When Nixon met Mao: ping-pong tables charted a path to the negotiating tables
- ‘Finding ways to bring the two peoples together, we just have to look for them’ is the reminder, more than 50 years later
- A chance exchange between an American player and a Chinese counterpart became the unlikely nudge for ‘the ping heard round the world’
It could have been a different sport. Another cultural event. A different time. The shaggy-haired American might not have taken a risk. And his gracious, well-groomed Chinese counterpart might not have responded.
A half-century on, as US-China relations hit new lows – and the two giants spar over everything from espionage and technology to Taiwan and the war in Ukraine – those who lived through the start of ping-pong diplomacy in April 1971 still marvel at how it all came together, what it led to and whether those days are lost forever.
“It’s the 64 million dollar question for all of us involved in this field. Our whole raison d’être is bringing people together and we have not been able to do that,” said Jan Berris, vice-president of the National Committee on US-China Relations. “Finding ways to bring the two peoples together, we just have to look for them.”
In retrospect, the pump was well primed, although few saw it at the time.
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When ping-pong helped put China-US diplomacy on the table before Nixon’s visit 50 years ago
After two decades of intense US suspicion of “Red China” – Washington’s avowed enemy after Beijing’s 1950 entry into the Korean war – a containment policy and tight economic embargo, the United States was starting to see China as a useful lever for peace negotiations with Hanoi as the Vietnam war dragged on.
