It was a given in Chinese politics that no one was independent; everyone was attached to a faction. If you were not recruited by one side, it was presumed you were working for the other. In Zhuang Zedong’s case, one of his biggest fans was Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. She had nurtured a coterie of young, handsome men, and some insinuated that all were ordered directly into her bed. By then Jiang was receiving blood transfusions from healthy young PLA soldiers because she’d heard it was a way to live longer. Zhuang fit her concept of vigor and success.
The further Zhuang was pushed up the political ladder, the more precarious his position. At the top, overseeing all sports from January 1974, was Deng Xiaoping, considered by Jiang as a main rival in the race to succeed Mao. Once again the National Sports Commission became one of the battlegrounds for the future of power within China.
Zhuang Zedong believed there was only one center of power, Jiang Qing’s Gang of Four. Given personal instructions by Jiang on whom to attack, he began to chisel away at Deng Xiaoping’s position. When Jiang called, Zhuang responded. Jiang ordered him to the Summer Palace, where he was filmed playing table tennis. During a period when the number of films deemed fit for public consumption numbered less than ten, Zhuang Zedong’s image was committed to celluloid. He had become Jiang’s “cat’s paw,” to help her knock Deng from his position of power in 1975.
With Deng Xiaoping gone, Zhuang Zedong was tempted to believe that the future was secure. But he was cautious, as he explained to the Times:
It was a huge honor to be a member of the Central Committee. But it carried huge risks. It was like being taken to the top of a mountain only to find a steep precipice at your feet. If one was going to survive, one had to form an alliance that would please the Chairman and offer oneself protection.
From his perch under Jiang, Zhuang continued to swipe at the old guard. Once Deng fell, the next target was revealed; none other than Zhou Enlai himself. If the Gang of Four could pry the premier away from Mao, their succession would be all but guaranteed.
Zhuang Zedong claimed that Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping “worshipped foreign things and toadied to foreign powers.” Denunciation meetings were held on Zhuang’s orders, where men and women had their scalps shaved and were “beaten around the head.” Once again, the Cultural Revolution targeted the premier, but this time he was a decade older and suffering from cancer. His old comrade Mao Zedong kept the news of his cancer from him, deciding it was better to extract more work from the premier than to send him to the hospital for lengthy treatment.
Under Zhuang, criticism of anything foreign in the National Sports Commission was ferocious. Referees were markers of “capitalist privilege.” When the head of FIFA came to visit Zhuang, he had to suffer through a meeting so absurdly political that the FIFA president “didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
In 1976, the Tangshan earthquake killed a quarter of a million Chinese in a morning. The same year also brought the deaths of China’s first Communist sportsman, Zhu De, then Zhou Enlai, and finally Mao himself. Mao’s death may have been greeted with shock, but it was Zhou’s death that had the greater emotional impact. As all of China braced for the coming struggle for succession, Zhou Enlai’s funeral was shown live on television. One young athlete watched in horror, realizing that the premier’s tortured grimace indicated a slow, painful death. “He was the second most powerful person in China,” mused the athlete, “but he was also the most miserable victim.”
What kind of society had this become? What must men like Zhuang Zedong have done to secure their own positions? And the real fear was that Jiang Qing could make things worse. The country could remain in the grip of the Cultural Revolution forever. Back in England, the aging Ivor Montagu enthused about its continuation. “You keep on having to wake people up” with revolutions if you wanted to keep the populace involved in politics, he told an interviewer.
After Mao’s death, however, the Gang of Four was seized in a sudden move orchestrated by members of the old guard. Jiang Qing went from talking openly of her affinity with past empresses to defending herself against criminal allegations. “I was Chairman Mao’s dog,” she said when she was finally brought to trial. “When he said ‘Bite,’ I bit.” Impromptu banquets in Beijing factories celebrated her downfall. Workers “paraded on the streets setting off firecrackers until the shells were a crackling red carpet underneath.” Jiang Qing would spend fifteen years in solitary confinement. She was released after being diagnosed with throat cancer in 1991 and hanged herself in her hospital bathroom.
