Ping-Pong Diplomacy

by Nicholas Griffin

  By late 1969, Nixon and Kissinger began looking very closely for a path to Beijing. The intentions were pure realpolitik. Mao had the ear of the North Vietnamese, and if the Russians wouldn’t hasten to the peace table, then China was the only other player with influence in Hanoi. Nixon would be standing for reelection in 1972. Vietnam and a declining relationship with Russia had ground down Johnson’s presidency, but an olive branch to China could turn the world on its head. Kissinger strategized that rapprochement with China would show Nixon to be a man capable of imagination, cauterize the bloody wound of Vietnam, and bring isolated China back into the international arena. Above all, it would worry Moscow into much warmer behavior.

  But what would the Chinese have to gain from the relationship? For Mao and very few others, the Cultural Revolution had been a worthwhile gamble. Those who had sought to challenge him in the past had been dismissed, imprisoned, or murdered. But efficient bureaucratic centers, such as the Foreign Ministry, had suffered hugely in the culling. With so many experienced diplomats banished to the countryside, could China find a way out of such a tight corner?

  In August 1969, Mao had told his doctor a riddle. “We have the Soviet Union to the north and the west, India to the south, and Japan to the east. If all our enemies were to unite . . . what do you think we should do?” A day later, Mao revealed the solution. “Beyond Japan is the United States. Didn’t our ancestors counsel negotiating with faraway countries while fighting with those that are near?” Mao said that he “liked to deal with rightists” like Nixon. “They say what they really think.” The doctor was aghast at the implications.

  Mao and Zhou Enlai turned for advice to the very man Jiang Qing had so berated at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, one of table tennis’s greatest friends, Marshal Chen Yi. Together with three other marshals, he was asked to convene secretly and give his opinion on China’s foreign policy options. Chen concluded that a nuclear attack by Russia was, for the moment, unlikely and noted that Nixon had been making quiet overtures to China. If communication with America was going to be reestablished, better that it should be done through new channels with no preconditions rather than falling back into the torpor of low-level diplomatic talks.

  There had indeed been talks going on for fifteen years, with 134 meetings between the United States and the Chinese taking place in Warsaw. They were notable, according to Kissinger, in that “they represented the longest continual talks that could not point to a single important achievement.” The rooms they were conducted in were so compromised electronically that it was said that passing taxis could tune in. Chen and Kissinger had reached the same conclusion independently. A new channel would have to be opened up. But could the situation bear the wait?

  With a million Soviet troops now on the border, Mao ordered two hydrogen bomb tests near the Russian frontier, designed to carry radioactive fallout over the Soviet positions. This extraordinary display was immediately followed by an offer to the Soviets to reopen negotiations.

  America took the opportunity to play a signal move of its own, temporarily withdrawing vessels from the Taiwan Straits as a sign of goodwill. For a moment, it seemed there might be a dialogue, suggested by both sides during what would turn out to be the last Warsaw talks. Instead, Nixon launched the invasion of Cambodia in May, and the Chinese promptly canceled the planned session. At Kent State, four students were killed by the National Guard while protesting the first foray into Cambodia, and the Nixon administration began to quake. More than thirty thousand young American men had already lost their lives in Vietnamese jungles. The longer the war bled on, the more damage it did to the government.

  What Washington had failed to calculate was that behind the seeming monolith of the Chinese Communist Party, there was strong opposition to any détente with America. Mao’s number two, General Lin Biao, an ally of Jiang Qing, was advocating easing difficulties with the Soviet Union instead.

  The cancellation of the Warsaw talks turned out to be an opportunity. With the State Department out of the picture, Kissinger was freed to look for a secret back channel. After attempting to send a message to Beijing through both French and Romanian connections, Nixon mentioned to visiting Pakistani president Yahya Khan that he hoped to communicate with Beijing that fall. On December 8, 1970, the Pakistani ambassador arrived at the White House carrying a handwritten note from Zhou Enlai.

