Ping-Pong Diplomacy

by Nicholas Griffin

  With the Beijing World Championships, the Chinese learned that Ping-Pong was a palatable digestive—Communism seemed softer, just as Montagu had predicted. Friends had indeed been made, and this was certainly a factor when the time would come for 1971’s Ping-Pong diplomacy.

  The other events of 1961 would have repercussions on China’s doorstep. President Kennedy had also learned something that spring. The Bay of Pigs fiasco had sent a worrying signal that America was capable of pathetic disorganization. Worse was to come. With Cuba now having proof of aggressive American intentions, Castro would goad Russia into supplying the Caribbean island with nuclear missiles. Within the year, the world would be poised on the edge of nuclear war. After the threat had passed, America flexed her muscles and escalated her role in Vietnam, tripling the number of American advisers in 1961 and then again in 1962. For China, it was enough to make the United States the number-one enemy. The Chinese feared that a US-sponsored victory in Vietnam would leave them surrounded on all sides—by the United States, Taiwan, India, Japan, and the Soviet Union. The silence between China and America was becoming very loud.

  CHAPTER 26 | Heroes of the Nation

  For the victorious Chinese players, these were heady times. Not only had the men won the Swaythling Cup, but Zhuang Zedong had beaten his own teammate Li Furong to win the singles title. Qiu Zhonghui had taken the women’s title.

  More important, the famine had lifted, and the players could begin to enjoy themselves without having to equivocate between their success and the state of the nation. Thanks to Rong Guotuan, Ping-Pong had achieved real popularity in 1959, but now, in the summer of 1961, it became a full-blown craze. Crowds gathered around stone tables in the parks. Wherever you walked, you could see Ping-Pong bats “kept down the back of people’s trousers.” In the streets of Beijing, students shuffled to school making short punches through the air with imaginary racquets.

  Zhuang Xieling, one of the members of the victorious men’s team, remembered leaving his apartment in a gleaming white shirt. By the time he returned home, the shirt was covered with handprints and finger stains. Everyone thought it was good luck to touch the world champion. Qiu said she was lucky “to have a plain face.” In public she wore a scarf to mask her appearance. “Rong was too distinctive looking,” she said, and had to wander through the city in a face mask.

  The table tennis players, whose victories had been followed by millions, had become celebrities, but they were Communist celebrities, in many ways created and nurtured by the state. All the players knew that they weren’t simply Chinese; they were representatives of the Communist Party whether they were party members or not.

  The players received pay raises, but these amounted to a handful of dollars a month, significant, but a pittance in comparison with modern wages. They were also famed for remaining humble, signing “table tennis player” beneath their autographs as if they still had to explain who they were.

  The players became a reflection of Zhou Enlai’s and Chen Yi’s foreign policy. In 1962, they were sent, with Rong Guotuan as their captain, to tour Guinea, Mali, Ghana, the United Arab Republic, and Sudan for two months, part of Zhou Enlai’s burgeoning strategy to forge a bloc of developing countries independent of the United States and the Soviet Union. Since the PRC was still not recognized by the UN, sports visits were one of the only ways Zhou Enlai saw to help foster diplomatic relations. In Ghana, the one match the Chinese lost was against the chairman of its Table Tennis Federation, who also happened to be the minister of defense.

  Members of Fu’s squad were now both world champions and diplomats, polished by the International Cooperation Department of the National Sports Commission, where they were coached in table manners and propriety. Nevertheless, things didn’t always go smoothly. At a banquet at the World Championships in Yugoslavia in 1965, they were faced with chicken legs and knives and forks. One player cut down heavily into the bone; the plate “was propelled into the air” and neatly caught by another player across the table.

  Players who traveled to represent China were given a huge three-hundred-yuan allowance, but it had to stretch over three years. Tailors would cut them bespoke Mao suits. They were measured for shirts and shoes. When they returned to Beijing, the Mao suits would have to be returned for others to use, unless the players had saved up enough money to buy their suit at a discount. Even the shirts weren’t always full shirts. Sometimes they were just cotton patches that could be easily detached, washed, and dried. Abroad, players received twenty yuan each in pocket money—again, a lot of money to them, though it was no more than what Hank Aaron might add as a tip to a postgame meal.

