The Swaythling Cup came down to the usual ending. The Chinese men scraped off the rust and edged the Japanese. And in the singles? Could Zhuang Zedong recapture his crown after six years? Instead of a highly anticipated matchup against a fancied East European, Zhuang held a press conference and suddenly withdrew from the tournament. Before he could meet such a high-ranking player, he would have to defeat a young Cambodian. Zhuang sat in front of dozens of microphones and patiently explained that he refused to compete against “players who represent governments [that are] enemies of the Cambodian and the Vietnamese people.” The squads representing these countries in Nagoya, Zhuang insisted, were simply “puppets of US imperialism.” It was pure strategy, devised a month before by Zhou Enlai.
The Chinese team had now made two statements. First, in the all-important team competition, the Swaythling Cup, they remained the best. Second, in the men’s singles, withdrawing their three-time world champion signaled that the Chinese did not value personal glory. Zhou had walked sport across a political tightrope to satisfy both sides of the Chinese political spectrum. The hard-liners of the Cultural Revolution could claim the victory for the masses. But Zhou and his pragmatists had not only reentered international competition; they were practicing international diplomacy.
CHAPTER 37 | A Measured Coincidence
On Monday, April 5, Glenn Cowan walked out of the practice hall after a game with a young Englishman. There was a bus waiting outside; Cowan presumed it was one of the shuttle buses running between the practice hall and the stadium, but it seemed to be full. According to the Chinese, Cowan stumbled up the steps, the bus doors shut, and the driver drove off. Only then did Cowan realize that he was the lone American on a bus full of Communist Chinese.
Cowan’s version was significantly different. “I was invited actually to board the Chinese bus with the team, which shocked me of course.” All agree that there followed minutes of silence, other than the mechanical roar of a large bus changing gears. Cowan was in a country where he couldn’t even read a street sign with players representing a supposedly hostile nation. These were the dreaded Red Chinese.
Ever since he’d approached Liang Geliang for a knockabout, he’d been convinced that the Chinese were watching him. He looked up at one point and spotted Zhuang Zedong staring at him from the crowd. “It was really weird,” he told Tim Boggan later. To Cowan, he felt he was getting the Bengttson treatment: the Chinese were learning from him. They weren’t. They were studying him.
If this was diplomacy, then who would be the diplomat? Cowan decided to defuse the awkwardness and started talking to the entire bus through the English-speaking interpreter. “I know all this,” he began, “my hat, my hair, my clothes look funny to you. But there are many, many people who look like me and who think like me. We, too, have known oppression in our country and we are fighting against it. But just wait. Soon we will be in control because the people on top are getting more and more out of touch.”
The translator translated. Was Cowan actually talking about Mao’s continuous revolution coming to America? Who was Cowan speaking on behalf of? Cowan told his roommate later that he was trying “to think like a revolutionary.” The Chinese players exchanged sideways glances as Cowan’s words were translated. Who would speak to an American? The orders had been strict back in Beijing: Americans could be greeted politely, but they were the only country at the World Championships with whom the Chinese players shouldn’t shake hands. What to do now? Which of them had waved him onto the bus? Why had they done it if they didn’t even want to talk to him?
From the back of the bus, Zhuang Zedong, China’s greatest player, stood up and walked forward. His teammates tugged at his sleeves. One whispered, “What are you going to do?” Another said quietly, “Don’t even talk to him.” Zhuang walked all the way to the front, where Cowan was sitting. In Zhuang’s right hand, he carried a gift. Not just a Mao pin, a badge with the Chairman’s profile, but a silk-screen portrait of the Huangshan mountains. He offered Cowan his hand to shake and handed him the gift. Cowan beamed in surprise. “Even now,” said Zhuang thirty-five years later, “I can’t forget the naïve smile on his face.”
“Do you know who’s giving you this gift?” asked the interpreter.
“Sure,” said Cowan. “It’s Zhuang Zedong.” He looked at the champion and smiled again. “I hope you do well this week.”
