Ping-Pong Diplomacy

by Nicholas Griffin

  There were few such moments of doubt for Montagu, who was sympathetic to Lysenko’s frustrations with the barrage of criticism from the West. “There are none so deaf as those who don’t hear,” said Montagu. Lysenko laughed aloud, and Montagu jotted down in his notes, “This tickles Lysenko who repeats it with relish and approval.”

  How could Lysenko have achieved some of his results? Could wheat really change its genetic structure so quickly that it could be grown in deepest Siberia, surviving ferocious long winters? Wouldn’t that save the world from famine? No one would ever starve again. Bernal and Montagu failed to pop Lysenko’s bubble. They returned to England, and Montagu wrote an aggressive defense of Lysenko’s methods.

  During the mid-1950s, Mao was eager to implement Lysenko’s ideas. Soviet scientists were sent across China giving lectures and spreading the “Law of the Life of Species,” where Lysenko’s cooperative seeds meshed with Mao’s deep belief in class struggle. Those Chinese who still believed in genetics were “enthusiastically persecuted.” When blights did occur, they were attributed to environmental factors. In 1958, China’s fate was sealed. Mao “personally drew up an eight point Lysenkoist blueprint for all Chinese agriculture.” Montagu, one of the few Westerners to visit Lysenko who had a background in both science and journalism, had missed an opportunity to puncture the myth.

  Montagu would reappear twice in China during the worst of the coming famine. As it began, he offered China the opportunity to host its first large sporting event of any kind: the 1961 World Table Tennis Championships. Ping-Pong would become more political than ever. All propaganda had been funneled down to the two weeks of April 1961. So much was at stake. First, China would have to host the World Championships, complete with foreign players, teams, and journalists, without the truth of the Great Famine slipping out. Second, China would have to win. This was not a victory that could be achieved through illusion or massaging of numbers. There would be real friends and enemies present, including Ogimura and the Japanese. They would all have to be beaten.

  In 1961, the year when the last of the bodies slumped to the ground, when villagers had no more energy to bury their dead, when the death toll had long since passed into millions, Montagu would return to China. It was the year when Ping-Pong’s first Communist passed the torch of politics and sport directly into the hands of the Chinese.

  CHAPTER 18 | The End of Brotherhood

  It was a brisk spring day, which in Beijing meant warm winds and a mouthful of Mongolian grit. The vastness of Tiananmen Square was filled by a huge crowd celebrating May Day with a parade in honor of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. The famine had already begun to grip the country and was slowly heading toward the cities, but that morning all eyes were on Beijing. For the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, the whole city gleamed with optimism. “Workers marched with the staffs of factories proudly displaying charts and models of their latest products and production successes.” As they reached the figures of Mao and Zhou Enlai, they released balloons in the shape of dragons and phoenixes, balloons carrying flower baskets. “The sky was a weaving mass of colour.”

  The Daily Worker poetically described how doves were released into the air to swoop with Beijing’s birds between the red balloons. The doves had little company. Less than a year before, the Campaign against the Four Pests had helped launch the Great Leap Forward. Sparrows were designated thieves of the people’s grain. Millions of loyal citizens had run through the streets and over rooftops, waving jackets and bedsheets to prevent any bird from finding a place to rest. Hours later, thousands of birds simply dropped dead from the sky. The insect population exploded. Soon “caterpillars wrapped the foliage in great nets of silver strands, a lovely lethal sight,” which quickly killed most trees in Beijing. It was merely a premonition of the madness to come.

  The Great Leap Forward had been a busy time in the capital, the centerpiece of a nationwide effort to compete openly with the world’s greatest powers. It was supposed to rocket China into an industrial age in five short years. Targets were set for steel production (Great Britain would be surpassed) and wheat yields would rise fivefold (to equal the output of Canada and the United States combined). A few faithful journalists were shown evidence. “One province alone,” wrote journalist Anna Louise Strong, an old friend of Montagu’s, “now produces more wheat than the entire of America.” But what was a cake without icing? In 1957, in order to celebrate the tenth anniversary of his revolution, Mao had unleashed a sweeping program of construction, planning one daunting edifice for each year of his revolutionary decade.

