Ping-Pong Diplomacy

by Nicholas Griffin

  In the winter of 1964, he received a letter from his mother. The local doctor had diagnosed her with cancer. Zhuang Zedong, the top Ping-Pong player in the world, offered him help. With Liang balanced on the handlebars of Zhuang’s bicycle, the two players pedaled around Beijing until they found a doctor willing to prescribe a radical treatment, pills that were a mixture of mercury and arsenic. Eighteen months later, she seemed to have made a complete recovery. How could Liang take part in any action against “a truly openhearted person”?

  Dozens of Red Guards forced themselves into Zhuang’s house. They went through every shelf and every drawer, and sat in small groups intently reading his letters. In a time when even a word could be used against you, Liang was right to worry on Zhuang’s behalf. Anything that represented the Four Olds could be destroyed or, worse still, used to prove that you had been running down the capitalist road to a bourgeois life. Calligraphy was shredded, antiques broken, letters and family photographs torn up. Liang looked on in horror. “They emptied the place, took everything away.”

  Back in the table tennis halls, another division could be seen. In the conservative group, a new line was drawn between the reckless and those who feared retribution. Practicing table tennis had been banned. The national sport was in danger, but the most daring waited until the Red Guards had left for the day, then kicked their clothes off tables, cleared their belongings out of the way, and continued to play. They locked doors that had been ordered kept open and batted the ball back and forth.

  When the Red Guards returned, the players hid their racquets and sat beside them. Together, along with the rest of Beijing, they busied themselves writing “big character posters.” These large pieces of paper were posted in public places to praise Mao, denounce a stranger, defend an ally. They’d been used since imperial times, but now they were being produced in their millions. The remainder of the time, the squad studied Mao’s essay The Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War. Mao’s thoughts could win them more victories—yet they could only prove it if they were allowed to play.

  The team had hoped that once the Red Guards began to drift out of Beijing, there would still be enough time to travel to Sweden for the 1967 World Table Tennis Championships. Their first champion, Rong Guotuan, sat down with some of the more established players and wrote a letter to the National Sports Commission. Its receipt wasn’t acknowledged, but there was pointed interest in who had written it. Even though the numbers of Red Guards were finally dwindling in the city, this didn’t mean that the Cultural Revolution was concluding.

  CHAPTER 30 | House of Cards

  In China, the weakest position both in imperial days and under the Communists was to be alone without a patron, vulnerable to either side. The table tennis squad was still protected by the men who had used it as an extension of politics and international relations. But one by one, their positions were weakened. He Long, who had never liked Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, now faced retribution. In front of a meeting of twenty thousand supporters that month in Beijing, Jiang called He Long a traitor. He Long appealed directly to Mao. “There’s never been any trouble about you,” said the Chairman to his face, knowing full well that He Long had refused to condemn Mao’s enemy Peng when he’d been placed in charge of investigating him. Still, He Long’s friend Zhou Enlai preferred to act cautiously. He found a safe house in the hills north of Beijing and discreetly moved He Long and his family there during the cover of a winter night.

  Jiang successfully chipped away at her husband’s support of He Long. Dozens of Red Guards rushed to He Long’s apartment, and the police were ordered to let them pass. His safe was discovered and “more than 1000 confidential documents” were seized.

  Within days, He Long’s hideout was discovered. At the age of sixty-nine and diabetic, He was sent to “struggle sessions,” a form of punishment the Chinese had adopted from Soviet Russia where the accused would submit to a public self-criticism often accompanied by violence. He Long was “beaten regularly, being first wrapped in a blanket so that the welts would not show.” Insulin was withheld, and he received glucose injections instead, “a sure process of medical murder.” During the height of the summer, he and his wife were pent up in their courtyard house without water and given a total of 3 cents a day to buy their food. The older guards would hum revolutionary songs over the walls so that He Long would know he was not forgotten. For two years, he would remain under house arrest, finally dying in June 1969 as a result of his untreated diabetes.