There are only two ways to interpret Zhuang’s behavior. The first is to take every interview he’s ever given at face value. All his actions that day, he claims, were influenced by Confucianism—a general belief in openness and reconciliation. Add to that a touch of topicality. He remembered that Chairman Mao had had several talks with the American Edgar Snow just months before. By Zhuang’s account, he was willing to go against everything that had been drilled into the team over the last five years, including the knowledge that “during the Cultural Revolution a lot of people got arrested from contacting foreigners and everyone was afraid.”
Or were Zhuang’s actions premeditated? This was the man who had seen three of his oldest colleagues and mentors driven to death as counterrevolutionaries because of their ties to foreigners. He’d stood onstage and been interrogated in front of tens of thousands; he’d been beaten and tortured and had his head shaved. Under extraordinary pressure, he’d signed a big character poster denouncing He Long and team officials. The accusations against them were weak; none of those deemed guilty had ever instigated contact with a citizen of a hostile nation.
Zhuang had already shown that he was in Nagoya to act as an individual representing the wishes of the Chinese Communist Party. He had withdrawn from the men’s singles on direct instructions from Beijing. As the most senior player, he was, in his own words, the first to be asked to “represent our team.” Even if the actual moment was spontaneous, the context was premeditated in the extreme. Cowan was more like a mark in a con game than an accidental diplomat.
Cowan had most likely been selected because he’d already tried to reach out to the Chinese in the practice hall, making them almost certain that he’d behave in a friendly way. The bus had waited for him even though the Chinese had their own bus, hotel, and training facility. The fact that it picked up Cowan and then departed without waiting for other players suggests it was Cowan they were waiting for. Would Zhuang, a player who knew the high price of political crimes, do something so obviously political without permission from above?
Besides, how could Zhuang explain the fact that he was carrying such a gift when even the most senior players were allowed to carry only tiny souvenirs, like Mao pins, to exchange? Despite always maintaining that the moment was spontaneous, he once admitted, “Before I left China, I went to a warehouse to get a large silk screen portrait, for an American. I thought it had to be a large one.” The Chinese Foreign Ministry “kept a warehouse, very carefully graded,” filled with gifts for foreign dignitaries. It was always decided in advance exactly what level of gift a diplomat would receive.
When, minutes later, the two men stepped down from the bus at the Aichi stadium there was a group of photographers waiting. Photographs of the two grinning players were printed on the front pages of every Japanese newspaper the following morning and immediately picked up by the Associated Press. They were also included in one of the world’s most important newspapers with a tiny circulation, specially edited for the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. When he reached page seventy-eight, Chairman Mao peered closely at the photograph of the two beaming athletes. The Californian and the former world champion had the Chairman’s full attention. “Zhuang Zedong,” mused the Chairman. “He’s not just a good table tennis player. He’s a good diplomat as well.” Mao immediately gave instructions that phone calls between the Ping-Pong team and Beijing increase from three to five times a day.
Now that the players had reached out to each other, the officials might be able to do the same. But instead, there was silence. The Chinese were convinced that the US team was being run by
Washington. There had even been a rumor that the CIA had stocked its Langley headquarters with Ping-Pong equipment in anticipation of the Chinese team’s trip to Nagoya. They feared that an American intelligence agent was going to be trained to infiltrate the tournament. The Chinese believed that the idea had been discarded by the CIA only when table tennis proved harder to master than the Americans had thought.
Cowan, son of a PR man, knew an opportunity when he saw it. From underneath the shaggy hair came an accent that swayed back and forth between New York and California. He didn’t have any more games to play, having crashed out of the first rounds of both the singles and the consolation tournaments. Instead, he went shopping for a return present.
Cowan ended up buying two T-shirts, one for him and one for Zhuang. They were white and long-sleeved, with a peace symbol in the corner of a painted American flag. Underneath in large letters sat the Beatles’ epigram, “Let It Be,” that Paul McCartney had written two years earlier at the height of his acrimony with John Lennon. All Cowan had to do was confirm from the schedule that the Chinese were due to play the following morning at 8:30 and go along to wait for Zhuang. The second photo op within twenty-four hours would be even better attended than the first.
