Ping-pong diplomacy
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Ping-pong diplomacy (
History
Background
The United States viewed the People's Republic of China as an aggressor nation and enforced an economic containment policy including an embargo on the PRC, following its entry into the Korean War in 1950. After approximately 20 years of neither diplomatic nor economic relations, both countries finally saw an advantage in opening up to each other: China viewed closer relations with the United States as a beneficial counter to its increasingly tense relationship with the Soviet Union, which had seen the outbreak of a series of bloody border incidents, while the U.S. sought closer relations with China as leverage in its peace negotiations with North Vietnam.[citation needed]
Process
The U.S. Table Tennis team was in
The meeting was facilitated by the
According to History of U.S. Table Tennis by Tim Boggan, who went to China along with the U.S. Table Tennis Team, three incidents may have triggered their invitation from China. Welshman H. Roy Evans, then President of the International Table Tennis Federation, claimed that he visited China prior to the 31st World Table Tennis Championship and suggested to non-Chinese sports authorities and Premier Zhou Enlai that China should take steps to get in contact with the world through international sport events after the Cultural Revolution. Furthermore, the American player Leah "Miss Ping" Neuberger, the 1956 World Mixed Doubles Champion and nine-time U.S. Open Women's Singles Champion, was traveling at the time with the Canadian Table Tennis Team that had been invited by China to visit the country. China diplomatically extended its approval of Leah Neuberger's application for a visa to the entire American team. The third incident, perhaps the most likely trigger, was the unexpected but dramatic meeting between the American player Glenn Cowan and the Chinese player Zhuang Zedong, a three-time world champion and winner of many other table tennis events. Zhuang Zedong described the incident[5] in a 2007 talk at the USC U.S.-China Institute.
The events leading up to the encounter began when Glenn Cowan missed his team bus one afternoon after his practice in
When a journalist asked Cowan, "Mr. Cowan, would you like to visit China?", he answered, "Well, I'd like to see any country I haven't seen before--Argentina, Australia, China, ... Any country I haven't seen before." "But what about China in particular? Would you like to go there?" "Of course," said Glenn Cowan.
During an interview in 2002 with the TV personality
When the Chinese Department of Foreign Affairs received a report that the U.S. Table Tennis Team hoped to get invited to visit China, the department declined as usual.
Reactions
Upon his return to the United States, one of the American players, Glenn Cowan, told reporters that the Chinese were very similar to people in the U.S. He said:
The people are just like us. They are real, they're genuine, they got feeling. I made friends, I made genuine friends, you see. The country is similar to America, but still very different. It's beautiful. They got the Great Wall, they got plains over there. They got an ancient palace, the parks, there's streams, and they got ghosts that haunt; there's all kinds of, you know, animals. The country changes from the south to the north. The people, they have a, a unity. They really believe in their Maoism.[9]
Ping-pong diplomacy was successful and resulted in opening the U.S.-PRC relationship, leading the U.S. to lift the embargo against China on June 10, 1971. On February 28, 1972, during President Nixon and Henry Kissinger's visit to Shanghai, the Shanghai Communiqué was issued between the U.S. and the PRC. The Communiqué noted that both nations would work towards the normalization of their relations.
The response to Nixon's visit
Two months after Richard Nixon's visit,
1991 united Korean Team
Another example of Ping Pong Diplomacy occurred during the 1991 World Table Tennis Championships in Chiba, Japan, where a unified Korean team played together for the first time since the Korean War.
The diplomatic efforts leading to the formation of this unified team were led by then-International Table Tennis Federation President, Ichiro Ogimura.
Prior to the championships, Ogimura visited
The Korean team played under a white flag depicting the Korean peninsula in blue and used the Korean folksong, Arirang, rather than the national anthem of either the North or the South.
The competition saw the Korean team win one gold medal, one silver and two bronze medals.