  Chen Yi, He Long’s fellow marshal and Ping-Pong enthusiast, also suffered. Despite being foreign minister, he was dragged to struggle sessions with a dunce cap on his head. On orders from Jiang Qing, ten thousand Red Guards chanted Chen’s name every night from their encampment near the leadership compound.

  Chen Yi did not go quietly. Some days he would walk up to the gate, shouting back at the mob that it was made up of “ignorant children,” “wahwah” babies who still wore slit pants. He said to them, “If you want to go make revolution, why don’t you go and fight in Vietnam?”

  Again and again, Chen was called into struggle sessions, ordered to give an account of his political missteps, screamed at and humiliated. He would go straight from struggle sessions to his house, wash, change his clothes, and head out to diplomatic receptions. On other nights, before finally heading to bed, his old friend Zhou Enlai would approach the gates and try to reason quietly with the Red Guards in Chen’s defense.

  Chen Yi was not merely one of Zhou Enlai’s oldest friends; Zhou had also entrusted Chen with his adopted daughter, who worked for the marshal in the Foreign Ministry. Speaking immaculate Russian, she had translated for Mao. Arrested as an underling of Chen, she was ordered to turn on her boss. Despite all of Zhou’s efforts, he couldn’t find where she was being held. The first news he had of her was eight months later when he learned she had died in jail. He demanded an inquest and received the following reply: “Dealt with as counterrevolutionary. Cremated. Ashes not kept.” If Jiang Qing was behind the death, as all of Beijing suspected, then the message was clear: she was aiming to topple Zhou Enlai.

  Zhou Enlai was China’s number three. To be sitting in the seat of heir apparent was traditionally a dangerous place. Liu Shaoqi, Mao’s second-in-command and formal head of state, had already been arrested. He had been guilty of criticizing Mao after the failure of the Great Leap Forward and was now undergoing intense struggle sessions, humiliated in front of tens of thousands of Red Guards. His wife suffered at his side, a string of Ping-Pong balls around her neck to mock her for having worn pearls on a state visit. The necklace was a personal touch from Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. Liu would die “covered in his own vomit and diarrhea,” rotting slowly alone, just as He Long had done.

  If Mao was worried about the maintenance of power and his legacy, Jiang Qing was concerned with positioning herself as the Chairman’s heir. Even Zhou Enlai was not immune. By May 1967, Mao’s wife had stirred up an old story, accusing him of “anti-Communist sentiment.” On August 17, 1967, while trying to defend Chen Yi, he suffered a minor heart attack. By the time he had recovered, the Foreign Ministry had been seized and the British Mission burned to the ground.

  The Russian Embassy was under siege as well. Soviet diplomats were attacked by Red Guards, who rolled their cars over and forced them to crawl under posters of Chairman Mao. Ten thousand Red Guards were rumored to have defecated inside the embassy grounds.

  Jiang Qing worked alongside three other rising stars of the radical elite. Together they were known as the Gang of Four, setting fires at a pace that outdid Zhou Enlai’s ability to put them out. How to choose who to defend? Zhou had failed his only child. He had successfully defended Chen Yi’s life, if not his position. And what had he been able to do for He Long, one of his oldest comrades? Every afternoon for years, He Long had visited Zhou, putting out his pipe before entering the premier’s house. They had shared a small glass of mao-tai together, and Zhou Enlai had stretched his bad
arm out, playing table tennis while He Long looked on.

  All across the country, the two sides claiming to act in Mao’s name exploded into direct conflict. Jiang Qing told the Red Guards that if they needed to criticize and replace members of the army, then so be it. Barracks were looted of weapons, and pitched battles were fought in Beijing and Shanghai. From the players’ perspective, it seemed as though the concerns of the nation were now so large that they were no more than a forgotten cog. Perhaps even without a protector, they might still escape unharmed.

