Ping-pong diplomacy
returning to campus after 25 years
BY JANET BASU
It was the first volley in
the game of high-stakes negotiations that ended the Cold
War between the United States and China. An improbable
team of diplomats U.S. table tennis players were
invited on a spur-of-the-moment tour of China in 1971,
the first officially sanctioned visit by Americans since
the beginning of communist rule in 1949.
A year later, members of
the Chinese national table tennis team toured the United
States for a series of "Friendship First"
matches. The last match was held before a
standing-room-only crowd in Stanford's Maples Pavilion.
Twenty-five years later,
at 6 p.m. on Sunday, July 27, Maples Pavilion will be the
site of a silver anniversary celebration of this
"ping-pong diplomacy." Olympic gold medalists
and members of the 1997 Chinese national team will play
exhibition matches against top California players. Two
players who played at Stanford in 1972 Robert Shur, a
student at the time, and former Chinese champion Liang
Geliang will stage a re-match.
A reception at the
Stanford Faculty Club at 7:15 p.m. on Monday, July 28,
will feature a speech by John C. Lungren Jr.,
international marketing director of the California state
Office of Trade and Commerce, speaking on increased
opportunities for trans-Pacific interaction. Chinese
officials and members of the original 1972 national team
also will tour the Bay Area, including visits to Silicon
Valley companies.
The Stanford tourney was
arranged by the group Northern California Table Tennis
Events and the Stanford Center for East Asian Studies,
with the support of USA Table Tennis and the San
Jose-based magazine Pacific Rim Business Journal.
Organizers said they hoped the event would serve as a
boost to improve U.S.-China relations on the eve of
Chinese President Jiang Zemin's planned visit to the
United States in October.
Stanford is the second
stop in a four-city tour organized by the Chinese Table
Tennis Association that also includes New York, Los
Angeles and Honolulu. The association has received
letters of congratulations from Juan Antonio Samaranch,
president of the International Olympic Committee, and
from former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who
reportedly has accepted an invitation to a reception at
the United Nations during the New York visit.
Ping-pong diplomacy was a
watershed in Chinese-American relationships the
opening that led to high-level negotiations between the
Nixon administration and the Chinese government,
according to Julian Chang, assistant director of the
Stanford Center for East Asian Studies. In the previous
few years, China's rivalry with the Soviet Union had
escalated to the point of pitched battles on the nations'
common borderline, and Chang said officials seized on
table tennis as a way to reach out to the West.
In April 1971, when U.S.
table tennis players joined an international tournament
in Nagoya, Japan, they were invited to continue on to
China. Chang said that the invitation almost certainly
came on orders from Chairman Mao Tse-tung himself.
Afterward, Time magazine quoted Premier Chou
En-lai as saying: "Never before in history has a
sport been used so effectively as a tool of international
diplomacy."
In mid-July, U.S.
President Nixon reciprocated by sending Kissinger on a
covert mission to meet with Chinese leaders. Later that
month, Nixon announced he would go to China himself.
Official U.S. diplomatic recognition of China was delayed
until 1979, but by the time Chinese table-tennis players
toured American cities in April 1972, the stage was being
set for normalized relations between the two countries.
Chang said that lately,
U.S.-Chinese relations have been strained by disputes
about China's trade surplus with the United States,
China's human rights record and weapons sales, and by
allegations of attempts to use campaign financing to
interfere with the American political process. "This
is an opportunity to re-visit the relationship between
the two nations and to remember the goodwill of ping-pong
diplomacy," he said.
The Chinese delegation
will be led by Zhang Xielin, vice president of the
Chinese Table Tennis Association and an original 1972
tour member. Xu Yinsheng, the president of the
International Table Tennis Federation and vice chairman
of the Chinese state sports commission, will join the
delegation as a special guest. China's national team head
coach, Cai Zhenhua, and several members of the original
1972 "Friendship First" tour are also slated to
come. The entire tour will be recorded by a film crew for
broadcast to Chinese audiences in August.
Among the Chinese players
at the Maples Pavilion exhibition will be Deng Yaping,
considered the best woman table tennis player in history,
according to tournament organizer Dennis Davis, the U.S.
national table tennis coaching chairman. A world champion
since 1991, Deng won two gold medals each in the 1996 and
1992 Olympics. The men's team will be led by Liu
Guoliang, 1997 world men's team champion and a double
gold medalist at the 1996 Olympics. They will be joined
by Yang Ying and Ding Song, members, respectively, of the
women's and men's '97 world champion teams.
The Northern California
team includes Khoa Nguyen of San Jose, a U.S. men's world
team member from 1987 to 1995; Shashin Shodhan of
Fremont, a 1996 U.S. high school boy's champion who is
now a sophomore at the University of California-Berkeley;
Tawny Banh of Los Angeles, a 1997 U.S. women's world team
member, and Michelle Do of Milpitas, who currently ranks
No. 1 among U.S. girl players under 16.
The table tennis matches
are scheduled for 6 p.m. on Sunday, July 27, at
Stanford's Maples Pavilion. Tickets may be purchased by
phone at (510) 601-8932 or (408) 287-5680, on the web at
www.ticketweb.com. The reception is scheduled for 7:15
p.m. on Monday, July 28, at the Stanford Faculty Club.
Reception tickets may be purchased by calling (415)
964-6130. SR
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