When Zhuang arrived, Cowan was waiting for him. Cowan had already been walking around the practice hall, showing off the silk screen; now he stepped forward in front of the photographers he’d gathered. “He gave me a big hug,” remembered Zhuang, and the cameras blazed.
The press would turn the moment into a spontaneous gesture of two innocents thirsting after world peace. For Zhou Enlai, it was the seamless projection of state policy; for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, it would be perfectly acceptable since it furthered their own designs. Kissinger would later suspect the friendship might have been manufactured in Beijing. In 1979, he wrote that “one of the most remarkable gifts of the Chinese is to make the meticulously planned appear spontaneous.”
The incident seemed to contain all of what the world thirsted for. The truth was subtler. It was the justification of Ivor Montagu’s belief in Ping-Pong as a form of diplomacy. The correct deployment of propaganda in sport provides the illusion of a space that seems neutral. The instigator can then step forward to gain the ground. You get the advantage of being seen as openhanded at a moment of thorough calculation. Ping-Pong diplomacy was a tribute to Zhou Enlai’s exact preparation. Table tennis had been political in China since its official adoption in 1953 and had remained malleable enough to be the correct tool at the correct time—but only if the last step was pulled off correctly. And the very last step would have to be made by officials.
CHAPTER 38 | An Invitation Home
The point man for Zhou Enlai in the Nagoya delegation was Song Zhong, the general secretary of the National Sports Commission. Song had previously worked for the People’s Liberation Army analyzing military intelligence. He was charged with conducting sporting diplomacy of the most delicate level. Chairman Mao’s initial reaction to Zhuang Zedong’s overtures had been positive, so Song now had to orchestrate the dance with the American officials. He had to prepare for the possibility of inviting the US team to Beijing but also to engineer matters to appear that the Americans had requested the invitation.
By the end of the first day of the tournament, a rumor had spread that the English team had been invited to Beijing to play an exhibition. Word soon followed that the Chinese had also invited Colombia, Canada, and Nigeria. That was particularly frustrating to Rufford Harrison, the US delegate to the ITTF Congress, who had accompanied the team to Nagoya. He was English by birth and had jokingly asked his English counterpart if he could finagle an invitation to China for the US team.
Back in 1959, when Ivor Montagu had proposed giving the 1961 World Championships to Beijing, Harrison had been the lone US representative in the room. Harrison, who regarded Montagu as a genial “iron hand in a velvet glove,” had always believed that the Englishman was behind China’s bid. By the time Harrison voted, he had already tallied up the numbers and knew that the proposal had been accepted, so he gave his vote to the Chinese in the hope that it might count for something down the road.
The ITTF meetings usually coincided with the start of the World Championships. Harrison expected nothing from the Chinese, still believing that “they were the pinko-commie bastards and we were the lickspittles of capitalism.” Beside him sat Graham Steenhoven, president of the USTTA. Like the rest of the American team, the president had a day job. Steenhoven was an English immigrant who had spent his entire life working for Chrysler in Detroit. He wasn’t, as many thought, an executive, just an employment supervisor at a stamping plant, anxious to toe the line. Genial and doughy, he was benign to his perceived betters but a stern parent to those placed in his charge, no matter their ages.
During the meeting the South Vietnamese made a motion for the inclusion of Taiwan in the championships, a proposal that was answered with a vicious harangue against American plotters from the Chinese delegation. Harrison and Steenhoven, long inured to the Chinese dragging politics into the ITTF, sat stoically. Between sessions, the two Americans bumped into Song Zhong in a narrow corridor. Harrison wryly complimented the Chinese on the skills of their interpreters. He’d noted that the quality of interpreting had risen considerably and had quietly wondered why.