  In schools and factories across China conflict was the rule, not the exception. Situations escalated from poster battles to beatings, to gunfights up and down streets. The marshals were furious that Mao had encouraged discord. A group had been rumored to have confronted him, led by an aging Zhu De banging his cane against the floor. Soon even Zhu De’s name appeared on big character posters calling him the Black General who had dared to declare himself the founder of the Red Army. The message was clear: only Mao was above the fray.

  At the end of 1968 would come the relief of the Down to the Countryside campaign, where the army would regain the upper hand against the young mobs as Mao ordered millions of students out to be reeducated by the peasants. On Mao’s orders, the army entered every institution in China in an attempt to restore a semblance of order. But Jiang Qing had prepared yet another campaign, Clean Up the Class Ranks. This time it would devastate the table tennis team.

  The entire sports system was suddenly accused of being “full of spies, traitors and capitalist roaders.” Table tennis was a convenient target. Everything foreign remained under suspicion, and one of the easiest attributes to identify was a Hong Kong childhood. The table tennis team was accused of being a hotbed of spies. Schoolchildren dragged their Ping-Pong tables outside and smashed them into splinters. The struggle sessions against the players started at once and grew in intensity. The first to undergo interrogation were the three heroes of China’s original Ping-Pong glory: Jiang Yongning, the pioneer who had come across from Hong Kong in 1953, Fu Qifang, the finest coach in the world, and Rong Guotuan, the first person to have won China a gold medal.

  As ever, the pincers exerted political pressure as they crushed their way toward their true targets. Zheng Mingzhi, one of the best players on the women’s team, was made to stand up in a small-scale struggle meeting. “I said, ‘I’m a player. It’s my duty to try and win glory for China.’ I told them I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong.” This was incorrect; it showed an impurity of thought. What she was guilty of, what most Chinese Ping-Pong players were still guilty of, was “trophyism.” To believe that the purpose of sport was to obtain trophies was “revisionist thinking.” Players like Zheng, though not detained, were forced to stay in their dorm rooms and were given only one book to read, The Complete Works of Chairman Mao. They studied it for a few days, were checked on constantly, were expected to be reading it both day and night, and then they were called again to another struggle meeting. Detailed notes were taken for their files to help interrogators offer judgment on their political progression.

  The entire squad’s sanity was under attack. Orders to parade might arrive at one in the morning, and the players would rush into their clothes. In the dead of night, the finest players in China would find themselves shivering along dark avenues. Xi Enting marched alongside his teammates through Beijing’s streets shouting the words of Chairman Mao. Even worse for Xi, because he was the strongest of all the players, he’d have the responsibility of dragging around a heavy cart covered in big character posters aimed at either praising Chairman Mao or denouncing someone new. They also carried players’ confessions, often a mixture of self-critique and sharp accusation. “Every now and then we’d be ordered to stop,” said Xi. “They’d make us do this ‘Be Loyal to Chairman Mao’ dance.” Then Xi would pick up the handles of the heavy cart and drag it down another avenue.

  CHAPTER 31 | Death to the Doubters

  As Xi Enting walked at midnight, chanting the songs, moving his feet in steps faithful to Chairman Mao, he mostly thought of how his best years as an athlete were passing him by. “I felt like a piece of bamboo that somebody kept cutting back every time it started to grow.” In Stockholm, at the World Championships the previous summer, a huge poster of Xi had been hung from the girders of the stadium, but the Chinese team never arrived.

  It was now declared that any player who had ever won a medal at the World Championships would have to come forward for criticism. The fact that Xi hadn’t been able to go to Sweden the previous year was, for a brief moment, a benediction. “The more honor you’d brought to the nation the more you were criticized, because you were considered favored.”

  It was an inevitability that death was coming to the squad. Why not? It had come to all ranks, to the cities and the countryside. By now, more than a million people had died in the upheaval. Criticism in the Cultural Revolution was fantastically inconsistent, mostly because few knew who was giving the orders. Who could protect you? Who could you turn to? Some were dragged up for criticism just once; some would suffer again and again. Some would be tortured, some incarcerated, some driven to suicide, and some beaten to death. It meant that when your name appeared on a big character poster and you were called to enter the crucible, you had no idea what the limits of your persecution would be. Players would pause in front of the posters, analyzing them, trying to recognize calligraphy.

