Ping-Pong Diplomacy

by Nicholas Griffin

  Back then, the Chinese were already watching Fu. At the Bombay World Championships in the pivotal year of 1952, when the Japanese Satoh dispatched all comers with his magic racquet, Fu had been part of the team from the tiny rock of Hong Kong that had won the bronze medal. Montagu’s rules meant that Hong Kong, despite being a British Crown colony, was allowed to enter an entirely Chinese team.

  In Bombay, Fu had been on familiar territory. Fu was not alone among table tennis players in having “no other apparent source of income” than his paddle and living “close to abject poverty.” Practice halls, even at the World Championships, had become both gambling dens and trading posts. In the postwar world, rationing systems were in effect in most of the countries that had been touched by the conflict, and luxuries were hard to come by. Back then, explained Reisman, “Everyone came to trade, a sort of unofficial smuggling. The Czechs would arrive with linens, the French with cognac and perfumes.” Players “would pull out wads of two, three, four hundred dollars,” not always easy to get hold of.

  Underneath Montagu’s nose, the tournament had metamorphosed into the sort of black-market capitalism that had taken root in the streets of Central Europe and Fu’s Hong Kong. There were two sets of laws, one to obey in the presence of officials and another when the players were left alone in the practice hall.

  Earning money in table tennis wasn’t illegal according to Montagu’s rules, but it was suspicious. Players were required to have all their matches approved by their national associations, a rule imposed from on high by a man who had a lifelong income provided by his father. Montagu had essentially gamed the sport so that it could prosper only in countries where the governments were willing to throw their support behind Ping-Pong. It was a gap the Chinese were now hoping to exploit. Individuals who tried to make a buck were often suspended or dragged down in red tape. Or, like Fu, they could lose heavily at the tables and fall into debt.

  Fu’s situation was even more complicated than his friend and rival Marty Reisman knew. A bigamist, Fu was struggling to maintain two families in Hong Kong without any other source of income but his paddle and speed around the table. His debts had become enormous. In 1954 his precarious existence was seized on by the Communists. Come to Beijing and coach in China, offered Marshal He Long. Choose one wife, he was told, one of your families, and we will take care of the rest. For all the inflexibility and terror meted out in the first years of the Communist regime, the Chinese could prove disarmingly accepting of foibles when something they truly wanted was at stake. Fu was given the astronomical sum of 200 yuan a month, 500 percent more than other players, though it was divided between his two families. He Long had come to call this “The Buy Policy”—just a little bit of capitalism to strengthen the Communist cause.

  There were plenty of players but few coaches. Fu couldn’t train all the players, so he recruited coaches from within the 108. Liang Youneng had attended university, where he’d studied railway construction, hoping to contribute to China’s push to crisscross its vastness with the veins of railway tracks. His Ping-Pong career, he believed, was temporary. But the National Sports Commission saw his learning as a reason to think he might be a good coach, and he found himself as Fu Qifang’s second-in-command.

  It was that sort of mixture of grassroots improvisation and the proletariat that made the game feel Chinese, despite its rumored roots in the British Army. The name was easily translatable: Ping-Pong became ping pang. The two Chinese characters are mirror images of each other. “Whoever came up with the words was a poet,” explained China scholar Robert Oxnam:

  The ping is a cannon shot. The pang is a bang. Then, if you overlay the characters one over another, you get the word for soldier. It has diplomacy embedded in its characters, but it’s a military diplomacy. If you go back to Sun Tzu and the Art of War, it’s the intimate knowledge of your opponent that allows you to win, not superior strength.

  Ping pang suited China perfectly.

  Zhou Enlai knew that for the moment, China was far from a position of military strength. In truth, it couldn’t even feed its own people. Now was the time for subtle advance, a time to disguise failures and magnify successes so that China could be positioned as a leader of the Third World. But in order to display its credentials, China would have to win the tournament.

  There had been political matches before. At the Utrecht World Championships in 1956, China had to play against Japan. China was also drawn in a group with South Korea and the United States of America—China’s two opponents in the recently concluded Korean War. “We were so nervous,” remembered a male player, Zhuang Jiafu. He kept calm and won a close match against the South Koreans, then won all three of his games against the Americans, too.

  Even without a medal, the trip was seen as a heady success. The imperialist Americans and the reactionary Koreans had been vanquished. At the airport on the team’s return, Marshal He Long singled out Zhuang Jiafu. His salary was raised to level one, the highest of the men’s team. The elder statesmen also embraced the team’s rise. Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Zhu De had all attended the National Workers’ Sports Meeting just a few months earlier. But that was a private success. Hosting and then winning a World Championships would be the true test of Ping-Pong as powerful propaganda.

  CHAPTER 20 | Sacrifice

  What was unfolding across China during the Great Leap Forward was not natural. The burgeoning famine was a homemade concoction of ideology and science, mismanagement and cruelty with the brunt borne by those farthest away from the center of Communism, in terms of both power and geography. As cities faltered, more and more grain was requisitioned from the countryside, until barely a grain of rice could be found outside state granaries.

