It was one of the few tiny glimpses of the famine that the players noticed, and then only in retrospect. Tomlinson remembered the look a waiter gave one of their female players who returned her food untouched and a third player who asked if the waiter could find him some tomatoes for breakfast the next day.
Montagu had personally arranged visas for three of Britain’s best sports journalists. It was a calculated risk, but China had two advantages. First, the visas were for a specific amount of time and no travel was allowed before or after the tournament. Second, no one had experience in China; no one knew enough to realize that the police had forbidden the publication of death notices or that “mourning bands” were forbidden among Beijingers.
As hunger closed in on the capital, people had begun to improvise. Children tipped sticks with glue and hunted for cicadas to eat or tied strings to the legs of female dragonflies, walked the edge of ponds, and ate the males that came to mate. The bitter joke was that the only thing with two legs that couldn’t be eaten was an airplane. The only thing with four legs considered unpalatable was a bench.
People scoured the small patches of green in search of plants and weeds to add to their thin soups. But city dwellers often lacked country knowledge. In a single week in Beijing, there were 160 deaths from the digestion of cocklebur plants, a long, agonizing process leading to convulsions and death. Qiu Zhonghui, China’s number-one hope in the women’s singles, remembered being given permission to leave the training grounds after weeks of work. She was stunned by the emptiness that had descended on Beijing’s streets. Finally, she spotted someone. It was a woman, perhaps in her thirties, who was digging up weeds from the side of the road. She’d never seen such a thing and approached her to watch. “What are you looking at?” snarled the woman.
“What are you doing?” asked Qiu.
“What planet are you from?” The woman kept digging for weeds in silence, then looked up and whispered, “The whole country’s starving. I’m making soup.”
CHAPTER 24 | The Chance to Shine
Finally, the opening ceremony began. “It was like Cirque du Soleil but it was in 1961, it was unbelievable. I’d never seen anything like it,” remembered New Zealand player Murray Dunn. “It was that spectacular and it went on for an hour or two . . . a mass display of gymnastics and dancing and tumbling.” Zhou Enlai was spotted sitting on the rostrum next to Ivor Montagu, “who looked like the cat who ate the canary,” undoubtedly “the man of the moment.”
While he’d already dined with the premier and Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, Montagu had done his best to ignore all overtures from Britain’s Beijing Liaison Office, reluctantly attending a single tea with the English team. The head of the liaison office dismissed Montagu. “He struck me as being something of a drawing-room Communist and I doubt whether he had talks of any importance with the Chinese.”
Montagu had also been welcomed the night before at a vast banquet by He Long, whose remarks were in lockstep with Montagu’s own view of sport. Table tennis players, said He Long, were about to make “due contribution to the strengthening of the solidarity of the peoples of all countries and to the defense of world peace.” No one was there to simply entertain.
When the games finally got under way, there was no holding back the crowd’s enthusiasm. The Chinese team, prepped, fed, and polished, was hungry for victory. Playing a first round match against the Cubans, their fellow Communists, the Chinese players began ruthlessly: twenty-one to zero, twenty-one to one, twenty-one to zero. The Chinese public had waited so long for their Ping-Pong Spring that they bellowed constant approval of the rout. Halfway through the game, a message came over the loudspeakers. Be careful, it advised, your reaction could be misconceived as inhospitable. Could you please begin to cheer both teams evenly?
“Had they done that in Europe, the audience would have got even worse.” But this was China. “All the cheering stopped; it changed completely.” The Cubans won a grand total of four points in the remaining games. The crowd applauded each of them.
The journalists wandered the halls of the stadium in between games, marveling at the contrast of its modernity compared to the “lowly, grey tiled resting places” in Beijing “where 7,000,000 lay their heads.” Every single reporter noted how “desperately proud” China was of “her new role.” “There is no austerity in the stadium. The restaurants are doing booming business with Chinese champagne, which tastes rather like bubbly brandy . . . you can eat anything from bird’s nest soup to shark fins and the Peking ducks.” The Ping-Pong stadium was the emperor’s garden, a tiny isolated bubble of bounty in the middle of a country shocked into silence.