This action has since been repeated. At the 2018 World Team Table Tennis Championships, the two Koreas entered separate teams in the competition but, when they were paired against each other at the quarter-final of the women's event, they negotiated instead to field a joint team for the semi-final.[11]
Legacy
Ping-pong diplomacy became one of the most prominent examples of
- In 1988, table tennis became an Olympic sport.
- Ping-pong diplomacy was referenced in the 1994 film Forrest Gump. After suffering injuries in battle, Forrest develops an aptitude for the sport and joins the U.S. Army team—eventually competing against Chinese teams on a goodwill tour.
- During the week of July 8, 2011, a three-day ping-pong diplomacy event was held at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California. Original members of both the Chinese and American ping-pong teams from 1971 were present and competed again.
See also
- 1999 Baltimore Orioles – Cuban national baseball team exhibition series
- 2008 New York Philharmonic visit to North Korea
- Summit Series
- Panda diplomacy
References
- ^ [1] Archived June 3, 2019, at the Wayback Machine.
- ISBN 978-0-8129-7057-9.
- ^ ISBN 9781501774157.
- ^ Baggins, Brian (2002). "History of the Black Panther Party". marxists.org. Archived from the original on October 31, 2019. Retrieved May 20, 2017.
- ^ Huang, Rune-Wen; Gants, Connor (March 7, 2008). "Diplomacy in the Sports Arena". US-China Today. USC US-China Institute. Archived from the original on June 28, 2013. Retrieved April 24, 2013.
- ^ "From Ping Pong Diplomacy to the Beijing Games". Team USA. June 12, 2008. Archived from the original on January 7, 2019. Retrieved May 15, 2014.
- ^ "Ping-Pong Diplomacy and a Changing World [ ChinesePod Weekly ]". The Official ChinesePod Blog. April 11, 2012. Archived from the original on May 15, 2013. Retrieved April 24, 2013.
- ^ "Getting to Beijing: Henry Kissinger's Secret 1971 Trip | US-China Institute". china.usc.edu. Retrieved February 1, 2024.
- ^ "1971 Year in Review, Foreign Policy: Red China and Russia". UPI Year in Review 1970-1979. United Press International. Archived from the original on July 22, 2013. Retrieved April 24, 2013.
- ^ Silva, Rennie (April 9, 2012). "Nixon went to China — and Maryland followed". The Baltimore Sun. Trif Alatzas. Archived from the original on June 1, 2019. Retrieved June 1, 2019.
- ^ "Table Tennis Diplomacy that Brought the Koreas Together". nippon.com. June 12, 2018. Archived from the original on April 10, 2019. Retrieved November 28, 2018.
- Boggan, Tim. History of U.S. Table Tennis
- Eckstein, Ruth. “Ping Pong Diplomacy: A View from behind the Scenes.” The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, vol. 2, no. 3, 1993, pp. 327–42. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23612842. Accessed 2 Oct. 2023.
Further reading
- "Talking Points" (USC US-China Newsletter), July 22, 2011, looks at the fortieth anniversary of ping-pong diplomacy, notes that the term was first used in 1901, and discusses how it was a bold bit of public diplomacy on China's part while China and the United States were engaged in back channel discussions.
- Griffin, Nicholas (2014) Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 1634505565
- Itoh, Mayumi (2011). The Origin of Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Forgotten Architect of Sino-U.S. Rapprochement. Palgrave-MacMillan. ISBN 978-0-230-11813-3.
- Mathews, Jay. "The Strange Tale of American Attempts to Leap the Wall of China". The New York Times, 18 April 1971.
- Schwartz, Harry. "Triangular Politics and China". The New York Times, 19 April 1971: 37.
- Wang Guanhua, "'Friendship First': China's Sports Diplomacy in the Cold War Era", Journal of American-East Asian Relations 12.3-4 (Fall-Winter 2003): 133–153.
- Xu Guoqi, "The Sport of Ping-Pong Diplomacy", Ch. Five, in Olympic Dreams: China and Sports 1895-2008 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008 ISBN 978-0-674-02840-1), pp. 117–163.
