Ping-Pong Diplomacy

by Nicholas Griffin

  In the spring of 1964, the National Sports Commission was worried that the Chinese women would fail to take gold in the approaching World Championships in Yugoslavia. Xu Yinsheng, the top men’s double player, partner of Zhuang Zedong, was asked to give a speech to the women’s team. “I never thought anyone would write it down,” he said. The speech was typed up and sent to He Long. He made a few notes in the margins and sent it on to Chairman Mao. Mao added a few notes of his own, including the comment that he had “not read anything so good for years. What he talks about is a ball game; what we can learn from it are theory, politics, economy, culture, and military affairs. If we do not learn from the young ‘generals,’ we shall be doomed.”

  Chairman Mao, the great believer in continuous revolution, student of Marx and Lenin, the man who had driven China back to unity, was transfixed by the words of a Ping-Pong player. The sixteen-page tract, entitled On How to Play Table Tennis, was sent to the highest officials in every province. Within a week, the entire speech was reprinted in the People’s Daily. Millions of copies were distributed and carefully digested. “Mao made everyone read Xu Yinsheng,” a retired official explained. “And I mean everyone.”

  The essay was, in retrospect, one of the very earliest signs of what was to come during the Cultural Revolution. “To rely entirely on the team leader or coach does not necessarily make for a good game,” Xu wrote. If you just accepted a coach’s regimen as perfect, and never challenged it, then the coach would stagnate and foreign competition would catch up. “Have the guts to speak out and state your views,” Xu urged. “If politics are not in command, you cannot play a good game.” Xu had made the connection between politics and Ping-Pong more explicit than ever. “We should realize that small though a table tennis ball is in size, its implications are great.”

  Just because he had written the greatest political tract of the year didn’t mean Xu Yinsheng could avoid the coming typhoon. By endorsing Xu’s point of view, Mao was at his most cunning. The essay made two points. One, that Mao himself was above criticism. His thoughts alone could bring victory. If that was true, then it put Mao in a unique position. He could unleash chaos and, as a living god, stand above it, knowing he could descend to restore order once his enemies had fallen.

  Secondly, Xu had made plain that elders should be open to criticism by the generation below, no matter their standing. This key point to the Cultural Revolution didn’t spring from the lips of China’s best doubles player, but it’s clear that what Xu said fit in with Mao’s plan. The established belief—that the first shot was fired by Mao eight months later in 1965, through his wife’s critique of a play that allegedly compared the Chairman to a corrupt emperor—seems wrong. Table tennis as a sport was already central to Chinese culture, and culture was already political. Xu’s words were clear, Mao’s support was obvious, and the message was threatening: let the old men tremble, because a new revolution was coming.

  Mao’s fellow Long Marchers, such heroes of the revolution as Peng Dehuai, Chen Yi, Liu Shaoqi, and even Zhou Enlai, all of whom had dared to doubt the success of the Great Leap Forward and had sought to steer China slowly away from Mao’s ideas, were about to pay the price. Only He Long stood between the players and the whirlpool of political violence.

  The athletes didn’t know that He Long, their protector, had once been handed an assignment by Mao to investigate Peng, the former minister of defense who had confronted Mao in Lushan. Instead of producing a report that criticized Peng, He Long had justified Peng’s actions and dwelled on the failures of the Great Leap Forward. Peng would be one of the first victims of the Cultural Revolution. He Long would not be far behind, and without him, who would protect the nation’s sportsmen?

  The table tennis team believed they had no reason to worry. They had won glory for China again and again. Their consistency was staggering. At the beginning of 1966, Fu Qifang’s squad was perhaps the only thing produced in China that was truly competitive at an international level. The gold medals they brought back to Beijing had turned into a biennial victory parade. After their third victory in a row in 1965, a huge party had been held inside the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai. The players drank and chatted with the country’s top politicians. In the middle of the room on a table sat the Montagu’s family heirloom, the Swaythling Cup, alongside all the other table tennis trophies. The presence of so much silver seemed to suggest a shimmering future. And then Mao flipped China on its head.

