At seven in the morning on June 20, Qiu Zhonghui was still lying in bed. She was now coaching the women’s team alongside Rong Guotuan. The two had engineered victory in the 1965 women’s team championship, the Corbillon Cup, finally dethroning Japan. When a halt had been called to the table tennis program, Qiu had been coordinating with the scientific institute over developing a robotic table tennis arm. For months now, she had been trying to step quietly through the minefield of the Cultural Revolution. It had been a hard time for her, since her husband’s parents had once been ambassadors to that revisionist hotbed, the Soviet Union. She’d been asked by officials to divorce him, but had stood resolute, insisting that neither of them was political. For a year she had been waiting for his release. Though she was only thirty-five, her hair had suddenly turned gray. She rolled over in bed and thought she’d get a few more minutes of sleep, but then she heard a voice screaming. Qiu sat up and listened closely.
“Rong Guotuan is dying, he’s dying! Rong Guotuan is dying!”
She rushed out and ran toward the voice; she found Rong “lying on the ground, covered in a cloth.” Qiu was told that Rong had been cut down from a tree, that he must have hanged himself the night before. “My first reaction was, ‘Impossible.’ It couldn’t be true. He would never do a thing like that.” She knew he had become pensive, no longer laughing and joking around, but they “were in the same group who didn’t support the destruction of things—he wasn’t actually tortured by the people.”
Before a crowd could gather, Qiu pulled back the cloth that covered Rong Guotuan, her friend and teammate for a decade. “I checked his neck, and there were no marks. There was no bruising. No bloodshot eyes and no tongue sticking out.” To Qiu, the story that was released that week—that Rong had decided to take his own life rather than be subjected to yet another humiliating struggle session—seemed false. She never saw the note later discovered in his pocket that purportedly said, “I am not a spy. Please do not suspect me. I have let you down. I treasure my reputation more than my own life.”
There was more than enough reason for a beating. He had been the one who had dared suggest the squad compete in Sweden. He not only possessed a property, his talent, but had been responsible for China’s first gold. In the inverted world of the Cultural Revolution, he was a repeat offender—a man who always wished to compete, who thought in terms of medals, who had traveled in foreign countries and lived in Hong Kong.
Twice, Qiu Zhonghui approached officials in the National Sports Commission with her concerns about Rong Guotuan’s death. Any investigation that might have been considered was discouraged by Rong’s wife. She had their daughter to think of. What good would come of proving that he had been murdered by Red Guards? The more common reaction belonged to Zhuang Zedong. “At the time,” he remembered:
I felt miserable because I was close friends with those who were tortured to death. But on the other hand I had complete trust in Chairman Mao. It was him who started this campaign and I feel my belief in Chairman Mao is bigger than my feeling towards my friends.
Zhuang was thousands of miles away from the aging Ivor Montagu, but the sentiment was identical. Once you bow before a system, the faith must be kept, even if the system is no longer faithful to its original incarnation. Both men had contorted themselves to adhere to their party line. Friends? Well, what were friends compared to the desires of a Stalin or a Mao, men who were always rewriting the verses of their own Bibles?
In the 1950s, Montagu traveled to Prague on table tennis business. There he learned that his old friend Otto Katz had been arrested. Like Montagu, Katz had been born a Jew and forfeited his faith in the name of Communism. As a Comintern agent, he had been credited with everything from Trotsky’s murder to pushing the Czechoslovak foreign minister out of a window. Nothing mattered now that the state had turned on him. During his interrogation, a Czechoslovak security officer had told him, “We’ll bury you and your filthy race ten yards deep.”
Montagu called Katz at his apartment, as he always did when in Prague, to ask him to lunch. His shaken wife answered and mumbled that Otto was traveling. The next day, Montagu was approached by an employee of the Ministry of Information, who told him that Katz had been jailed. Back in London, Montagu was taped speaking of his fear that his friend of twenty years had been “scrubbed.” He was premature but correct. Katz was hanged weeks later. Montagu never even paused in his outspoken support for Stalin.