Zhuang Zedong was caught up in the first round of arrests; he was far too close to the Gang of Four to avoid repercussions. After his arrest, he “was forced to appear before a meeting of 10,000 athletes and sports officials in a Peking gymnasium in November and read aloud a long article that attacked the conduct of the ‘Gang of Four.’ ” Zhuang was called the “black hand” of the Gang of Four, used to “topple numerous officials,” and was accused of turning the National Sports Commission into a fascist dictatorship. Questions were screamed at him. Why had he sent Jiang “a pair of embroidered shoes as a present”? Was it true that he was “afraid of Jiang Qing’s calls”? How did he “usurp the supreme power in the Sports Commission”? He was prohibited from answering at the struggle sessions, and he realized that in this game of thrones, he had chosen the loser.
Eight years after his death, He Long was officially rehabilitated by the party. The marshal who had overseen Zhuang Zedong’s rise, who had selected him over Li Furong to take the gold medal at the World Championships three times in a row, returned to haunt Zhuang. Zhuang’s earlier criticism of He Long had been recorded and was now turned against the Ping-Pong player. It was Chinese politics as usual. Ghosts rose to walk again, and the living were condemned to live as the dead.
It was hard to reconcile the two images of Zhuang Zedong. Was he the man whose arrest brought a round of cheering from those who worked under him or the warmhearted sportsman who had toured America? In New York in the spring of 1972, after the crowds at an exhibition match at Nassau Coliseum had dispersed, Consultant for Press Affairs Marcia Burick remembered him quietly passing a paddle to her small son and spending five peaceful minutes hitting back and forth with him. It was an unnecessary kindness, not a public performance.
For four years, Zhuang Zedong suffered in solitary confinement at a garrison outside Beijing, “in a cramped room containing a small bed and a reading lamp.” For two of those years, he had no contact at all with his wife or two children, who believed he had been executed. One hour of exercise a day was all he was permitted. “I was not allowed to play table tennis,” he said. “I was shut away and I was always reading, reading and learning by myself in those years. I armed myself through learning.” He was allowed a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, and he read the novel of incarceration and escape again and again. “The book taught me to hope when I was at my mental limits.”
He was exiled to Shanxi on October 6, 1980, where he had sent so many from the National Sports Commission. One of China’s most famous men was allowed out of captivity to start his new life as a sweeper of streets.
Many of his old teammates had suffered under his rule: Li Furong, who had patiently accepted a lifetime in second place and whom Zhuang had struggled against; Xu Yinsheng, his old doubles partner, whom he had publicly humiliated and exiled from Beijing; Xu Shaofa, whose party membership he had turned down. Zhuang Zedong had written letters to Jiang Qing against all three, but he didn’t talk of these things. He diluted the truth to a potable level: “What I did never caused anybody to die.”
And what would have happened had he done as the protesters on the American tour screamed at him to do: defected? In 1961, when Zhuang won gold at the Beijing World Championships to lift the country during the famine, the Hungarian pretournament favorite wasn’t beaten by Zhuang himself but by an obscure teammate, Tan Cho Lin, ranked thirteenth in China. In practice sessions, Tan was Zhuang’s preferred sparring partner.
But by the start of the Cultural Revolution, Tan knew there was little left for him in China. As the madness of Mao’s politics destroyed any chance of a future, Tan, along with tens of thousands of others, dreamed of escaping to either Hong Kong or Macau.
Some tied themselves to a plank of wood or a tire and tried to float their way to freedom across Deep Bay or the Zhujiang River estuary. Most ended up as bloated carcasses on rocky shores, additions to the statistics used by the American State Department to measure the turmoil inside China. But Tan Cho Lin had trained for years with the table tennis team. His body, hardened by the state and for the state, pulled against the tides, and after three straight hours of swimming, Tan found himself in Macau. Most arrivals would be carried to Casa Ricci, a residence run by a Catholic priest who roared around the tiny island on “an ancient scooter.” They were allotted two weeks’ rest and then encouraged to leave. Tan passed through Hong Kong, stayed long enough to play for the national team, and was banned under Chinese influence from taking part in the 1971 Nagoya Championships.