  CHAPTER 28 | The Grinding Halt

  If the Great Leap Forward still echoed through China like distant thunder, then the Cultural Revolution arrived like a bolt of lightning to show that the storm hadn’t passed. The next ten years of life in China played out against the Great Leap Forward. Before, it had been easy for Mao to divide the country, always drawing new lines in the sand and accusing groups of being rightists, reactionaries, or counterrevolutionaries. Mao would declare his position and watch China shuffle into line with him.

  In order to consolidate power, Mao’s new strategy would gamble everything on an incredibly divisive campaign. Now he spoke only in muddy aphorisms, letting both sides claim that they were trying to act in his name. On one side was the old guard, symbolized by pragmatic Zhou Enlai; on the other, the younger radicals, headed by the Chairman’s own wife, Jiang Qing. Mao insisted that revisionists were hiding in every level of leadership. They ought to be removed through violent class struggle.

  He would float above, a god who refused to intervene, covertly directing both sides while keeping them in a state of constant tension. It was like watching a man walk two dogs that despised each other, one a tamed Doberman and the other an energetic pit bull eager to bite on command. Back when he had confronted Peng at Lushan, Mao had said, “If others attack me, I always strike back. Others attack me, I attack them later.” Now the time had come.

  The Chinese people were inured to the relentless campaigns of the Communist Party. If your family was lucky enough to avoid scrutiny, then most campaigns were little more than arbitrary privations. In 1964, houseplants and flowers were condemned as bourgeois affectations. Perhaps the Cultural Revolution would be similar. Roads were renamed, which was confusing but hardly life changing. The British Mission now found itself on Anti-Imperialist Road. The Russian ambassador resided on Anti-Revisionism Road. And on those roads, the cars were now encouraged to forge ahead at red lights, the color of the revolution. Cars should also move forward on the left. Only the lightness of traffic kept the city from grinding to a halt.

  The men who had built New China found themselves unexpectedly on the defensive. Suddenly, their revolutionary character was cast in doubt. Mao, to their surprise, announced that the party was being threatened from the inside by a creeping bourgeois mentality. What was really needed, he suggested, was a burst of revolutionary zeal to weed such elements from the party and secure the future of China. The only thing the Cultural Revolution secured was Mao’s position. What it risked was the unity and sanity of a nation. In order to reverse the order of logic in China, Mao chose the most credulous section of the population: the students.

  The young had inherited rather than fought for the revolution. They had been born into a Communist state and learned that the time of revolution had passed them by, and with it, the chance for real achievement. Yet suddenly, the father of the nation was telling them otherwise. It wasn’t too late. Revolution, according to Mao, was continuous.

  Best of all, the young were to be directed against authority figures, just as Xu Yinsheng, the Ping-Pong player, had written. They could test the length of the leash against their own teachers. In schools, ten-year-olds picked up brooms and planks of wood and beat their teachers. The fortunate teachers were humiliated by being made to stand in bathrooms, cleaning the stalls with slogans tied around their necks. The unlucky were beaten with clubs embedded with nails and died in schoolyards. Humiliation could also kill slowly. The suicide rate rocketed in both Shanghai and Beijing. The statistics for the summer of 1966
showed a rise of more than 800 percent over the previous year.

  The table tennis players thought little about the Cultural Revolution when it began. After all, those who had been with the national squad for a while knew that Ping-Pong players weren’t part of everyday society. Any political examination of the players had supposedly been made before they had entered the elite program, “because the purpose of the training is not only to produce champion sportsmen but to help develop a generation of young builders of communism.”

  These days, players vacationed with party leaders, they danced with their wives, they ate the best food in China, because they were the best of China. If the horrors of the Great Leap Forward hadn’t touched them, why would the Cultural Revolution?

  During the first outburst, the table tennis team wasn’t even in Beijing but in the north of Sweden, in a tiny town of twenty thousand people, conducting yet another goodwill tour. When the team returned, not a soul was there to greet them at the airport. Before they left the terminal, Xu Yinsheng, so celebrated the year before, was arrested. When the players reached their dorm rooms, they had been emptied. No washbasin, no quilt—even their carpets had been taken. One player wandered down to the kitchen and found it closed. “Don’t worry,” said one of his teammates, a practice player who had stayed behind. “Every restaurant’s opened its doors. Everything’s free.”

