Source:
https://scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3012297/ping-pong-diplomacy-game-and-players-changed
Post Magazine/ Long Reads

Ping-pong diplomacy and US-China relations: the game and the players that changed the course of history

  • Judy Bochenski was involved in one of the most astonishing geopolitical games in the world
  • Then 15 years old, the American table tennis star’s 1971 trip to China would help end the cold war
American Judy Bochenski plays a match against a member of the visiting Chinese table tennis team, in Cobo Hall, Detroit, in 1972. Photo: courtesy of Judy Hoarfrost

On any given evening, the city of Portland, in Oregon, flashes its credentials as the North American capital of bar-room table tennis. In watering holes such as Pips & Bounce, The Nest Lounge and Sellwood Public House, a largely millen­nial crowd revisits the pastime they all enjoyed as children, this time with dispos­able income and artisanal beverages.

In the Pacific northwest, where it rains a lot and the local beer wins prizes, table tennis has an evolutionary advantage in the natural selection of games to play indoors: anyone can pick it up quickly and a couple of drinks only add to the merriment.

Boozy ping-pong gatherings may be a long way from the top-flight version of the sport, accepted into the Olympic Games in 1988, but contagious fun is spelt out in the nightly clatter of thwacks, clicks and chops, like Morse code at triple speed.

If the bar scene shows the party face of table tennis, the soul of Portland’s alliance with the sport can be found half an hour’s drive southwest of town, in Tigard, a suburb known for its large shopping mall and annual Festival of Balloons.

Right across Main Street from Yen’s Chinese Restaurant, and next door to the post office, sits Paddle Palace: table tennis club and equipment distributor. The building, a former carpet store, melts comfortably into its surroundings and offers no clue to the extraordinary story of its current owner, Judy Hoarfrost.

In the spring of 1971, Hoarfrost – then 15 years old and familiar by her maiden name, Judy Bochenski – was a player in one of the most astonishing geopolitical games in world history: a week-long event that changed the course of Sino-American relations, helped to end the cold war and, to paraphrase Chinese leader Mao Zedong, used the little ball to move the big ball. The event coined, and became synonymous with, a concept that still has currency: “ping-pong diplomacy”.

Bochenski (now Hoarfrost) at Paddle Palace in Portland. Photo: Kennett Mohrman
Bochenski (now Hoarfrost) at Paddle Palace in Portland. Photo: Kennett Mohrman

The United States national team, of which Hoarfrost was the youngest member, were in Nagoya, Japan, for the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships. The American players had stumped up their own airfares, for which Judy’s father, Lou Bochenski, a schoolteacher, had taken out a US$900 loan on his daughter’s behalf.

Ranked 23rd in the world, they competed to form and looked set to return home under a cloak of relative anonymity – before the invisible hand of international statecraft intervened.

After what first looked like a spontaneous gesture on the part of Hoarfrost’s teammate Glenn Cowan, who apparently got on the wrong bus and ended up exchanging gifts and grins with Chinese ping-pong star Zhuang Zedong, the American players were invited to visit China on a friendship tour.

The encounter had, in fact, been expertly stage-managed on the Chinese side, but it caught the Americans, and the world at large, off guard. In the moment, none of the covert backstory really mattered: this was a game-changing bolt from the blue. No official American delegation had set foot in China for more than two decades. The implications for global politics, especially the balance of power between the US, China and, by extension, the Soviet Union, would be monumental.

“We knew it was big news, because immediately there was a lot of press and a lot of excitement,” says Hoarfrost, in a boardroom full of ping-pong memorabilia just off the Paddle Palace lobby. “But the scope of it didn’t really hit home. What I could see was the grown-ups getting all crazy. I was just a kid.”

It is impossible to understand the degree of grown-up craziness Hoarfrost experienced, let alone the instant elevation of table tennis to the world stage, without a brief overview of the sport’s origins and its place in China’s revolutionary history.

Devised by British Army officers, most likely in India, at the height of the Victorian colonial era, the game’s prototype phase involved balls carved from champagne corks, cigar-box paddles and a row of books for a net. After the first world war, table tennis spread into the wider world from the cities where the British had a foothold. Macau, Hong Kong and Guangdong took part in an inter-port tournament in 1930.