  Among the buildings that were to be completed by the tenth anniversary that October were the Workers’ Stadium, the Great Hall of the People, and the Beijing Railroad Station. All were designed by Russian and Chinese architects working together to meld a form of Stalinist architecture with Chinese characteristics. The message to the individual was clear: You are small and you cannot survive alone, so join us and enter as part of the community. It was an enormous diversion of funds and labor—the railway station had two million men working on it at a cost of 60 million yuan and was completed in an extraordinary seven months. One additional undertaking had just been approved by Zhou Enlai: the Chinese were about to start building the largest Ping-Pong stadium in the world. It would be the only large-scale structure based on Western designs.

  On May 1, 1959, three and a half thousand miles away, similar celebrations were occurring in Moscow. “Brilliant sunshine broke through to flood Red Square” just as Premier Nikita Khrushchev led the Soviet government up the steps to the “top of the Lenin-Stalin mausoleum.” It was a big day for Khrushchev. He was being awarded the Soviet equivalent of a Nobel, the Lenin Peace Prize. Another man had been awarded the same prize that day: Ivor Montagu, the son of a baron, Hitchcock’s film producer, the founder of modern Ping-Pong.

  Montagu was lauded across the USSR, and his biography ran in every Communist organ in the world. He was named one of the world’s “outstanding fighters for peace,” and it was noted that he’d made “considerable contribution to the consolidation of peace and cooperation among nations.” Most extraordinary of all was the boldness of the next line. Despite having been born “into an aristocratic family,” “the life of this man is a vivid example of a progressive representative of the Western intelligentsia finding his real calling in joint struggle with the masses of the people.” Montagu was being congratulated using the code name INTELLIGENTSIA assigned to him by the GRU. The message was clear, at least to Montagu. He had received the Lenin Peace Prize as much for his work as a spy as for his role as a propagandist for the Communist Party.

  In Beijing, the Chinese also drank to his health. They had been selected to host the World Championships of table tennis. If industry and agriculture were to be the meat and bones of the Great Leap Forward, then sport was New China’s muscle tone.

  By the time Zhou Enlai had accepted Montagu’s offer for China to host the 1961 World Championships, it was already obvious to the premier that the remainder of 1959 and 1960 would be difficult years. The realization that the Great Leap Forward would not be great and that the leap might actually be backward made the coming tournament even more important than Zhou Enlai had previously imagined.

  That October 1, with Tiananmen packed once more for the official celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic, ITTF President Montagu and General Secretary Roy Evans were among the VIPs attending the event. Evans wrote that “for about four hours we watched this incredible [display] march past, symbolizing all of Chinese life,” while they sipped on green tea and the potent fermented sorghum called Maotai. Montagu busied himself organizing the coming World Championships, but Evans was confused that they were attached to a group called Friends of China, another of Montagu’s left-wing organizations back in London. They spent their time in Beijing being “carted around in ‘big black Russian cars [that] were always at our disposal,’ ” looking at the plans and site where
the world’s greatest Ping-Pong stadium was about to rise. By October 3, Montagu had reached Moscow to pick up his peace prize in person and bowed to receive his gold medal. After a “warm speech” congratulating Montagu, the Englishman was allowed to speak. “The forces of war had been shaken and weakened. Peace will not be handed out on a plate,” said Montagu, “it had to be won.”

  There would be difficulties ahead for Russia and China. Mao had drawn a line in the sand between the Russians and the Chinese. China may once have publicly accepted the role of “younger brother” to Moscow, but neither believed it anymore. Tiananmen Square itself was a symbol of the growing divide. The Russian advisers had recommended an expanded Tiananmen fit inside the nine hectares of Red Square. Mao had pointedly signed off on forty-four hectares.