By the time Zhuang Zedong landed with his squad in Detroit in 1972, Tan had moved to Austin, Texas. Soon Tan was once again a concern for the Chinese government, which was anxious that he not be included in any friendly matches during the Chinese team’s US tour. Instead, he fished for his dinner in Texan rivers or roamed graveyards looking for “coffin crickets” to keep him company. Occasionally, he played in regional table tennis tournaments. Boggan had heard he was unemployed.
Was this the choice? Stay in Beijing, compromise ideals under party pressure, and rise as high as Zhuang Zedong, now minister of sports, or escape to America? For what—a fishing rod, an expensive smoking habit, unemployment, and the pittance of regional table tennis prizes? But also for the deep peace of knowing that you would not have to gird yourself against another political campaign for the rest of your life.
Many of Zhuang Zedong’s old teammates still find it hard to speak his name. “Let’s talk about something else,” one told me, as I interviewed him at a Beijing hotel under a vast glass atrium that stretched upward for six floors. “If we’re going to talk of him we need to find a bigger room,” he said. “I could blow the roof off this place,” he continued, shaking his head as he considered his past with Zhuang. “I could bust it wide open.”
Finally, in 1984, Zhuang Zedong was allowed back to Beijing to teach in a local sports school. His protégé, Liang Geliang, who won six gold medals in World Championships, stayed true to him. “He’d been in a difficult position,” Liang said, “and made mistakes.” Now Liang went to treat his old friend to dinner, the old friend who had once taken Liang around Beijing by bicycle to find medicine for Liang’s mother’s cancer. As they walked, Liang noticed they were being followed by two security officers, who stood outside the restaurant throughout the meal. The midnight shadows of Communist China escorted the two champions all the way back to Zhuang Zedong’s modest apartment.
During Zhuang Zedong’s absence from Beijing, the vast city had begun its transformation, and new buildings were starting to rise above the old quarters. It was hard now to see the wrongs of the past. The government preferred that they were acknowledged quietly, if at all. With a crime like the Cultural Revolution, both victims and criminals could be counted in the millions. Zhuang Zedong was the personification of everything Montagu had once hoped for, the political within Ping-Pong, a racquet-wielding diplomat who held power. And yet he had returned to nothing.
In 2005, when Zhuang Zedong wanted to set up a table tennis club, he had to make a series of phone calls to the men who had once played beside him, those he had once punished. Slowly, they came around. They even showed up on the opening day. A photo from that day shows Zhuang Zedong and Li Furong holding either end of a banner, looking but not smiling at the camera. “The old players get together often,” explained former coach Liang Youneng. “But not with Zhuang Zedong.”
Zhuang Zedong would still be dragged out for the Americans every time China hosted a memorial event for the 1971 American team. In 2006, on the thirty-fifth anniversary reunion in Beijing, Boggan noticed that when they sat for dinner, Zhuang was exiled to a distant table, while all the other world champions were at the center tables. “The officials sitting there,” he’d write, “seemed cool to him.”
Zhuang Zedong was the sole Chinese volunteer to travel in the American bus during the reunion, a strange inversion of Cowan’s famous ride back in Nagoya. He acted as the veterans’ guide as they traveled out to the Great Wall. During their 1971 trip, the Americans had had the Great Wall to themselves, but now the crowds clogged the crenellations as far as Boggan’s eyes could see. There were camels to ride and T-shirts to buy if you were willing to haggle. Heading back into Beijing, they passed McDonald’s, KFCs, and a Mr. Donut. The next day, when Zhuang Zedong showed them around the Forbidden City, Boggan paused in front of a kiosk that had certainly not been there in 1971. It was a Starbucks, a splotch of American green among the red roofs of the emperor’s palace.
Zhuang Zedong persuaded the National Sports Commission to let the Americans play at his own table tennis club. In the audience, he confided to Boggan, there were relatives of Mao. Was it true? Or was Zhuang trying to impress the visitors to compensate for his loss of status in his hometown? Zhuang led a karaoke session after the final banquet of the week-long trip. He chose the song based on the shirt he still kept, “Let It Be.” Glenn Cowan was dead, but his ninety-year-old mother had traveled in his place. The Americans rose to join in, and Cowan’s mother wept.