  Weather patterns had nothing to do with the famine. One intellectual, imprisoned in a labor camp in the Great Northern Wilderness, remembered 1960 as a “bumper harvest of corn, rice, wheat and soybeans.” Without outside interferences, the prisoners acting as farmers had managed to thrive in terrible conditions—until their crops were requisitioned for the nearest city and the prisoners given food substitutes: ground corn cobs and husks. The men were reduced to nothing but “muddy rags and a ghastly pallor.”

  How to pay for Beijing’s rash of buildings and the world’s largest table tennis stadium? How to pay for the projected success of the Chinese Communist Party? By exporting grain. At the beginning of the famine, the amount of grain exported actually went up. China would continue to pay off debts to the Russians in grain, continue to ship food to Third World brethren as a sign of their largesse. Historian Jasper Becker called the resulting famine “deliberate murder on a mass scale.”

  In Russia, the first five-year plan had been carried out at a time when the peasants were relatively wealthy. In China in the late 1950s, the majority of the country was living barely above the level of sustenance. Even a small increase in the amount of grain requisitioned would push the countryside into starvation. There was no escape—unless, of course, you were a Ping-Pong player.

  The Chinese were a nation of smallholders, but now all land belonged to the state. It cost the individual farmer more to grow the grain than the government was willing to pay for it. There were no other buyers, thanks to collectivization. On the farms, nothing, from animals to utensils, belonged to the farmers anymore. The only people left with incentives were the Communist cadres who were supposed to be delivering record-breaking yields to the state granaries.

  Failure to achieve one’s quota was a political catastrophe—a demotion in rank within the Communist Party meant a cut in rations. Lies were invented and sustained at every level across the country. Magazines and newspapers heralded the advances. “How bold the peasants have been in their close-planting experiment—bolder than any scientist would have imagined,” boasted one government publication. Another improvisation was “deep planting” of rice, which required workers to stand up to their waists in water. Chairman Mao’s doctor, sitting beside him on the train as they steamed from Beijing i
nto the countryside, looked out at the fields of peasants wading through the rice plants. Instead of a “technological advance,” he saw an “open invitation to gynecological infections.”

  The orders came down directly from Mao. “Grain should be taken before the farmers could eat it.” If violence had to be employed, so be it. “There is something ideologically wrong with you if you are afraid of coercion.” The Chinese government believes that there had been 17 million “excess deaths” by the spring of 1961, when Montagu returned to Beijing. Western experts, such as Frank Dikötter, place the number at 45 million.

  Once a human body is driven to starvation, it makes calculations of its own; there was certainly no energy left to enter the fields, no matter the threats made by ever more angry cadres. Villagers shirking work or stealing food were drowned, frozen, burned, and otherwise tortured. By the time the World Championships started, between two and three million had died directly as a result of violence.

  The starving were prevented from leaving their villages by the hukou system, a form of internal passport that required a government-issued stamp for travel. It was instituted in 1958, and without a hukou a worker couldn’t receive food coupons in the city or a communal share in the countryside. Within the villages, as within the cities, access to food was a matter of political loyalty—except for Ping-Pong players, who were fed three times a day, whether they were Communist Party members or not.

  In the countryside, laborers stood in line at the communal canteen and awaited the ladle. Nothing was more closely watched than the level of that ladle; it wasn’t a question of pettiness but a matter of life and death. The politically disaffected, those who had written letters complaining of food shortages or ill treatment by the cadres, could be killed slowly, ounce by ounce. The ranks of the Communist Party were to swell during the famine, going from 12.5 to 17.4 million in the space of three years. This wasn’t a political awakening but a desperate strategy to gain access to food.

  If the hukou system prevented villagers from traveling to spread news of the famine, their lack of energy ensured that the few who did travel didn’t get far. Most died in their villages. The last to die, in the spring of 1961, were left unburied; in many villages there was no one left to dig. Amid such weakness, disease flourished—polio, meningitis, hepatitis, and malaria rates all soared. Beijing was one of the few places where, to some degree, the misery was kept at bay. If the nation was to survive, then the capital must be maintained as the exception.

  The summer after Rong Guotuan’s victory, a strong coalition emerged against Mao at a conference the Chairman was attending in Lushan, pressing him to change course. Peng, the minister of defense, wrote a letter pleading with Mao: “the people urgently demand a change of the present condition.” He had visited the countryside and witnessed the repellent mixture of starving children and boastful cadres. His letter directly contradicted the Chairman’s own stance. “Putting politics in command,” wrote Peng, “is no substitute for economic principles, much less for concrete measures in economic work.”

  For two days, Mao was silent, brooding over the letter of a man he had once glorified in poetry. Then the Chairman took the stage, letter in hand, and eviscerated his minister of defense. Criticism of Mao was now equated with criticism of the party—there was no longer any difference. Mao compared himself to Marx and Lenin, both of whom had also made mistakes. To criticize the Great Leap Forward for economic reasons such as the grain quota of a province was a rightist, bourgeois idea.