The first time the New Zealanders played, Murray Dunn looked up into the stands and was amazed at the uniformity of it all. Staring at the chanting crowd of twenty thousand, he realized that “everybody, and I mean everybody, wore . . . blue denim.” Everyone had the same short hair. “It was hard to tell the difference between a man and a woman, quite frankly.” The reporter from the Express went further. The women reminded him “of British Railway engine drivers.”
Unbelievably, as Dunn finished off his game and headed past the wooden barricades that separated the tables from the stands, he heard his name called from the crowd. It was a Kiwi accent. “G’day Murray!” He looked up into the blue sea and scoured the faces. A hand waved. Almost unrecognizable under his blue denim cap was an old friend from school, “a bright fellow” named York Young, the New Zealand son of Chinese immigrants. He had returned after the revolution, one of thousands of optimists who had wanted to help in the Great Leap Forward. Young rushed down to meet Dunn beside the barricades, but immediately his interpreter pushed forward until she was between the two men. She took Young by the arm and “grilled him for ten minutes” then pulled Dunn aside “to make sure the stories coincided.”
With the interpreter now standing between the school friends, Dunn didn’t know what to say. “I said something silly like ‘we’ll have to have a coffee.’ ” Young just looked at Dunn and said, “We can’t talk again. We’re not going to be allowed to talk again.” He turned and merged sadly back into the blue-clad crowd. Another small opportunity for open conversation had been lost. “That was the last I ever heard of him,” said Dunn.
Thanks to Montagu’s willful ignorance, the Chinese had pushed the laws of the game to the limits. The host country was legally allowed to invite extra players into the tournament. The Polish were the largest traveling contingent, with eleven players. The Chinese had seventy. Their strength was extraordinary, and the inevitable soon happened in the singles competitions: Chinese were drawn against Chinese. The players would then further bend the rules by playing their games slowly, waiting to see who would win the game that would provide their next competitor. There was no direct translation in China for the British sense of fair play that went hand in hand with sport. Sports were political, they were simply serving one aim: victory for Communism. Depending on which type of player was best matched, the other Chinese player would throw the game.
In case there were any doubts as to the politics of the sport, the biggest news of the decade was announced to the Chinese public not in the People’s Daily but in the middle of the Workers’ Gymnasium. All the lights were turned up; the New Zealanders’ big match was suddenly brought to a halt. A huge victory for Communism was announced. Russia’s Yuri Gagarin had orbited the earth and returned. A Communist was the first man in the history of the world to leave the planet. The Soviet team was brought out to take a bow. Russia’s top young star, Gennady Averin, made a sweet speech: “Even though Major Gagarin in his spaceship Vostok has not won a table tennis title, his name is known all over the world.” Laughter swept the stadium. The New Zealand squad, standing to one side alongside their proud translator, tapped her on her shoulder. “When are we going to have our table back?” they asked.
In the men’s team competition, the Swaythling Cup, it soon became obvious that the gold medal clash was going to be the grudge m
atch that the Chinese team had prepared for: Japan against China. It was Japan’s chance to create history. Victory would mean they were the only team in the world that had won six straight championships. All the Chinese efforts to use the tournament as a propaganda push could suddenly be transformed into an alternate worldview. Japan could emerge as the nation that dominated Asia, even when playing in the capital of the old enemy.
Rong Guotuan faltered when victory seemed close for the men’s team. The noise in the stadium grew for every point Rong Guotuan won, but the points he lost were greeted with shrill, desperate screams. Rong Guotuan, the world champion, looked distinctly worried. To the consternation of the crowd, he couldn’t find a way back. The Japanese won, forcing another game.
For the Chinese, with their world champion beaten, the stadium’s hopes would be carried by a local teenager, a handsome, bowlegged boy named Zhuang Zedong. He had been born in a mazelike Beijing hutong, or alley. Without money for a table, he’d hit balls against a wall in his own home. His mother didn’t worry about it until he grew strong enough to break his first window with a Ping-Pong ball. From then on, she’d encourage her Tiger Cub to run to school an hour early to hit before class.