  Winston Lord, then Kissinger’s special assistant, explained, “the ambassador would come in to Kissinger’s office and he would give us a handwritten note from Zhou Enlai and we would take it to the President and draft a response and go back to the Chinese.” The Americans didn’t use official stationery. The Chinese didn’t even use a typewriter. Envelopes were sealed, then placed in another envelope. There were no cables sent, just letters moving very slowly via diplomatic pouch from one continent to another. Kissinger and Nixon agreed to keep the State Department in the dark, anxious there should be no leaks. It looked as though they’d made a breakthrough. There would be no preconditions to sending a high-level American diplomat to China—perhaps Kissinger himself.

  During 1970 a slow-motion flirtation began. When Nixon used the words “People’s Republic” for the first time in an official speech, it was noted in Beijing. China lifted a restriction on American oil companies. Passport restrictions on Americans planning to travel to China were eased. In a wide-ranging interview in Beijing on December 17, 1970, Mao hinted to his old friend Edgar Snow that he might be willing to deal directly with Nixon; he made sure the state press ran pictures of them standing together.

  Mao and Zhou were sure that Snow “must be working for the CIA” and would quickly pass along the information to Washington. Snow would be backed up by photographs that showed him standing with the Chinese leadership. Mao and Zhou were far from the mark. Snow had had his lengthy, opaque article based on his interview with Mao rejected by the New York Times, and the White House wanted nothing to do with him. “We thought he was a Communist propagandist,” explained Kissinger, “and we didn’t pay any attention to him.” Life finally agreed to print the interview but month after month slipped by without publication.

  Having missed that signal, 1971 brought deep unease to the White House. The last communication of any kind was in late January, when Kissinger fired off a note to Beijing repeating his earlier willingness to meet. Now, as Kissinger said, “there was nothing to do but wait.” He surrounded himself with China books and scholars, ordering papers in preparation for what he prayed was inevitable: Sino-American détente.

  The continuing silence shook the Americans deeply. “We hadn’t heard anything for several months,” explained Winston Lord. Could it have anything to do with the new military campaign to cut Ho Chi Minh’s supply route in the panhandle of Laos? They scoured Beijing’s People’s Daily every morning, reading little into anti-American speeches since it was obvious that the real opprobrium was still reserved for Moscow. But why the silence? Were the Chinese serious or not?

  The only mention of table tennis in the translated Chinese press that year could hardly have been more anti-American. A Vietnamese Ping-Pong team had arrived in Beijing that November “fresh from the battlefront,” where they had been entertaining Vietcong troops. While the United States shipped entertainment directly from Los Angeles and New York to the troops in Vietnam, the Vietnamese Ping-Pong players were forced to wade across “rivers, penetrate heavy forests and often risk their lives to pass through enemy raided areas.” When they finally reached the front lines, they made table tennis tables out of shell cases and played their exhibition match in an “enlarged section of the trench to give themselves a bit more room.”

  During one exhibition, they were interrupted by a coordinated raid from American forces. “They saw US planes screaming down toward them. They scattered and took aim. As bullets spat from their guns, one plane burst into black smoke and plummeted to the earth, then another.” After the two planes had been brought down, the Ping-Pong players helped the sold
iers shoot down eleven American GIs. For this superb display outside of the World Championships, in Beijing they were given the honorary title “Intrepid Fighters against the US Aggressors.”

  The Chinese were told all about these paddle-wielding heroes. It was the finest distillation of the teachings of Chairman Mao, a stirring display of how greatness in sport could serve the defense of a nation. That same month, the American troops were being entertained by Bob Hope.

  The American methods of signaling China had been military and economic: withdrawal of the fleet from the Taiwan Strait, the lifting of sanctions, tiny increases in trade. Mao’s messages to the Soviet Union were bloody: a border ambush, a nuclear test, constant skirmishes. Yet in its recent dealings with America, China’s methods of contact had an entirely different tone: an interview with a famous writer, a photograph from a parade, the release of a dying priest. There was something cultural about many of the Chinese attempts to communicate with America. The next step would be from the world of what the Americans called sports and the Chinese called physical culture. This time the statement was so obvious that every editor at every newspaper in the world, every network television producer, immediately understood its importance. To the Chinese table tennis players idling in Shanxi Province or working in woodchip factories in Beijing, it was as if a stone had been rolled from their chests.