After the Americans left, Zhuang Zedong was not alone. With special dispensation from Deng Xiaoping, the man he had once helped exile from Beijing, he was permitted to marry his second wife, a Japanese citizen. In 2007, he was diagnosed with colorectal cancer and given a year to live. He decided in his remaining time to travel with his wife to Jinggangshan, the birthplace of the People’s Liberation Army back in 1928. It’s a sparse mountainous region with little to recommend it: no flashing lights, no theme rides, no camels, nor guides to lead a tourist up the side of a mountain. “Can you imagine,” he said, “in a place as desolate as that, our predecessors dared to dream of founding a brand-new China and actually made it. I was there to see, think and learn.”
Jinggangshan was where Mao retreated with only a thousand men, where Zhu De and Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi congregated just as Montagu was paying a visit to Leon Trotsky. The Communists were still twenty years away from victory over Chiang Kai-shek, and Edgar Snow had not yet appeared over the hill to sleep on a Ping-Pong table.
Like Zhou Enlai before him, Zhuang Zedong lived with his cancer, traveling when necessary in a wheelchair. The state treated him inconsistently. Premier Wen Jiabao was rumored to be funding his ongoing treatments. Players of Zhuang Zedong’s caliber are supposed to have their treatments paid for by the National Sports Commission, yet it often ignored Zhuang. More revealing still was the list of Zhuang’s hospital visitors, including Mao Zedong’s daughter Li Min and Zhou Enlai’s nieces and his old secretary. The ties really were still there. He had not forgotten his past and the past had not forgotten him.
His death in 2013 provoked dozens of obituaries around the world. Most concentrated on his sporting past, a few on his political rise. All commented on his meeting with Glenn Cowan. However, by characterizing that meeting as spontaneous, none gave Zhuang Zedong the credit he deserved for executing a very deliberate strategy. He made up for that himself. “The Cold War,” he once told a reporter, “ended with me.”
What lies between Zhuang Zedong’s disastrous career as a politician and his glory days as a Ping-Pong player is an understanding of what it meant to be part of a new country. In 1961, when Montagu was a retired spy and president of the ITTF, Zhuang was just a sportsman, but even then he knew the weight of his burden. As Mao’s famine hushed the nation, people looked to Zhuang and his team for good news. “If I won, the whole country won,” he explained. “If I lost, China lost.”
Epilogue
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br /> When I began this book in 2008, my research in China soon led me back to the city of my birth, London. Months later, about a mile from where I was born, I stood in front of 28 Kensington Court, the house where Ivor Montagu had been raised. It turned out that this man I first heard mentioned by a Chinese Ping-Pong player was the uncle of my father’s closest friend. My father had spent a few days at Kensington Court in the 1940s, the guest of Montagu’s nephew. Montagu, I found out, was never allowed to meet his nephew. Much of this book was driven by another early question I asked myself: What exactly does an uncle have to do to be kept away from his own family?
Montagu’s relatives may never have known the extent of his betrayal, but his espionage didn’t have the same long-term effects as his role in bringing China into the International Table Tennis Federation. As Russia’s man, if Montagu had lived another five years, he would have seen the fall of the Berlin Wall as a searing loss. Would he have acknowledged the Sino-American détente as one of the reasons for the fall? Did Ping-Pong diplomacy help push the Soviet Union into strategic errors that brought an end to a seventy-year-old experiment? Did his chosen game help bring about the demise of the only country he was ever faithful to?
Ninety years ago, Montagu revived a sport that really did fit the best and worst of Communism. It was suited for airless, cramped factories, it was humanistic and competitive, it kept the brain engaged and exercised as much as the body. Table tennis became, as Montagu wrote, “a weapon for peace.”
But as a retired president of the ITTF, Montagu had to witness 1971’s Ping-Pong diplomacy from the sidelines. He had placed the game in Chinese hands when China had been in Russian hands. Now the band in the Great Hall of the People was playing “America the Beautiful.”
Ping-Pong Diplomacy Page 28