  If success was a crime, then Zhuang Zedong was the guiltiest of all, covered in glory and gold, he was the most famous young man in China. Frequently, his name would appear on the posters, and he would follow his persecutors through the doors to attend struggle sessions. As the insults and accusations were hurled, Zhuang was ordered to bend forward. It was a position called “the airplane” that would become one of the symbols of the Cultural Revolution. The accused were force to squat down and throw their arms up behind them with their heads held high into “something like the position of a swimmer about to do a racing dive. It stiffens the back and every time you try to straighten, you get punched in the stomach and your head is forced back again.”

  Conversations Zhuang barely remembered were turned against him. In Japan for a match years before, a guide had taken the Chinese to the coast and told the team that it was the closest point to Taiwan. “So near?” Zhuang had asked. The conversation was used as proof that Zhuang wanted to join his sister who lived in Taiwan. After all, they rebuked him, wasn’t his grandfather once known as the king of the Shanghai landlords? Shouldn’t Zhuang confess that he was aching “to collude with the enemy to commit treason”? Half of his hair was shaved off so that he had “yin-yang head,” a walking admission of guilt.

  When Zhuang returned to the dormitories at the end of the day, he would give his teammates tips about what to expect and how to handle it. When you’re in the truck, you’ve got to sit this way. When they put you on the stage, “you keep your head down, your legs relaxed, and you try to relax your neck.” Xi Enting, one of his roommates that year, watched him walk in from a struggle session, sit at the table, down an enormous plate of food, and then retire to their room. By the time Xi joined him, Zhuang “was snoring away.”

  Not everyone could deal with the inquisitions as easily as Zhuang Zedong. Across Beijing and Shanghai the suicide rates remained high. The Ping-Pong spy, Zhuang Jiafu, who had been so instrumental in China’s victory over the Japanese in 1961, was detained for one month. He was accused of espionage, of having visited Hong Kong for nefarious reasons. Any affiliation with Hong Kong whatsoever often led to horrific torture. One man accused merely of having a relative in the British colony was “hung over a tree branch with his ten fingers tightly fastened by flaxen threads . . . his fingers lengthened, bit by bit, until they were doubly long.”

  Zhuang Jiafu’s story as a Ping-Pong spy was pored over. “I thought of suicide. Yes, I did. But I thought it would look more like an admission of guilt.” Suicide, like murder, was a political crime for party memb
ers. The notion would be absurd but for how detailed the millions of individual files being compiled were and how the actions of a grandparent could still limit the progress of a grandchild. Every perceived crime had a genuine echo. But how could people not think of suicide when some of the tortures were so cruel? There was “duck swims on dry land,” when victims had the skin on the soles of their feet removed by an iron brush, and “smoking anus,” when the accused was made to sit on lit cigarettes.

  Fu Qifang, easily the most successful coach in the history of the game, was next in line. Struggle session after struggle session ensued. Beaten by teammates, “humiliated and slapped by younger players,” he waited until the table tennis team left for morning exercises on April 16, and then hanged himself from a curtain rod. The fleeting optimism he had felt sitting at Ogimura’s side the year before had long since gone.

  The next to die was the first to have arrived. Back in 1953, Jiang Yongning had been the Ping-Pong pioneer, the first Hong Kongese to have trusted He Long and Chen Yi and returned to China to help their struggling table tennis team. In Jiang’s room, investigators had found a photograph of him as a child, dressed up in a shirt “emblazoned with a Japanese flag.” No context was necessary. The Red Guards didn’t pause to remember that Hong Kong had been taken over by the Japanese in 1941, or that as a five-year-old, Jiang wouldn’t have known the differences between any two flags. Besides, he was famed among teammates for poring over newspapers, a habit now labeled “intelligence gathering.” This was a clear sign that he had spied for Japan. On May 16, he was found hanged in his fourth-floor dormitory.