Zhuang was utterly fearless, with the same height and the same extraordinarily developed legs as Ogimura, but seven years younger. He walked out to face the Japanese to a home crowd’s vigorous applause, a mixture of encouragement and appalling expectation.
Of all the countries in the world that harbored deep-seated resentments against Japan, none had as much reason as China, which had suffered fifteen years of brutal occupation. The Rape of Nanking alone had seen three hundred thousand casualties. Photographs of the humiliated dead—the rows of Chinese heads lining the city streets and the women impaled on bamboo poles—were seared into the Chinese collective memory. The government said the 1961 World Championships were friendly, but the crowd of twenty thousand Chinese was frantic for victory. Teammate Xu Yinsheng remembered looking up into the stands just before the game against Japan started and being amazed at the number of old faces that stared back. “These were people who didn’t know a thing about table tennis. What they understood was that this was a grudge match.”
It must have been deeply discomforting to Zhou Enlai. He had made a special effort to greet the Japanese players personally—not because he believed in overextending the hand of peace, but as a signal to Tokyo. China had no fleet worth speaking of and was desperate to begin to charter as many Japanese ships as possible to import food.
Ogi and Zhuang Zedong were tied at two to two. Montagu sat in the stands next to the Chinese premier. The stadium, now crammed past capacity, was “a sweat pit.” Ogi waved his hand in the air, calling a temporary stop to play, unable to think in the clamor. The whole stadium was shaking with so much noise that the Japanese coach complained to the officials. Another plea went out across the “big brother loud-speaker” but this time the noise didn’t abate. Ogi opted to continue. “When Japan scored a point there were moans and a long wailing cry of E-yay.” But Ogimura didn’t score many more points against Zhuang Zedong, the hometown teenager. He was utterly humiliated.
The fastest man in table tennis, so sharp that the Chinese had nicknamed him The Brain, looked like he was wearing stone sneakers. Zhuang knew that “every shot against the Japanese players was revenge for the Chinese [who had suffered the Japanese invasion].”
The final game ended twenty-one to thirteen to Zhuang Zedong. The Japanese team then folded, allowing Rong Guotuan quickly to dispose of his last opponent. When the final point was over, the whole stadium rose. “Hats and scarves and gloves were thrown into the air.” It was a freezing, windy April day, but not a soul cared. “It was genuine happiness.” “China was champion of the world. This arena broke apart like a huge Ming bowl, done in pastel shades. The normal fixed smile of the Chinese shone like a new moon as they cheered, clapped and danced and the team hugged and kissed like English Soccer players.”
Somewhere in the control room, a technician flashed the stadium’s lights on and off, on and off, as the Chinese players stood in a row applauding their fans. The stadium shook. “China! China! China!” The chant rang hardest inside the stadium, then out the doors and through the gathering crowd. It could be heard echoing around every radio set in Beijing.
After the stadium emptied, the workers walked through the empty stands in silence. They filled bag after bag with the hats, scarves, and gloves that, in a time of so few personal possessions, had been thrown freely in the air. Throughout the night, the city reverberated to the banging of drums and the crack and whine of fireworks. The scenes were repeated as Qiu Zhonghui won the women’s singles and then again as Zhuang beat his young rival Li Furong in the men’s final. The only moment the applause was equaled was when Chairman Mao was spotted inside the stadium. “He got a huge reception,” remembered a player. “Everyone stood up to clap in his honor, including Mao himself.”
In order to obscure the harshness of the crowd’s reaction in the final, the only team Zhou Enlai hosted a good-bye party for were the Japanese, most likely thinking of his shipping needs. Before departing, the ITTF delegates met one more time, and President Montagu was “reelected without any other nominations.” He’d stood and congratulated “China’s fledglings” such as Zhuang Zedong, who had showed “themselves to be daring, willing to learn, modest in victory and undaunted in defeat”—although they hadn’t needed to be undaunted in defeat. At long last, China had seen nothing but success.