  Across the country, schools were creating their own Red Guard units to practice Mao’s latest revolution. With food and travel for the Red Guards suddenly declared free by Chairman Mao, the limits of the hukou were lifted. A whole generation of people who had been tethered to their birthplace was released. Railway stations across the country filled with Red Guards making their way to the capital. The rumors had already begun. Chairman Mao was willing to meet the Red Guards. He would shake their hands and thank them for their revolutionary attitudes.

  Proof of their loyalty to the Chairman manifested itself in the violence against authority figures, from teachers and parents to factory foremen, from traditional “class enemies” to previously lauded elderly cadres. The initial burst of bloodshed was encouraged by Mao and his wife, Jiang Qing. The truth was that rather than practicing revolution, this was a generation reduced to imitating it. They wore uniforms without joining the army, then deliberately suffered entirely avoidable hardships by trying to replicate the Long March. Thousands turned their noses up at the free trains toward Beijing. They were going to walk to the capital to celebrate their living god. Instead of boots, many wore straw sandals like He Long. They marched through the countryside “at the forced pace of an army at war.”

  When the Red Guards arrived in Beijing, it would have been antirevolutionary to deny them a thing. They had already been blessed by Mao. They needed food, housing, and things to do. When Xi Enting, the game’s latest prodigy, reported to the National Sports Commission one day, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The entire complex had been taken over by the Red Guards. He walked into the practice hall and found Red Guards sleeping on the table tennis tables, under the tables, in the corridors, their battered travel bags pushed up against walls.

  The previous version of reality was being replaced. Ogimura, still a frequent visitor to China, found himself in Beijing in the first weeks of the Cultural Revolution in the summer of 1966, on tour with a small Japanese squad. Walking through the streets, he saw something he had never witnessed before, “a man in a three-cornered hat being marched down a main road with his hands tied behind his back, followed by a mob ringing bells and banging drums.” He walked close enough to learn that this was the manager of a local factory. The pack marching behind him was made up of his own workers.

  That afternoon, Ogi walked past a school and saw a new white statue in the schoolyard—but it was moving. It was the principal, his blue suit completely covered in the “phlegm and saliva” of his students. In his favorite record store, Ogi found “all the records by classic European composers had been smashed on the floor.” They were part of the “Four Olds” that Mao declared due for destruction. Old culture, old habits, old customs, and old ideas. Everything from statues to buildings, books to paintings was busted and broken. Many storefronts had been completely covered by photographs of Mao, the one infallible image.

  Cyclists now taped the Chairman’s quotations to their handlebars. The trees in the streets they rode through were covered in Mao photographs. When they traveled, they found the trains equipped with a loudspeaker in every carriage, spewing endless praise for the great leader. Even the hillsides of China had been carved with Maoist slogans thirty feet high.

  At least table tennis lent an air of stability. In the first competitive match in Beijing, Ogi pitted his touring Japanese squad against the superior Chinese. He could feel the atmosphere in the gymnasium change as soon as the Japanese won several points in a row. A local woman with a megaphone started shouting, “In times of difficulty we must not lose sight of our achievements!” The three thousand spectators watched her. “We must see the bright future!” yelled the woman at the top of her lungs. Suddenly the crowd seemed to respond as one. “We must see the bright future!” When someone with such revolutionary fervor stood up, explained a spectator, you had to go along with it.

  Ogi looked over at the Chinese bench. Fu Qifang glanced at Ogi and then “immediately averted his gaze and stared at the floor.” By now, Fu must have suspected how he was viewed from outside the team; he wasn’t the coach who had led his team to a series of gold medals but an authority figure surrounded by young men and women who might move against him at any moment.