  CHAPTER 34 | The Seeds of Peace

  In 1971, the World Table Tennis Championships were due to return to Asia, to the Japanese city of Nagoya. Only twenty-five years before, Nagoya had been a central target for US bombing raids, an industrial hub that was home to Japan Aircraft and Mitsubishi Generator. Now an American ally would be hosting Team USA.

  Japan’s interest in China’s attendance at Nagoya could be traced to Ichiro Ogimura. Having read of the Ussuri River clashes in 1969, Ogi had immediately fired off a telegram to Zhou Enlai, recommending that China’s “best opportunity lies in opening the door to the international community through the sport of table tennis.” He had received no answer from the premier.

  To his surprise, Ogimura was included in a small cultural exchange program invited to attend the October 1 parade in Beijing that autumn. For years, relationships between the Japanese and Chinese had involved disparaging each other aloud, disdaining any official ties, but also establishing plenty of low-level trade contacts.

  Ogimura, desperate to talk to the premier, was granted little more than a handshake at the event. Deeply disappointed, he started to drink heavily at the banquet that night, until a Chinese official whispered into his ear, “This liquor has a high alcohol content, Mr. Ogimura. If you drink too much of it you’ll get drunk, you know.”

  At one in the morning he was called to visit Zhou Enlai at his office in the Great Hall of the People, where he pled his case. Zhou was wary. “Suppose we were to send a team to Nagoya, can you imagine what kinds of trouble might occur? If something were to happen after you have personally involved the premier of a country, how will you take responsibility?”

  By the end of the year, Ogi was back in China under the guise of Ogimura Trading, his new company, which exported ashtrays and tablecloths. The former champion was followed everywhere by Toshiaki Furukawa, his employee and table tennis acolyte, a young man so in awe of his mentor that when Ogi once banged his head, he “immediately banged his head on the same spot so that [he] could feel the same pain.” In November, Ogi asked Furukawa to accompany him on a trade mission to Guangzhou. Checking into the hotel, Furukawa was impressed to see that it had a table tennis table in the lobby.

  Two Chinese porters stood on either side “wearing white dress shirts.” “You might as well have a knockabout with them,” said Ogi as he checked in. The first porter could barely return a lob. The second started slowly, then raised the pace, until Furukawa, trained by Ogi himself, was being spun around the lobby. The porter put down his paddle, then slowly unbuttoned his shirt. Underneath was the bright red uniform of China’s national table tennis team. The player carried with him an invitation for Ogimura Trading to play a friendly game in Beijing.

  Furukawa was stunned; fifteen thousand spectators watched Ogimura’s next exhibition. The players who emerged from the tunnel under the Workers’ Gymnasium had not played on the international stage in years. There was Zhuang Zedong, three-time world champion, a little heavier than before. Beside him was the Handsome Bomber, Li Furong, who had lost all three of those finals. Mao’s favorite, Xu Yinsheng, the Ping-Pong polemicist, stood beside them. Ogi couldn’t have failed to number his old rival Rong Guotuan and his friend Fu Qifang among the missing. His quiet presumption was that they “had been sent to their deaths.”

  Even with the table tennis team reactivated, Zhou Enlai had other hurdles to jump. The United States would be attending the World Championships. The Americans’ political relations with Japan were obviously excellent; it was China that still had no official relationship with either country, something Zhou had to maneuver around.

  Japanese table tennis was run by sixty-four-year-old Koji Goto, nicknamed Shogun because he resembled one of those proud samurais so frequently disemboweled in Akira Kurosawa’s films. Not even a year before, he had been labeled as a “reactionary” by the Chinese press, having committed the cardinal sin of inviting Taiwan to play in a regional tournament. Table tennis was, as ever, a litmus test for international policies, and Goto had been considered acidic to the cause. Yet suddenly, in January 1971, he was issued an invitation to visit with Zhou Enlai.