  Khrushchev was, to Mao, a reactionary who waffled over providing China with nuclear technology and skewered Stalin’s legacy in the wake of his death. Mao had never liked Stalin. Stalin had backed Chiang Kai-shek for a while in the civil war. He had called Mao a “margarine Marxist.” In Korea, Stalin had promised Mao’s troops air cover and then left tens of thousands of Chinese infantry open to bombing runs by American planes. Mao’s favored son was among the dead. Yet, despite all this, Stalin was the granite bust alongside which Mao was chiseling his own image.

  Khrushchev’s reconsideration of Stalin’s past could encourage Mao’s successors to reinterpret his own legacy. This alone was more than enough reason to distrust Khrushchev. Besides, Khrushchev had dared to visit America, attending a white-tie dinner at President Eisenhower’s White House. What sort of brazen revisionism was this? Mao chose to humiliate the Russian premier, who, he believed, wanted “to control China’s seacoasts.” Inviting Khrushchev to swim with him in his private pool in the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai, Mao lectured the Russian as he swept through his laps. Khrushchev, who had never learned to swim, floated impotently in a rubber ring, watched by his bodyguards.

  In July 1960, the Russians were thrown out of China overnight. The declarations in the Russian press from the fall of 1959 seemed ridiculous eight months later. “We treasure this friendship like the apple of our eye,” proclaimed the Moscow News of the harmony between China and Russia. “This friendship will live for centuries.” From that moment on, the Moscow newspapers held their silence on China; the word was rarely written. The enormous International Congress of Orientalists that took place in Moscow that same summer was notable for the fact that Nigerian speakers were drafted to cover for the absent Chinese.

  The tension had been bubbling for years. In April 1955, Zhou Enlai’s “vigorous advocacy of anti-colonialism won a warm reception” at a conference in Indonesia and had led many in the Third World to believe that China could beat a new path between the two great rivals of the Cold War. Moscow insisted that the Kremlin remain at the center of socialist and Communist thought. In Communist China, the land of no coincidences, Zhou Enlai’s performance was celebrated six years later to the day, during the table tennis tournament.

  What the Russians had left behind as they packed their bags in 1960 was an effective recruiting system for all sports. Promising youngsters would be spotted by primary school coaches. They would be streamed into local sport schools, which in turn would feed city teams. They would provide teams to compete at the provincial level and from there, the national team coach would cherry-pick the best players. Once again, a Chinese spin was put on a Russian framework and directed at table tennis.

  CHAPTER 19 | Preparation

  In September 1960, with only six months to go before the tournament, 108 of the best male and female table tennis players gathered for winter training. This was far from an arbitrary number. Every child in China knew the book The Water Margin, an epic version of Robin Hood, though altogether angrier; it described a revolt of 108 men who had risen against corrupt emperors. They were the so-called brigands who fought to protect the people. Heads flew from shoulders; guts lined mountain roads.

  The most famous tale in The Water Margin concerned the emperor’s garden, where every perfect blade of grass, every beautiful flower was revealed to have come at the cost of the lives of his own subjects. The ruler’s magnificence was measured in the suffering of his people. Never was there a clearer metaphor for what the National Sports Commission was up to with their table tennis program during the century’s greatest famine.

  Teenagers from around the country were uprooted and sent, proudly, to one of three areas concentrating on Ping-Pong: Shanghai, Guangdong, or Beijing, where He Long had been busy building a training area by Dragon Lake with no windows on the windward side to disturb the players. Their isolation would be total.

  They were the cream skimmed from the top of sponsored table tennis tournaments across the nation. In Shanghai alone, three hundred thousand people had played. Beijing, Nanking, Chungking, Xi’an, Wuhan, and Harbin all held tournaments. Had Montagu been able to float slowly over China, he would have seen an absurd realization of his dream: millions of Ping-Pong balls popping back and forth in dormitories, factories, classrooms, and dining rooms.

  The oldest school in China, founded in 141 BC, now contained half a dozen Ping-Pong tables. In one hospital, three hundred of the four hundred workers entered the competition, including the head nurse and the director. Reporters and newspapermen “took on the dual propaganda role of competing in as well as covering the events, while leading citizens such as Communist Party secretaries, college presidents and industrial managers either played themselves or acted as referees.”

