. There was also East Germany, not very far away. The Chinese team had heard that America was much richer, but West Germany had at least welcomed China. True, the West Germans had treated the Japanese to the best hotel near the stadium and relegated the Chinese to a suburb and given them “electric cards to take a bus to the stadium every day.” But then, the Japanese were the reigning champions, and China had never won a medal. Not in table tennis—not in any other sport in the world.

  Rong’s semifinal was against thirty-four-year-old American Dick Miles. Miles was the closed-off, unloved scholar of the game. Back in New York, he kept a bust on his mantelpiece of Beethoven, his fellow maligned genius. Miles had lost a tight first game by a net cord, then battled back to win two in a row in the best out of seven format. But could Rong afford to lose to an American? One of the running dogs of capitalism? What would they say back in Beijing?

  Miles recalled it as a purely psychological game, one where both players wanted to be the aggressor. He tried to force Rong to play defense, but the Chinese kept hitting his way out of the corners Miles was trying to put him in. Miles had already claimed two Chinese scalps; there was no mystique about China—not beyond its own borders. “To be honest,” said Miles’s teammate Marty Reisman, “we thought they all looked alike.” With just a few more points, Miles could move on to the final. Awaiting the winner was the grand old man of the tournament, the forty-year-old Hungarian bear, Ferenc Sido, who had won the singles back in 1953. Both Rong and Miles fancied their chances against the veteran. The winner was Rong. He beat Miles to a pulp in the last game, with the American winning just eight points.

  The final contained all the absurdity and grandeur of the game of table tennis: a packed stadium with two men facing off under a single bright light in the center of the darkness. It looked like a championship boxing bout, but without the bloodshed. The pair were physical opposites. On one side, Rong Guotuan: tubercular, long and thin, sad-eyed and frail; on the other, Ferenc Sido, Hungary’s old pro. His body suggested a wrestler, but his footwork was that of a prima ballerina. You could see that Rong was thinking his way through Sido at high speed,
bringing him near to the net with heavily angled shots, making him move his bulk backward with hefty drives. Sido reached up again and again to wipe his forehead.

  When Rong won, a huge smile broke out across his face, and you could see the pressure lift from Sido as well. He hadn’t seen it coming—no one had dreamed the Chinese would produce a men’s champion so soon—but once the match was under way, Sido never came close to a win. He retained the demeanor of a gentleman but waved quickly at the crowd and left the applause to Rong.

  At the closing ceremony, Rong Guotuan, China’s first champion in any sport, stood to receive his trophy from Ivor Montagu, friend of China. And Montagu had an even bigger prize for China, not just the cup chosen from his grandfather’s enormous collection of silver but an invitation that could shift the way China was seen by the international community. How would they like to host the next World Championships in two years?

  To China and her National Sports Commission, it was a timely boon. First, it could let them celebrate the achievements of the Great Leap Forward. Second, they could position themselves as an outward and friendly nation, just as the Japanese had done.

  An American team would not be traveling to Beijing. It wasn’t that the State Department was opposed to attempting some form of contact with Communist China—inert ambassadorial-level talks had been going on since 1954—and it was cautiously considering a Chinese proposal for an exchange of journalists. But these overtures were far from the public eye, and there was no way for American Ping-Pong players to know of or interpret such subtleties. Even though the Chinese were offering to cover a portion of all teams’ travel to Beijing, table tennis player Marty Reisman laughed at the idea of applying for a passport to China in 1959. “What were we going to do? Go and say we wanted to go to China to play Ping-Pong? They would have thought we were fucking insane.” At a time when anything that brushed against Communism could be equated to a lack of patriotism, Reisman understandably believed that “they’d have put us in a crazy house.”

  It was April 17, 1959. Back in Beijing, the news of Rong’s victory was greeted jubilantly. Zhou Enlai paused to organize a victory party for Rong held at the Beijing Hotel, usually reserved for the top foreign delegations. Zhou reinforced the work they had done as diplomats. “I’m the premier, so I can’t go everywhere. You’re Ping-Pong players—you can go anywhere in the world.” It was Montagu’s notion in a nutshell—Ping-Pong could move quietly under the borders and boundaries created by the Communist and capitalist worlds. Rong had done as much as any ambassador to promote China internationally and at home.

  Mao congratulated Rong Guotuan personally. He called Ping-Pong China’s new “spiritual nuclear weapon” but was distracted by troubling news from the countryside. In a nation still essentially powered by agriculture, China’s true currency was grain, and the numbers were disturbing.

  The Great Leap Forward, Mao’s plan to industrialize the country rapidly, could only happen if steel was produced. On the party’s orders, people had created homemade smelters in villages across China. But Beijing still needed to export grain to garner the cash to continue the Great Leap Forward. On March 25, Mao gave orders that the party had to procure up to one third of the peasants’ grain, “much more than had ever been the case.” At the meeting, Mao announced that “when there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.” At least that way, the Great Leap Forward could continue at pace.

  Still, there was nothing to panic about yet. A year of mild famine was nothing new to China. Propaganda was pumped up to cover the minor blip in China’s progress. As Rong raised his trophy, the Chinese press began to defend the Great Leap Forward. “Foreign friends visiting China keep asking how it was possible to double grain and cotton output . . . the most important factor . . . is the strengthening of the leadership of the Communist Party . . . in other words, the political aspect.”