Thanks to American journalist Edgar Snow, and his “scoop of the century” book on the guerilla origins and Long March era of Mao’s Communist Party – Red Star Over China (1937) – global readers became aware that the movement’s leaders, and the troops they commanded, were wildly enthusiastic about ping-pong. They played in the caves of their rebel bases, on tables hastily cleared after dinner for their designated sporting function, then repurposed overnight as beds.

Mao Zedong playing table tennis, in Yanan, Shaanxi province, in 1945. Photo: Alamy
Mao Zedong playing table tennis, in Yanan, Shaanxi province, in 1945. Photo: Alamy

The man who codified the sport, and supported its growth worldwide, was a new-money English aristocrat and communist – however paradoxical that sounds – called Ivor Montagu, president and founder (in 1926) of the International Table Tennis Federation.

As described in author Nicholas Griffin’s elegant account of the game’s geopolitical history, Ping-Pong Diplomacy (2014), Montagu also produced espionage thrillers for Alfred Hitchcock, socialised with Charlie Chaplin, spent time with Leon Trotsky and spied for the Soviets using the sport he fostered and adored as cover.

Early in 1950, with the People’s Republic only months old, Montagu wrote to Zhu De, founder of the Red Army, with the long-term aim of embedding China within the global ping-pong community.

Ping-pong could move quietly under the borders and boundaries created by the communist and capitalist worlds Nicholas Griffin in ‘Ping-Pong Diplomacy’ (2014)

He succeeded beyond his wildest expectations because Mao and his leadership believed that table tennis was ideally suited to an industrious proletariat. The leisured millennials of modern-day Portland are not-too-distant cousins of the Chinese workers who fulfilled mandated exercise breaks with paddle and ball.

Crucially, Montagu, Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai all fully grasped the diplomatic potential of the game long before the extraordinary events of 1971. When Rong Guotuan won the men’s singles event at the 1959 World Table Tennis Championships, in Dortmund, West Germany, Zhou held a victory celebration at the Beijing Hotel, lauding the Chinese ping-pong ace and his teammates as both sporting heroes and global emissaries.

Mao called Rong China’s “spiritual nuclear weapon”. As Griffin puts it: “Ping-pong could move quietly under the borders and boundaries created by the communist and capitalist worlds. Rong had done as much as any ambassador to promote China internationally and at home.”

For the next decade, table tennis continued in its starring role as the soft face of Chinese communism, a brilliantly managed sporting branch of international diplomacy with athletes pulling double duty as politicians.

At the end of the 1960s, US president Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, were mulling over the benefits of restoring relations with China as both a way out of the Vietnam war and a means to acquire leverage against the Soviet Union. So, by the time 1971 rolled around, the stage for the historic ping-pong goodwill exchange had more or less been set.

“I was ready to go,” recalls Hoarfrost of her anticipation on the eve of the historic excursion. “I was all for it: I was in high school – I had no job to get back to. And I wasn’t scared: everybody always asks that question – ‘Were you afraid?’ No.”

Members of the delegation, including Bochenski, at the Lo Wu border crossing, in 1971. Leading the players is John Tannehill. Photo: SCMP
Members of the delegation, including Bochenski, at the Lo Wu border crossing, in 1971. Leading the players is John Tannehill. Photo: SCMP

When Hoarfrost and her teammates crossed into China from Hong Kong, on April 10, 1971, the eyes of the world were on them. The impromptu and groundbreaking delegation was 15-strong: seven players and eight officials, plus wives, but none of them caught the eye quite like Cowan.

The Californian seemed to be the living embodiment of the hippie coun­ter­culture: long hair, floppy hat, big smile, bell-bottom trousers and a T-shirt emblazoned with a peace symbol overlaid on the American flag and the Beatles’ existential mantra: “Let It Be”. It was hardly surprising that he became the self-appointed poster boy of the delegation.

“He loved attention – it’s just the way he was,” says Hoarfrost.

“We went to Hong Kong, took the train to the border, got out, walked across and there was this music blaring,” she remembers. “We went into a little guest house, had tea, then got on a plane to Canton, now known as Guangzhou, and went on to Beijing and Shanghai.”

For a week, the unlikely delegation was hosted in grand style, as they undertook a tour of sights – including the Great Wall – and exhibition matches, making history and harvesting acres of international newsprint with every scythe of the paddle.