  The Japanese tour continued south toward Guangdong. They found the same Mao posters coating the streets, the same Mao quotations strung above the stadiums. When the Chinese women practiced playing, “they tied Mao slogans to their table tennis nets.” The ball was thwacked back and forth over the Chairman’s sacred words.

  The Japanese team’s final night in China included a good-bye dinner; the two coaches, Fu Qifang and Ogi, were seated next to each other. At the end of the meal, Ogi leaned toward Fu and asked him in English, “What do you think of the Cultural Revolution?”

  Fu looked around him. “The ideals are wonderful,” he said. “I’m getting too old. I’m worried I won’t be able to keep up with this.” Ogi nodded. The talk was innocent enough. But Fu leaned in again toward him. “You and I are good friends united by table tennis, are we not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Someday, there may be a time when I can help you.”

  “Yes, I may need your help one day,” said Ogi.

  “Likewise.” Fu leaned closer. “You may be able to help me now.” At that point, the officials returned to the table. Unable to speak any more to Fu, Ogi sat silently thinking about the stories he’d heard of bodies washing up in Hong Kong as the desperate swam for their lives. The next time Ogi would hear of Coach Fu, Fu would be dead.

  CHAPTER 29 | Under Pressure

  Mao was the center of the Cultural Revolution. The capital filled with “the mock soldiers” dressed in green uniforms, who spent their days buoyed by a sense of revolution, finally partaking in the stories of their parents. Tiananmen Square filled within hours every time a rumor spread that Mao might soon be present. His eight actual appearances were greeted with the same hysteria that the West reserved for the Beatles. Twelve million Red Guards passed through Beijing by the end of the year, all in search of the Chairman’s blessing.

  Fainting teenage girls were carried out of the throngs; boys screamed their adoration as the Chairman rode through the square on the back of a jeep, one hand trailing over the side touching the hands and heads of hundreds of Red Guards. Soldiers wept as the Chairman passed.

  During an athletic meet in the Worker’s Stadium, the encroaching lunacy lent every event a manic shine. Weight lifters consulted Mao’s works before raising their bars, high jumpers held up the Little Red Book of Mao’s aphorisms after successful leaps. Red Guards were allowed to run back and forth across the stadium, han
ding out written slogans to encourage athletes ahead of their races.

  The division in China’s national table tennis squad was at first simple. The most famous of the players were in the “conservative group.” Veterans such as Rong Guotuan and Fu Qifang, now both coaches, and top players, such as Zhuang Zedong and Li Furong, were obviously closer to the officials. They were friendly with Zhou Enlai, He Long, and Chen Yi. They were, or so they thought, standing in the shade of strong trees.

  On the other side of the Ping-Pong split, in what was called the Heaven Group, were the younger players and the practice players—those who had not yet been given a chance or those who would never be given a chance, who had faithfully spent their lives imitating the style of foreign players, using up their bodies in service to their country without recognition. Some of the younger players simply felt bad for their elders. Xu Yinsheng, whose essay had been read by all of China, was locked alone in a room. Xi Enting, one of his protégés, would be allowed to visit, smuggling in love letters from Xu’s girlfriend as well as a pair of scissors to give his mentor a haircut.

  Another of the youngest—and the most promising—was Liang Geliang. He was fairly typical in that he had a lot of admiration for players like Zhuang Zedong, but at seventeen he felt a natural affinity with the youthful Red Guards.

  One day, Liang Geliang heard that the Red Guards were going to raid Zhuang Zedong’s home. What could they find in the home of the finest table tennis player in the world? “I followed the Red Guards down the street,” he remembered. But instead of acting with the Red Guards, Liang hung back. How could he betray Zhuang? Two years earlier, when he was just fifteen years old, Zhuang had helped him. Liang had been of what they called “perfect revolutionary character,” or what we might call dirt-poor. He grew up in the mountains of Jiangsu, the shoeless child of a deaf seamstress. The first newsreel he had ever seen was of China’s 1961 victory in the World Table Tennis Championships. The first time he ever wore shoes was after he had been sent north to Beijing to become a national team member. He shivered so much in training that the coach had bought him a hat and gloves out of his own pocket.