In 1963, the year when Zhuang Zedong shook Montagu’s hand and accepted his second World Championship, the Czechoslovak government issued a statement absolving Otto Katz “on all points of indictment.” It noted “the inhuman methods of interrogation and the use of drugs on the prisoners.” That same year, the Venona program finally uncovered Montagu’s greatest secret: that he was a Soviet agent. Back when Montagu was spying, treason had been a hanging offense. The last man caught spying had received a sentence of forty-two years, the longest ever handed down at the Old Bailey law courts. Would Montagu flee to the East, like three of the Cambridge spies?
He gave no sign of moving, because MI5 gave no sign of arresting him. To bring Montagu to trial, MI5 would have had to disclose the success of the Venona program at a time when it was considered better to let the Russians think their codes remained unbroken. Besides, Montagu’s unveiling would have been a deep embarrassment to his prominent family, the government, and the monarchy.
Instead, British intelligence would have to watch Montagu move back and forth across the Iron Curtain. He led British delegates to World Peace Council meetings in Moscow. Even from afar, it was obvious Montagu was still trusted by the Russians. When a “bearded and sandaled” group of British delegates decided to march against the bomb in both London and Moscow, it was through Montagu that they were warned that a demonstration in Moscow would be considered “a breach of hospitality” by the Kremlin and that they would be immediately deported. Despite such ringing reminders of Montagu’s past influence, MI5 decided to leave him alone.
When he finally retired from his position in the ITTF in 1968, a German magazine suggested that the sport of table tennis be renamed Montagu, “because the game with the little white ball which has spanned the whole world is really the work of one man.”
Zhuang Zedong may have been a true believer but, unlike Montagu, he wasn’t in control of anything. And with Moscow remaining a hotbed of revisionism, there was nowhere for a Chinese Communist to flee to unless they dared to lose their faith and then risk their lives in escape. Zhuang never stopped to consider either possibility. He gambled on riding out the revolution.
CHAPTER 32 | Down to the Country
Had there been any proof against the three dead members of the Chinese table tennis team? No. And there wasn’t any evidence against the former world champion Zhuang Zedong either, but his name began appearing on the dreaded big character posters again. “Let’s drag out Zhuang Zedong,” they declared. “He’s a hardcore Bourgeois loyalist.” His young wife, a pianist, was also in trouble. She was guilty of relying on one of the Four Olds, the piano, symbol of Western bourgeois affectation.
Zhuang probably knew what was coming. One of his squad members pulled him aside and explained that his position was untenable. “It’s time to join one group and fight back, to be a rebel.” Zhuang would be a big prize for Jiang Qing’s leftists, a world champion who “could influence many people.” Called back to the struggle sessions, Zhuang ended up signing a big character poster accusing He Long of “promoting revisionist policy ideals within the independent realm of table tennis.” It also stated that Zhuang believed he had been “both mentally and physically injured and ruined over the preceding eight years on the table tennis team.”
Zhuang Zedong’s big character poster would have echoes for decades to come and carried with it a bitter stain that he never escaped. Worst of all, it didn’t stop criticism of him. Soon, he was called “a fake rebel.” When officials were dragged up onto the stage in front of thousands, Zhuang
was forced alongside them, bent over into the airplane position. By the end of the summer of 1968, the newlywed Zhuang was thrown in jail, his wife quarantined in their home, his new father-in-law imprisoned. Interrogators tried to turn wife against husband, father against daughter. Zhuang was occasionally “beaten with sticks and displayed in front of the public.” A Red Guard held up his right hand in the air and threatened to cut it off—the right hand that had brought three gold medals to China; the right hand grasped and shaken by Ivor Montagu, now raised in front of thousands baying for blood.