“I felt very welcomed by the people and I enjoyed my time in China,” recalls Hoarfrost. “We had wonderful banquets of Chinese food. I had not had food like that before – it was different from the kind of Chinese food I had eaten in the USA. One of our players was homesick for American food and they went out of their way to prepare her a hamburger.”

Chinese table tennis player Zhuang Zedong (left) presents a silk print of Huangshan to America’s Glenn Cowan, in April 1971.
Chinese table tennis player Zhuang Zedong (left) presents a silk print of Huangshan to America’s Glenn Cowan, in April 1971.

In Beijing, the enormity of the occasion truly hit home when the players arrived for exhibition games at a ping-pong stadium filled with 18,000 well-drilled spectators.

“It didn’t seem like the kind of crowd you would get at a basketball game,” Hoarfrost says. “They all seemed to clap at the same time, and were quiet at the same time. It really struck me. It was like being in a completely different world.”

In the broadest terms, public perception of the tour was nothing but good news for both China and the US. This was the goodwill coup of the century, not a deep dive into the more troubling issues that underpinned it. For the Americans that meant the tragic, festering sore of the Vietnam war; for China it was the dark side of the Cultural Revolution.

On the ground, though, a few telling details filtered through the carefully managed apparatus of bridge-building spin. At the match-up in Beijing, there were two prominent banners on display: one read “Welcome American team”, the other spelt out “Down with the Yankee oppressors and their running dogs”.

 At any other time, this would surely have been a problem, but the exhilaration of the moment prevailed. There was also potential for deviation from the script when one of Hoarfrost’s teammates, John Tannehill, was over­heard by reporters expressing his admiration for Mao, but any brows furrowed on the American side were again massaged away by the bigger story and its designated tagline: “Friendship First, Competition Second”.

American players and officials at the Great Wall. Photo: AFP
American players and officials at the Great Wall. Photo: AFP

For Hoarfrost, the experience was nothing less than a cultural revelation: “I really caught the travel bug doing this. You cannot see your own culture until you’ve been outside it. Until you go somewhere else, you don’t see yourself.”

Like most unforgettable holidays, the whirlwind table tennis tour of the century was over in a flash. Hoarfrost, who had learned to sing The East Is Red in Chinese during the trip, returned to America the week in which Barbra Streisand recorded We’ve Only Just Begun, a suitable tune for the renaissance of international relations between the US and China.

In June 1971, the US lifted the embargo that had been placed on China for 21 years, and in February 1972, Nixon and Kissinger would, just like the ping-pong delegation that preceded them, visit three Chinese cities (Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai) in seven days – “the week that changed the world,” in Nixon’s words – ending a quarter of a century of mutual diplomatic isolation. Two months after Nixon’s trip, a Chinese table tennis team, led by Zhuang, would make a reciprocal visit to the US.

For most of the American table tennis players, the immediate aftermath of the China tour was, by any measure, frenetic. They had all been seen atop the Great Wall on the cover of Time maga­zine and America wanted more. Cowan fielded offers of advances for books and joked around on daytime television.

Others popped up on chat shows. Hoarfrost appeared on The Today Show with Barbara Walters. On home turf, she was a teenage hero, feted as grand marshal of Portland’s Rose Festival parade.

“They had a Judy Bochenski Day for the state of Oregon,” she says. “I went to Salem, the capital, and spoke to the senate. I met the governor and played a game on his oak desk.”

Bochenski as grand marshal of Portland’s Rose Festival parade in 1971. Photo: courtesy of Judy Hoarfrost
Bochenski as grand marshal of Portland’s Rose Festival parade in 1971. Photo: courtesy of Judy Hoarfrost

Before the era of social media, the American team was as viral as newswire, flashbulb and television cable permitted. If Hollywood had written their business script it would have played out some­thing like it did in the Oscar-winning film Forrest Gump (1994), whose eponymous hero is imagined as ping-pong diplomacy’s star player.

“When I got home, I was a national celebrity, famous-er even than Captain Kangaroo,” says Tom Hanks’Forrest, who makes enough of a killing from table tennis paddle endorsements to buy a shrimp boat. A hefty payday for the real-life ping-pong diplomats was more elusive.