  Now was the time to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China as well as Rong Guotuan’s unexpected victory. Rong Guotuan was “hailed by the Communist press” for “bringing glory to the Motherland.” Even the Daily Mirror in London, eight thousand miles away, tipped its hat. “It’s easy to mock at the sometimes grandiloquent claims which come from behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtain but there is no gainsaying the fact that these young—in a sporting sense—nations have performed miracles virtually overnight.” A new company was launched. Double Happiness was to produce table tennis balls and equipment in honor of Rong Guotuan’s achievement during the PRC’s tenth anniversary. “In three months, Shanghai factories received orders for 21,600,000 balls,” an increase of 700 percent over the previous year. Ping-Pong was to provide the weakest of smiles in the bleakest of times.

  CHAPTER 17 | Setting the Table

  After the end of World War II, Ivor Montagu found many ways to make himself useful to the Communist cause. First and foremost, he knew that he had to follow the party line as dictated by Moscow, no matter how much it strained against logic.

  As Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai prepared their final push against Beijing in the summer of 1949, Montagu traveled once more to Moscow, this time as a journalist. With his background in science, he was well suited to the task of writing a series of articles for England’s Daily Worker on Soviet advances. The main thrust of his visit was to interview the head of the Academy of Sciences, Trofim Lysenko. To the Communist world, Lysenko was the greatest of the peasant scientists, who based their new theories on their childhoods tilling Russian soil. Genetics, to Lysenko, were a scientific dead end; what really counted in agriculture, as in Soviet politics, was ideology. Lysenko’s schemes to increase crop yields were promoted by the State not because they were effective but because they reflected Stalin’s beliefs.

  Weeks before, the Times had ridiculed Lysenko as more fraud than scientist and stirred up a vicious debate happily covered by the world’s newspapers. According to the Daily Worker, the Western press and radio had “combined to depict him as a monstrous villain.” Even his accusers could not imagine that within the decade, Lysenko was going to aid and abet in one of the century’s greatest losses of life. His ideas were going to help kill approximately twice as many people as had died in World War I.

  Born a peasant in the Ukraine in the late nineteenth century, Lysenko had managed to persuade an Azerbaijani journalist into running a story in the Russian newspaper Pravda about how he had single-handedly vernalized peas so that they could grow in a harsh winter. Never mind that the experiment could not be repeated. Lysenko had already warped his science to reflect Marxist theories. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, he gradually grew in power in the halls of Soviet academia, until he launched an academic putsch. Interdepartmental fighting is familiar enough in any university, but in Lysenko’s time the losers wound up exiled or shot. By 1948, he had secured Stalin’s personal assurance that those who believed in Mendelian genetics would be considered reactionary. They lost their jobs, their homes, and their lives. Lysenko gained three chauffeured cars, a beautiful dacha on the outskirts of Moscow, and his own theme tune, which was played by a brass band before speeches.

  Lysenko claimed that nearly all Western scientific thought was limiting, if not useless. He ordered millions of trees planted in Siberia in an attempt to warm the climate in Russia’s south. More dangerous was his political belief that seeds were like good Communists: the more you planted close together, the more likely they were to help one another in brotherly spirit. Mao had read these stories in his revolutionary base in Yan’an and adored them. They would lie at the center of China’s agricultural policy during the Great Leap Forward.

  Once the extent of Lysenko’s power was known in Moscow, the predictable happened: surviving Soviet scientists started producing work to support Lysenko’s theories. Lysenko continued to work on his crops. He wasn’t too worried about statistics—he preferred questionnaires filled out by farmers.

  Lysenko�
��s rise made horrific and perfect sense. His results and conclusions were all viewed through a prism of Marxism. Even when there were contradictions, they could be marched far enough to the left to fit Stalin’s world. Though Lysenko had heretically admitted that men might not be born equal, he believed that the human race could be controlled and pushed toward the “desired requirements,” an idea that was “of immense political and social significance to the regime.”

  On his return to Moscow, Montagu was not traveling alone. He was accompanied by J. D. Bernal, one of England’s finest scientists and a renowned Communist sympathizer. Wherever they went with Lysenko, they traveled quickly, bypassing Moscow traffic with special passes. Stalin had appointed Lysenko chairman of one of the two houses of the Soviet Parliament in addition to his role as president of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the Soviet Union—could Montagu or Bernal possibly speak against him?

  Montagu’s handwriting was so small and spidery that he could cover a single sheet of paper in two thousand words. Reading his writing required two aspirin and a magnifying glass. When he first shook Lysenko’s hand, he was impressed by its coarseness and imagined that the man could “handle grain as though utterly fitted to do so.” His eyes “were deep set” and he wore “a frequent smile of mischievousness and complicity,” along with a pair of sandals. There was a portrait of Charles Darwin in his disorganized office. Montagu took an immediate liking to him. Bernal was not so convinced. He asked Lysenko a series of probing questions about genetics. Lysenko’s catchall answer was “I never said and never thought I knew everything. Nobody does.”