  The Chinese approach to diplomacy wasn’t always welcome. In the summer of 1966, four Chinese table tennis players were arrested in Tunisia. They’d come over to teach the sport, “but used every opportunity to enlighten young Tunisians on the thoughts of Chairman Mao Tse Tung.” Finally, a player watched by Tunisian authorities was intercepted, interrogated by police, and returned to the Chinese embassy. Diplomatic relations were immediately suspended.

  The most famous players of the new generation were Zhuang Zedong and Li Furong. They had been doubles partners at fifteen years old. At first glance, they seemed like good friends. They were photogenic, and Li Furong was known as the Handsome Bomber. Together they led Chinese domination of the next two World Championships, with the squad providing nearly all of the semifinalists. In three consecutive championships, Zhuang Zedong and Li Furong faced off across the table in the men’s final.

  Individual gold, it was now decided by the Chinese government, should reflect each player’s efforts for the team. Zhuang won his first medal over Li in 1961 because he had secured the vital victory over Ogi. That gold was a reward ordered from above. In 1963, Zhuang won more victories for the team than any other player and was allowed to beat Li in the gold medal game again. Yet when Li starred for the Chinese squad in 1965, winning more games than all of his teammates, he was directed to lose to Zhuang in the final. At the last moment, it had been decided that it reflected better on China to have Zhuang win three golds in a row. Zhuang benefited, and Li bowed his head to Montagu to accept the silver yet again. It would have been of small consolation to Li that he was the crowd favorite and that his ovation always overwhelmed Zhuang’s. The squad gave him the teasing honorific of “younger brother.”

  During championships, the traveling table tennis players were now pampered by China’s embassies and their chefs as if they were diplomats. It became “almost routine for the Chinese to descend on world tourneys with a contingent of forty or more—by far the largest—that included players, newsmen, photographers, delegates, propagandizing interpreters, masseurs, cooks and even laundrymen.”

  The players of the table tennis team became national heroes, second only to Mao’s warrior statesmen who had founded New China. The squad met with these otherwise elusive government leaders twice a week and every day during important national holidays. Both He Long and Zhou Enlai hosted dinners in their houses for top players. It was a distillation of Montagu’s dreams. The only guests at the dinners were Ping-Pong players and officials from the Foreign Ministry. In front of strangers, Zhou would often hide the crooked arm that he had broken back in Yan’an, but with the table tennis team he felt comfortable enough to exhibit it.

  To visit with the premier was always considered like “a visit to one’s own family, so simple, with no protocol of any kind.” The only extravagance in his home was the number of books on the shelves. In the living room, there were no antiques or curios, just worn sofas, rattan chairs, and a cheap carpet. Players who excused themselves to the bathroom had to walk through the premier’s bedroom and would catch a glimpse of the two “small wooden twin beds, old blankets, no carpet on the floor, a wash basin, a desk with a lamp.”

  Qiu Zhonghui remembered the moment when she first stepped foot in Zhou Enlai’s kitchen. The premier stood beside Qiu with his sleeves rolled up, “making these special little meatba
lls. They’re called the lion’s head.” Privately, the table tennis team called Zhou Enlai “the good premier.”

  At He Long’s house, they’d gather around the table, and the mustachioed general would pour drinks for them all. With Qiu, he’d use terms of affection normally reserved for a daughter or a niece.

  In the summers, when they weren’t representing China abroad, the teams would travel to Beihaide, where the Communist Party elite summered on the wide beaches of the Bohai Sea. Originally developed by the British, Beihaide was lined by plum trees and close to both forests that could be scoured for mushrooms and its famous shallow waters that vacationers waded into to escape the heat. All the leaders gathered on the beaches, including Chairman Mao and his wife, Jiang Qing. Mao never got over the embarrassment that his wife’s “right foot had six toes.” She “kept her feet covered with rubber shoes even when she waded into the ocean.” It was she, as much as anyone, who would ultimately determine the fate of the Ping-Pong squad.