  It was going to be Goto’s second trip to China, but only the first with a visa. In 1937 Goto had arrived in the far north as a noncommissioned squad leader in the despised Japanese army that occupied Manchuria. Guarding communication lines for two years, Goto’s work also included training horses and soldiers. He kept his men entertained by teaching them his two personal loves, the martial art kendo and table tennis.

  On his way to meet Zhou Enlai, Goto was thinking purely of Sino-Japanese relations. The premier gave no hint of the even greater rapprochement on his mind: the coming together of America and China. The idea would have seemed outlandish to any Japanese, and the implications were frightening. Besides, Goto had no reason to do America any favors. In 1944, American incendiary bombs had set fire to the school his family ran in Nagoya. Worse was to come. Another bomb hit the hospital in which his youngest son was being treated for pneumonia. Though the child survived the attack, he died within the week. Goto had slept alongside the coffin for days before finally giving up the body for cremation.

  Goto’s decision to visit China wasn’t without opposition from Japan’s far right. Death threats began arriving by the end of the week. On his flight to Beijing, Goto opted for a disguise. He skittered through the airport terminal wearing a hunting cap, glasses, and a mask, which must have made him only more conspicuous.

  In Beijing, the reason for his invitation was made clear. After years of silence, Zhou Enlai was contemplating sending the Chinese team to compete in Nagoya. The price Goto would have to pay for the privilege of hosting their coming-out party was heavy. He would have to step away from his government’s policy and abandon support of Taiwan, even within the regional body of the Asian Table Tennis Union. Implicit was Goto’s rejection of the Two Chinas solution, which would have allowed both Taiwan and China to be represented. Zhou Enlai was asking a body that was supposed to be nonpolitical to take a highly political stand. It was the essence of propaganda—adapting culture to effect a change in the political world.

  On February 1, Goto finally announced that China would be participating in the World Championships. Chinese and Americans would be in contact. Goto was inundated by calls from TV stations trying to negotiate the rights to air the championships. He was also appointed round-the-clock protection by the government, highly unusual for a Japanese citizen.

  Another man was summoned to Beijing that spring. With Montagu finally retired, it was the turn of his former understudy, Roy Evans, a Welshman whose head looked like a ruddy
Ping-Pong ball, to helm the ITTF at the Nagoya championships. Before Evans left London, the Chinese chargé d’affaires had passed on a message from Zhou Enlai, asking if he wouldn’t mind traveling through Beijing on his way to Japan.

  Evans was not like Montagu. Though he had worked under Montagu for many years, Evans was apolitical, albeit a quiet admirer of Montagu’s astonishing clout behind the Iron Curtain. He flew to Beijing via Guangdong and was ushered across Tiananmen Square at midnight into the Great Hall of the People. Over green tea, the premier pressed Evans to expel South Vietnam from the World Championships, but Evans held his ground. Zhou Enlai’s only satisfaction was that Evans had already rejected Taiwan’s latest application to join the ITTF. The ITTF held two Germanys, two Vietnams, and two Koreas, as well as spots for Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and even the tiny island of Jersey in the English Channel, but Taiwan would be excluded again. Evans’s explanation in Nagoya would be that Taiwan’s “applications have not been received in the proper form,” followed by a refusal to elaborate. Before leaving, Evans said that the best thing Zhou could do to show that China was now friendly to the rest of the table tennis world would be to invite Western teams back through Beijing after Nagoya.

  Finally Zhou had to convince his own table tennis squad to go to Nagoya. For five years they had known they were subject to political headwinds. He called a meeting with the team on March 11 and asked for their opinion as to whether they wished to compete in Japan. A group from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was there to take their vote.

  What were they supposed to say? After handpicking wheat in a field, with callused fingers and sunburned skin, it seemed a ridiculous notion that they would soon be in Japan playing in a televised World Championships. Besides, the Americans were going to compete in Nagoya. What would happen if they were drawn to play them? Though a handful thought they should attend, the majority carried the day and voted to remain in China, indoctrinated for years to believe that there was nothing to learn from foreign countries.