  The best of the best, the 108, were assigned to a seven-story dormitory inside a huge complex near the Temple of Heaven. From the rooms at the top you could see the gold and purple temple roof, one of the few spots of color in Beijing outside the red party slogans. Built with the help of the Soviets, the sport complex was designed to house a nation’s elite athletes. There was a soccer pitch, indoor and outdoor running tracks, an Olympic-sized pool, an arena, a huge weights room, and, of course, the specially designed training room for Ping-Pong players. Just yards away were offices for the sports press, as well as the National Sports Administration Center, staff dorms, even a garage for the cars and buses the athletes and officials might need.

  The nation’s best athletes ate together in a huge dining hall the size of two basketball courts. Athletes would keep their own bowls and utensils on checkered shelves against the wall next to the entrance. They’d pick up their rations at the far end—half a bowl of milk, a sweet cake, rice porridge, and wheat flour buns with as many pickled vegetables as they wanted. That was just for breakfast. Other meals included at least two dishes with meat in them, as well as a bottle of yogurt. When they were finished, every athlete was expected to wash his or her bowl and place it back near the door again.

  Those selected to be part of the 108 were dedicated to the state. Han Zhicheng had left home in 1959 when he was seventeen. He didn’t see his family again until 1962. This, he said, was typical. “We weren’t encouraged to go back home for spring festival. We were supposed to be a model for the people.” As the slogan went, “Mother and Father are good, but Chairman Mao is great.”

  For most, any fear of being away from home was overcome by the relative luxury of the facilities. There were no rich people in China anymore. These were young men and women who had carved their own bats, built their own tables from sawhorses and doors, or drawn them with chalk on cement. Bamboo poles had been used as nets. When shoes had worn thin, they had been taped up. Now, on the party’s dime, worn shoes were replaced, there were choices of bats, the balls were shiny and whole. “The new life,” remembered one player, “was glorious.”

  There were tiny signs of how much weight table tennis was suddenly expected to bear. He Long had announced that it was a vital component of how “he wanted to use sport to raise the spirit of the people.” There were no other sporting options. By 1958, China had withdrawn from both the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Fédération Internationale de
Football Association (FIFA). There were only two other sports kept alive in the period of the Great Leap Forward: volleyball and speed skating. It was hard to imagine the northern sport of speed skating finding support among the highest-level leaders, all born in central provinces. Men’s volleyball was still dominated by those with enormously developed physiques. Not even the National Sports Commission expected the Great Leap Forward to have produced such specimens yet.

  The head coach for the men’s table tennis squad was a man named Fu Qifang. Fu, who, like Rong Guotuan, was from Hong Kong, looked like an inverted version of their world champion, a solid Cantonese verging on chubby. Unlike Rong, who was familiar with some tenets of Communism through his father’s union activities, Fu was strictly apolitical. He was an athlete in the American mold who played hard, drank hard, and preferred two women to one. On a good night, he was easily capable of downing ten bottles of beer.

  Back in the early 1950s, Marty Reisman, one of the best players America ever produced, spent years out in Asia for the simple reason that if you played table tennis, that was where the money was. On the table, the thin American was known as the Needle, but off the courts, in English suits and Italian shoes, he looked as elegant as a fountain pen.

  Table tennis matches between Fu and Reisman brought out the biggest gamblers in Hong Kong. The two men would face off against each other in Southorn Playground, attracting crowds of more than four thousand. “Fu was like me,” said Reisman, “a showman.” They would combine to draw out the matches, filled with flying bodies and Reisman’s trademark shots accompanied by 360-degree pirouettes. Fu, already carrying extra weight, was made to sweat for his points in the soupy heat of one Hong Kong July. Run back and forth by Reisman, Fu collapsed on the floor and lay there panting. The crowd began to boo. Reisman walked around and helped Fu back to his feet. The Hong Kong native won the game, but Reisman took the match and the money.