  At night the team was invited to dances with the top officials, the same dances Mao had been hosting for the Communist elite for more than thirty years. Zhou Enlai always attended with the two other stalwarts, Chen Yi and He Long. He glided along, preferring the waltz. He Long, with his scarred feet, could only sit and watch. Zhu De “danced alone in place, tranquilly waddling to one side like a bear, right foot, left foot.” Even dancing could be dangerous. Zhou was once accused of favoring a turn to the right. When Mao arrived to shuffle stiffly around the dance floor with women thirty or forty years his junior, Zhou would retire for the night.

  Table tennis was very much the precursor to China’s latest sporting policy. Zhou Enlai’s political aspirations for China lay behind the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), an alternative Olympics that would be hosted first by Indonesia in 1963 in direct opposition to the IOC. If table tennis had been used as a wedge to create a fresh space between Russian and American sporting and political dominance, then the GANEFO was supposed to widen it. Fifty-one countries sent twenty-five hundred athletes into Jakarta. China would dominate, a perfect promotion of Beijing as “the leader of world revolution” against imperialism. Among the most lauded of the athletes was a North Vietnamese sharpshooter “already famous for his part in downing many US pirate planes,” who went on to win gold in the 50-meter pistol competition.

  In the 1960s, Ping-Pong was fast becoming the quickest way to read China’s political intentions in the greater world. The team moved around the globe like the phantom hand of Zhou Enlai, kind to those they were instructed to be kind to, turning their backs on others, refusing to play against some countries altogether. Considering that not all of America’s China watchers believed in the Sino-Soviet split, they would have been better off watching Ivor Montagu than dissecting the Chinese media. In 1965, a furious argument between a Russian and Chinese player erupted during the World Championships over a service from a Chinese player that the top-ranked Russian deemed illegal. Insults were traded, accusations were made, and Montagu himself came to play peacemaker. Western news coverage, of which there was little, presumed the episode stemmed from a personality clash, but in the Chinese squad, there was no such thing.

  The incident was the perfect reflection of China’s growing disdain for the Soviet Union. The Kremlin may have regarded itself as the center of the Communist world, but to Mao and Zhou they were now revisionists with imperialist tendencies. In fact, Russia was quickly becoming as repellent to China as America itself. Thanks to the successful nuclear test of 1964, pointedly conducted during the Tokyo Olympics, China was feeling worthy of independence. There were few, and none of them vocal, who would see the larger picture; China was quickly backing itself into a solitary corner with barely a friend in the world.

  CHAPTER 27 | Spreading the Gospel

  Before Ogimura, the deposed world champion, left Beijing in 1961, he gave an interview to Radio Peking chastising the Chinese players for their lack of sportsmanship. They had pushed the rules to their limits, consulted coaches in the middle of games, saturated the competition with their own players, played for time. Ogimura crashed out early in the men’s singles and flew back to Tokyo, confused. Japanese domination had ended in a flash, but how on earth had the Chinese ripped the sport of table tennis from Japanese hands?

  Ogi was about to find out the answers to all of his questions. In the spring of 1962, an invitation arrived in Tokyo. Would Mr. Ichiro Ogimura care to return to Beijing to make a personal visit to the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai? Ogi knew that Zhou Enlai “was known for his fanatical love of table tennis” and had heard the rumor that the Chinese premier always carried two briefcases. One was said to be filled with official documents, the second “with papers and books on his favorite sport.” Back in Yan’an, he’d been told that Mao and Zhou had played table tennis through Chiang Kai-shek’s bombing raids inside one of the roomier caves that made up their wartime capital.