CHAPTER 25 | Fallout
From any sporting standard, the Beijing World Championships were a stunning accomplishment. Normally an international sporting event such as the Olympics is aimed as a show of strength to the rest of the world. The 1961 World Championships were even more important as a domestic statement because they implied that the sacrifices made had been worth it. The Great Leap Forward had driven the country to the edge of yet another rift, but the lie had held: progress was being made. There were many, like the head of the British Mission, who shrugged off the World Championships as “a not entirely negligible fillip to the regime.” That was missing the bigger point. Propaganda is often about hiding, not making news. The death of somewhere between 17 and 45 million Chinese remained an internal secret.
Not even the depth of the split between Russia and China had been revealed. Though it was well known even to midrankers in the party, the crowd had betrayed little to foreign journalists except a very predictable prejudice. England’s Ian Harrison had been the darling of Beijing on April 5 when he came up against Ogimura and, against all expectations, took the Japanese to five games and won. His victory caused “the great roar of China.” Yet, the following day, when Ian Harrison beat a Russian player, “you could have heard a lotus blossom drop.” “There was no room for doubt where the Chinese spectators’ sympathies lay—and it certainly wasn’t with England.” This suited Zhou Enlai perfectly. While China continued to find its path to independence, it was far better to be thought to be standing under Russia’s nuclear umbrella. It helped show China’s dealings with the West from a position of strength.
There were a few grievances in the foreign presses, but from a propaganda standpoint, the tournament had been a heady success. Even those who shed their roles as thankful guests to criticize the hosts were looking in the wrong direction. There were complaints about the airplanes, the quality of the food, and that the country was made up of “650 million blue ants.” To their horror, the British journalists had explored an entire commune and failed to find a single pub.
Those who did travel farther did so with the permission of the Chinese and cheerfully parroted government statistics. A Daily Worker journalist declared that 300 percent increases on national target figures “seem to be well within the area of possibility.” Edgar Snow, who had slept on a Ping-Pong table in China thirty years before, was back again and saw no indications of famine anywhere he went. But the novelist and doctor Han Suyin had seen signs of berib
eri throughout Beijing; “the swollen faces were obvious.” She couldn’t bring herself to write about it for another nineteen years. It was a question of saving face. At a time when “the whole world seemed to rise with glee to threaten China,” she considered it her duty to start “lying through my teeth (with a smile) to the diplomats and the newsmen who probed.” All was good in the world; all was good in China.
As far as Cold War score-keeping was concerned, the spring of 1961 continued an excellent run of results for the red team. Within a week of the end of the tournament, it was clear that Fidel Castro had successfully repelled the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Zhou Enlai lent his support in speaking out against “The United States imperialists [who] have no scruples in shattering world peace and in dragging their people into war.” Gagarin still dominated the news, and then, on April 23, the French Army revolted in Algeria, yet another indication of colonial powers faltering.
There were very few signs that journalists had discovered anything at all about the famine in China. One Japanese photographer, who had followed his team beyond Beijing in the wake of the World Championships, did note that:
Almost all the people in their fifties and above that I saw in the cities and the countryside were depressed. I tried to have talks with some of them but they were reluctant to answer my questions for fear of something. They seem resigned to their fates under a regime they did not understand.
Members of the British Foreign Service in Hong Kong were among the few who suspected a mass famine in China. The freight trains bringing produce into Hong Kong from the mainland were marked with their province of origin. The British weighed every pig and chicken, noting their frail state against past plumpness. They suspected the death toll must be huge. But what good was empirical data against a well-publicized interview? The same week the players left China, Viscount Montgomery spoke to the Sydney Morning Herald. He talked of his own visit to China months before, calling Mao “a genuine democrat,” insisting that “China is closely allied to Russia,” and concluding that “life is much better now than under the emperors [because] at least they have enough to eat.” Zhou Enlai couldn’t have written a better defense himself.
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