Zhuang Zedong had written on that damning character poster that he “wanted to revolt, he wanted to rebel, and he wanted to be a people’s servant.” But he was not about to become a people’s servant, he was about to become the servant, or perhaps even the lover, of Mao’s wife. His new position couldn’t have been more tenuous. The back-alley gossip said that now when Jiang Qing called on the phone, Zhuang Zedong’s “knees would shake.” Still, his salvation from prison after four long months wasn’t by her hands. He owed his survival to Ping-Pong’s greatest supporter, Zhou Enlai, Jiang’s mortal enemy.
In 1969, in a move that some interpreted as the final stroke against He Long, who was still dying slowly from diabetes, almost 90 percent of the National Sports Commission was exiled from Beijing. They ended up in Shanxi in a farming community at one of the notorious May 7 Cadre schools designed for reeducation through compulsory labor. Almost five hundred players and officials traveled slowly by train to the middle of nowhere. Shanxi was considered one of the harshest assignments for those “going down to the countryside” to learn from the peasants. Athletics, where they existed, continued to be as military as they were political. Girls were still being trained in the art of the grenade toss.
Photographers followed the exiled athletes to take stunning shots of the world’s best table tennis players dressed as peasants with bales of freshly cut wheat over their shoulders. Players built aqueducts, dug in the fields, wielded pickaxes and shovels, helped with the harvest. In truth, they depended almost entirely on nearby towns and communes for their food. In return, the players were expected to entertain the peasants, slamming the ball back and forth on a shoddy table retrieved from a farmhouse. They wove a table tennis net from straw and leaves. Entertainment was now the only acceptable role for sports. Nobody kept score, nobody lost, and nobody won; table tennis simply served the people.
Life was dull, but not easy. One player remembered getting sunstroke while harvesting wheat. She crawled to the shade of a tree, where she “was caught by a commissar comrade who ordered her to take out the Little Red Book, Quotations from Chairman Mao, and read the admonition, ‘Be resolute; fear no sacrifice and surmount every difficulty to win victory.’ ” Once she read that, he said, she’d recover unaided. “Instead, she vomited at his feet.”
The 1969 World Championships in Munich came and went. There was no Rong Guotuan to dare to gather a petition to suggest they defend their titles. There may have been no one that naïve left in all of China. The news slowly filtered all the way to Shanxi that the Japanese had won the Swaythling Cup again. How could this have happened? How could a team that was the centerpiece of Chinese sporting achievement, ambassadors to the Third World, victors over imperialists and revisionists, have met such a fate?
If they could have sat with Zhou Enlai, he would have counseled patience. Though it seemed as if he’d abandoned the table tennis team, he had no such intention. The premier, having finally managed to send China’s ambassadors back out into the world, had something even more stunning in mind—not so much a resurrection as a transfiguration. The table tennis team would help pull off the single greatest foreign policy feat of the century, realigning the world’s largest country, China, with the strongest, the United States.
PART THREE | East Meets West
CHAPTER 33 | The World at War
The Cultural Revolution wasn’t the only revolution in the world during the 1960s. Thousands of miles away, the United States was having its own generational spasm. China watchers in the United States were comparatively starved for information, relying on translations of state newspapers and radio broadcasts, or interviews with travelers from other nations willing to talk to their consulate in Hong Kong. In China, government agencies had America’s entire free press to digest. What to make of the open talk of sex? Of drugs? There were tens of thousands gathering in a field near the village of Woodstock in New York State, listening to music powered by electric guitars. Black Americans were taking to the streets, burning down parts of America’s greatest cities in protest against racial injustice. President Kennedy, his brother, and Martin Luther King Jr., the country’s greatest civil rights champion, had all been shot dead by US citizens. By the end of the decade, antiwar protests against US involvement in Vietnam were weekly events. Was this a coming revolution?
Thanks to new satellite television technology, in the West you could watch the world writhe in real time. Protesters were beaten on live television not just in the United States, but in Japan and during the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, when dozens of tanks made a blunt statement in the streets of Prague about the liberalization of Soviet satellite states. Alarmed by Russian mobilization, Beijing decided to restart low-level talks with the United States in the interests of “peaceful coexistence.”