  Mao threatened to split the party in two, go back to the countryside, and lead another revolution of peasants. Peng was abandoned by his allies and immediately relieved of his position. There was much that could have been done. Exports of grain could have been cut and immediately distributed to the worst-hit areas, but the loss of face for China in the international arena was considered an even greater cost.

  The minister of defense, who came so close to saving millions of lives, sat down in silence. Anyone attached to Peng would find himself at the wrong end of Mao’s plotting. In the system of Chinese infighting, a man’s underlings and support systems would be picked off first, before he was attacked. Little did the nascent Ping-Pong team realize that in the decade to come, it would end up as the focus of a vast campaign of vengeance. Mao’s favorite movie that year, as his doctor reported, was Gary Cooper’s High Noon.

  CHAPTER 21 | Nourishing the Team

  For the moment, the concerns of the National Sports Commission were immediate. Chief among them was how to keep the Ping-Pong team well fed. He Long realized that the ministry had a secret weapon to fight hunger—the international shooting team. They were sent into Inner Mongolia, a dozen hours’ drive from Beijing, in order to hunt yellow goats. Once they had plenty of goat meat to barter, they soon found a plentiful source of eggs.

  Living conditions were simple. The team moved into a one-story house near the practice hall with no indoor plumbing and “a roof that leaked when it rained,” but their food was first-class. They had milk, pork in a can, and fresh eggs every day. The players were presented with their training uniforms and socks and shoes. “When you wore through a pair of shoes, you just went and got a new pair.”

  The schedule for the 108 was punishing, yet nothing compared to the pain and death being meted out across China. They were divided into four teams: men’s, women’s, a mixed team, and a youth team. All would rise at 6 AM. It didn’t matter how cold it was; they would be turned out into the courtyard or the playground and begin a series of exercises and weight training, then go for a morning run. Breakfast was at 8:30, followed by three hours of table tennis, a large lunch, and a nap; three more hours of table tennis from 3 PM to 6 PM, then dinner and a mixture of training and meetings in the evening. There was very little free time. Perhaps they’d see a war movie once a month, but despite their generous salaries, there was little to buy. Often, table tennis films would be screened—hard-to-obtain footage of Ogimura and the Japanese as well as of the Hungarian squad, the players who were considered the main threat to the Chinese drive for a world title. They watched the films at normal speed, then studied them in slow motion.

  Han Zhicheng was a practice player. His job was to study the film, then, when the foreign teams arrived in Beijing, try to watch them practice. He would run back to the practice hall and imitate their technique for the best players in the Chinese squad. “What you have to understand,” he says, “is that we were united. It was a total team game. We were fighting for the glory of our unit.” The word unit can also be used in the army, or a factory—but the idea is a strong one: unit first. Individual actions don’t count unless they are part of the whole. Any success achieved by individuals belongs to the entire team.

  Patriotism wouldn’t be mentioned in the actual competition, but in the practice halls it was a common subject. Though Zhou Enlai would try to defuse the mounting tension in the country, the players knew that they were bearing a heavy responsibility. News of the famine had filtered down to them. It was hard to read letters written with controlled desperation, then look at a can of meat or a plate of vegetables without making the mental calculation that you owed your countrymen everything.

  The biggest problem for the players wasn’t the physical pressures but the psychological stress. “Some players were very nervous, and they couldn’t shake it. They had to be replaced by those who could stay calm.” Officials more accustomed to setting policy and attending banquets now stood at the back of the practice hall, scooping up stray balls. Their jobs, too, were on the line. Rejected players or demoted officials could find themselves on a train back to their hometown. In the winter of 1960, returning home could be a death sentence.

  Zhou Enlai had a country to run. He squeezed the most out of his days by keeping to a particular schedule, working late into the night and accepting no meetings before 11 AM. His visits to the Ping-Pong team would usually happen around midnight, when the players would have to tumble out of bed to present themselves to the pr
emier. Foreign Affairs Minister Marshal Chen Yi was another visitor who hoped to break the tension, but more likely added to it. “If you lose a game,” he told them, “I’ll invite you to dinner. If you win, I promise I won’t.” It was an uncomfortable joke; giving a dinner for a loser in China was a signal of banishment, rather like a last meal on death row. Everything seemed to increase the pressure, never more so than when Chairman Mao stopped by to “offer encouragement” during training.

  Nothing was left to chance. The team’s training schedule was advertised to attract spectators, so they could learn to play before a full house. In a time when there was little in the way of entertainment, the stadium was packed. Inside, the crowd would be controlled by the PA system. “Now applaud for your Chinese team!” Clapping. Then ordered silence. Then clapping again. Afterward the players would linger outside the stadium. All 108 stayed to answer any questions on table tennis the crowd might have.

  Despite the bubble that the chosen lived inside, they weren’t impervious to the increasing desperation among their relatives. Many had some idea of the famine because it had crept right to the heart of China’s greatest city. At the theater, a visiting doctor remembered that all around her “men and women were falling asleep in their seats. Tired and cold.” At dinner, she was chastised by her waiter for leaving a few grains of rice in her bowl.