  The government compound of Zhongnanhai neighbored the Forbidden City, part of the same system of man-made lakes, garden paths, guesthouses, and vermilion walls that had housed six hundred years of emperors. The one thing that Ichiro Ogimura would have noticed as he walked through the compound was a gleaming table tennis table in the wide corridor that led to Mao Zedong’s door.

  That afternoon, Ogi lunched with Zhou Enlai in his home. They sat together, sipping soup. Finally, Ogi could stand it no longer. “Why am I here?” he asked. Zhou smiled and answered with a question. “Do you know that Chinese women practiced the art of foot binding?” Ogi admitted he knew of the practice.

  Zhou said, “In the end, foot binding makes girls physically frail, and children born of women whose feet have been bound also have poor physiques. This custom created a vicious circle for our people.” Table tennis was a way out. It could be played anywhere in China, at any time, by anyone, explained Zhou. “There’s another reason which is embarrassing for us.”

  Ogi nodded and waited for the premier to continue. “Ever since the Opium Wars, we have suffered many humiliating experiences. We reasoned that sport is a way to wipe away the sense of inferiority created by these humiliations.” Wasn’t that what Ogi had done for Japan?, asked the premier. And physically, what was the difference between Chinese and Japanese? “That’s why I want you, Mr. Ogimura, to use your experience and ability to convey the wonder of Table Tennis to the people of this country.”

  It was strange enough to be greeted and treated so well by the premier of the world’s most populous country, but Ogi was truly puzzled when they went together to visit the Chinese national team. The premier talked not just of Ping-Pong but of politics with the team.

  Ogi looked around and saw that the room was piled to the ceiling with books and documents about table tennis, “most of them relating to Japan.” They had films of him dating back to 1956. They had bought a copy of his graduation project from Nihon University, a short film called Japanese Table Tennis. They had been studying him for years without his knowledge. Ogi was stunned.

  Zhuang Zedong came up to shake his hand, one world champion to another. No partisan crowds, just a pair of obsessives. “You know,” said Zhuang, “your film was the perfect textbook for us.” In the film, Ogi had rallied with Tanaka, another Japanese world champion. “Watching the two of you practice made us realize that you don’t just swing a table tennis racquet with your arms, you hit the ball with your feet.” Zhuang explained that five years earlier, when he was just a student, he had heard that National Sports Commission officials were going to have a screening of Ogi’s film. He tried to sneak in and was stopped by a doorman. He had bowed and scraped “and fallen to his knees and eventually he’d let me in. Once I saw that film, you became my mentor, Mr. Ogimura.” It was a strange revelation. Without ever meeting, Ogi had helped a young pretender develop a game specifically aimed at defeating the Japanese.

  By the time of Ogi’s return to Japan, he had traveled throughout China, coaching everyone from farmers to schoolchildren. Back in
Tokyo, he despaired for Japan. A place now existed where coaches thought “about table tennis 24 hours a day.” Promising players had eight hours a day at the tables. He even liked the lexicon that the Chinese had developed around the game. The service was now called a launch, the first chance to attack. The Japanese had been too soft in adopting the English word for service.

  A year later, just after his thirtieth birthday, Ogimura captained the Japanese team against China in Prague in the 1963 World Championships. The Japanese were humiliated five to one. In the men’s singles, six out of eight of the men’s quarterfinalists and all the semifinalists were Chinese. The same two players, Zhuang Zedong and Li Furong, would contest the final again, and it was Ogimura’s own accidental progeny, Zhuang Zedong, who would win.

  China’s love for table tennis still bemused Westerners, including those in Beijing at the British Mission. One Foreign Office memo from June 9, 1964, quoted an editorial that claimed the Chinese team’s success was “due to the fact that they have raised high the great banner of Mao Tse-tung’s thought.” The British diplomat explained to his London colleague, “Lest you should think they used Volume One of Mao’s Works instead of a bat,” that the Chinese players had actually developed their table tennis technique “in accordance with the party policy to ‘let a Hundred Flowers Bloom.’ ” The letter concluded, “Flowers sometimes bloom in strange places in China.”