Russia and China shared a border almost three thousand miles long, a boundary that was of increasing worry to both Mao and Zhou Enlai. The Ussuri River, which separated the two countries in China’s northwest and the Siberian Far East, was demarcated in a strange manner. Usually, river islands belonged to the country they were closest to, yet in the 1900 Treaty of Beijing, Zhenbao Island (Damansky Island to the Russians), a half step from the Chinese bank of the river, had been granted to Russia.
By 1969, the behavior of both armies guarding that desolate spot was increasingly unrestrained. Between the snowstorms that often blanketed the region, patrols would shout insults across the frozen river. The Chinese would drop their pants and moon the Soviet troops. The Russians would hold up photographs of Mao to accept the homage. In late January of that year, the local Russian commander noticed that Chinese troops had dared to step onto Damansky Island. He ordered troop carriers out over the thick ice to confront them. With both sides refusing to retreat, the situation turned into a brawl. Noses were broken, and tensions escalated.
On March 2, the Russians noticed another incursion on Damansky Island. Again they piled into their troop carriers, drove across the frozen river, and with their rifles slung over their shoulders, approached a line of unarmed Chinese soldiers. That first line stepped to one side. Behind them lay a second line of soldiers who aimed their weapons and fired. The Soviet officer in charge of the border post fell immediately.
It was a calculated attack. The Chinese had reserves with heavy machine guns on the high ground behind them. After two hours of fighting, a handful of Soviets managed to pull back, leaving behind thirty dead and fourteen wounded.
In Beijing, demonstrations were immediately called to condemn the “Soviet aggression.” The following day, in Moscow, a huge march culminated with “the smashing of windows and throwing ink bottles at the Chinese embassy.” Back in Washington, the news was being slowly digested for what it was—final proof of the depth of the division between the Soviets and the Chinese. When the Soviet ambassador approached Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s national security adviser, to lay before him evidence of China’s actions, Kissinger argued that it was of no concern to the United States. The ambassador disagreed, saying that “China was everyone’s problem.” The extent of Soviet agitation was now obvious.
What was Mao up to? There was precedent for provocation. In 1958, Mao had bombarded some of the tiny islands off the Taiwan coastline as a “challenge to Khrushchev’s bid to reduce tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States.” It had been a statement that Mao wanted China to be part of a triangular relationship, not a territory to be divi
ded between Cold Warriors.
The 1969 border conflict fascinated Kissinger. Though approaching China had been on Nixon’s mind since 1967, Kissinger’s efforts to begin “exploring rapprochement with the Chinese” only started in February 1969. As he now studied satellite photographs to try to determine the seriousness of the situation, the Russians approached various Washington players to see how they would respond to an attack on Beijing’s nuclear capabilities. Nixon and Kissinger thought there might be an immense opportunity at hand; it seemed the Soviets and Chinese now feared each other more than they feared America.
What would Nixon do with the moment when the monolith of Communism shattered? The easier option would be to strike a deal with Moscow: the United States would green-light a Soviet nuclear attack on China if the Soviets agreed to stop arming the North Vietnamese. Yet the Soviets were reluctant to withdraw their support from Vietnam, and Nixon worried that a Russian nuclear offensive would leave the Soviet Union as the central power across all of Asia. Ultimately, a deal was never brokered.
Mao was pursuing a high-risk strategy against Russia. To underline the intensity of the crisis, cities across China began digging elaborate nuclear fallout shelters. Within the year, Zhou Enlai believed “that the whole of China could be underground within five minutes.” It was a wise precaution. The Soviet defense minister continued to lobby for “massive nuclear strikes on Chinese cities.” But then what? Invade a country of 800 million people? Many Russians believed the most likely outcome was a limited nuclear attack on Chinese military installations. The air between the two countries froze. “So withering is Russia’s hostility” toward Beijing, one commentator wrote, that in Moscow, Chinese “diplomats seldom venture outside the forbidding fastness of their embassy.”
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