Steenhoven had brought handfuls of Kennedy half dollars with him and had been giving them out to maids in the Nagoya hotel as inexpensive mementos of the States. Now he smiled widely and handed one to Song. “I heard you Chinese people are gentle,” he joked. “Why were you so aggressive just now?” Song laughed loudly, pocketed the half dollar, and immediately went to file a report with Beijing.
Without realizing it, Steenhoven and Harrison had made a key contribution to one of the first reports that whistled back to Zhou Enlai: the Americans were deemed friendly. There’s no word on how closely the half dollar was examined. On one side of the coin, the American eagle holds an olive branch in one claw and thirteen arrows in the other claw, symbolizing both the original colonies and the United States’ willingness to go to war if need be. It was entirely accidental and entirely appropriate. Was it an aggressive overture or a peaceful outreach?
Qian Jiang, the Beijing-based author of a book on Ping-Pong diplomacy, explained that “Song Zhong was really like a spy,” though in truth, he was more like a thermometer, gauging American temperatures five times a day. Did the Americans know, for instance, that one of their female players had already been seen buying a pin with a picture of Zhou Enlai on it?
Perhaps because he already knew what Zhou wished to happen, Song was reporting steady progress, painting the Americans as eager for an invitation. Years later, he told Qian Jiang that in retrospect, he’d been a little naïve. When Steenhoven and Harrison had been merely polite, he called Beijing to elaborate on their choice of words. “Glad to meet you” had been interpreted as something other than a banal welcome.
A series of high-level meetings leading to the final decision to invite the Americans to Beijing involved the Foreign Ministry, Zhou Enlai, and Mao himself. Zhou tried to promote contact and refute it at the same time. He talked about inviting the American team only if it was “progressive” and then railed against US actions in Vietnam, walking the line between his own desires and the radicals’ fervent isolationism. As his friend Edgar Snow recalled, he was a man who “never gambles—without four aces.” The report summarizing China’s options in Nagoya sat on Mao’s desk for several days. The opportunity to reach out to the Americans through table tennis was slipping by. Like Zhou, Mao followed the games on the radio. He was well aware of Ping-Pong’s foreign-policy credentials over the previous fifteen years. But was table tennis really the best way to deal with Americans?
Mao waited until the tournament was almost over to decide. The Americans were supposed to be heading out to Mie Prefecture for three days to play exhibitions against teams from a Japanese ball bearing factory. It didn’t matter what Zhou tho
ught; for all his power to execute ideas perfectly, this decision was so large that it could only be made by Chairman Mao himself.
Now seventy-four and recently diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Mao’s restful nights depended on his nurse supplying a steady dose of sleeping pills. Having personally authorized the Chinese table tennis’s team trip in the first place, he was still wavering over whether an invitation should be extended to the US team.
That morning, he had “endorsed a Foreign Ministry recommendation to turn down the request.” Now, having taken the pills, Mao still couldn’t sleep. According to the Chairman’s explicit rules, decisions he expressed after swallowing the drugs were to be ignored. “Invite the American team to China,” he said, as he began to doze. His nurse leaned in closely, “dumbstruck.” “It was just the opposite of what he had authorized during the day!” His nurse decided to play it safe and pretended she hadn’t heard the Chairman. “Little Wu,” he said. “Why don’t you go and do what I asked you to do?”
She then spoke loudly so there could be no misunderstandings, “Please say it again.”
Once more the Chairman repeated his words. “Invite the American team to China.”
“You’ve taken your sleeping pills. Do your words count?”
“Yes they do!” said Mao. “Do it quickly. Otherwise there won’t be time.”
The emergency message arrived in Nagoya early on April 7, just as the Chinese team was sitting down to a farewell meal. Had it really been a last-minute decision, or had Mao deliberately waited until the last moment so that the Gang of Four would have no time to oppose such a drastic move toward America? The message was couched in language familiar to anyone who had ever read an imperial edict about “solicitous barbarians” seeking an audience with the emperor:
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