“For two summers after I got back, I took on all challengers,” says Hoarfrost. “I travelled around the country doing exhibitions in shopping centres. Sort of like Barnum & Bailey’s circus. My mom and my dad and my younger brother, Michael, and me, we would have a table, and for a couple of hours, maybe three sessions a day, people would line up and play me.

“I would do things like sit in a chair and play. I had all kinds of tricks: after you’ve done this as a kid, you learn how to do exhibitions. My dad would do the announcing. We had a little button that said Ping-Pong Power with crossed US and China flags.”

If money was made, “I didn’t see any of it,” says Hoarfrost. “My dad and mom were doing this instead of teaching summer school.”

The American delegation with Premier Zhou Enlai (fifth from right, front row), in Beijing, in 1971. Photo: courtesy of Judy Hoarfrost
The American delegation with Premier Zhou Enlai (fifth from right, front row), in Beijing, in 1971. Photo: courtesy of Judy Hoarfrost

During the first summer, the family stayed in hotels as they toured the Western states, but the next year they piled into a camper van and increased their range to take in the South and the Midwest.

Hoarfrost won most of her matches. “Even though I wasn’t playing good table tennis, because I wasn’t training, I was still holding a paddle every day, and my game actually improved. Some good players would come and challenge me but a lot of times I would win, because I was used to the table and the conditions.”

Still a schoolgirl, Hoarfrost needed thick skin to deflect the ire of testy male challengers who presumed they would beat her. “I remember one guy said something to me that was weird: ‘Your right arm’s bigger than your left.’ And he said it like this was really unattractive. At the time it didn’t really bother me – but why would you say that?”

Sleights aside, Hoarfrost didn’t especially care for the celebrity she attracted. “It was fun but I appreciated anonymity more,” she says.

“I did it because I felt like it was sort of an obligation. My dad was kind of like my manager, I guess. He didn’t ask me: ‘Do you want to do this? How do you feel about this?’ I just did it, you know. Everywhere I walked, people recognised me. It was OK: the amount of fame I had was enough to handle.”

The original Paddle Palace, in a former Elks Lodge, in Portland, Oregon. Photo: courtesy of Judy Hoarfrost
The original Paddle Palace, in a former Elks Lodge, in Portland, Oregon. Photo: courtesy of Judy Hoarfrost

When she went to university, at Stanford in 1973, Hoarfrost was known on campus as “The Girl Who Went to China”. That year, her father, who had honed his enthusiasm for table tennis as a sergeant during the Korean war – a source of the diplomatic tension between China and the US that his then unborn daughter would help to assuage – opened the first incarnation of Paddle Palace at its original loca­tion, in a former Elks Lodge in downtown Portland.

“My parents actually lived there for about a year,” says Hoarfrost. “They put in an apart­ment for themselves on the fourth-floor mezzanine. It was full time, seven days a week.”

Nearly five decades after the sensational genesis of ping-pong diplomacy, the family business still attracts new generations of converts to a game hamstrung between top-level competition and bar-room jollity. At her Tigard club, Hoarfrost employs full-time head coach Xia Jiwei, a former member of the Beijing men’s team, but the way of the paddle is a tough road.

“It’s really hard to make a living in table tennis,” Hoarfrost admits. “We sunk a lot of money into it and we’re not rich. We love the sport and I want a place where people can go to learn the sport and get good at it if they want.”

Bochenski playing in 1979. Photo: courtesy of Judy Hoarfrost
Bochenski playing in 1979. Photo: courtesy of Judy Hoarfrost

For Hoarfrost, the popularity of ping-pong bar nights is a harmless distraction from the serious business of competitive table tennis. “Yes, it is cool and fun, but we’re not beer pong: we’re not a drinking game. More than that we’re an athletic sport. Now people are more aware of it. Before ping-pong diplomacy it maybe wasn’t as famous.”

The events of 1971 are now just a speck in the rear-view mirror of global politics, but for Hoarfrost, the experience is a still-fresh memory. She continues to visit China, both for her table tennis equipment business and for ping-pong diplomacy reunions: the 50th anniver­sary comes up in two years, and is set to coincide with the 2021 International Table Tennis Federation World Championships, in Houston, Texas.

Popular culture has a habit of reminding the world that ping-pong diplomacy is more than just a colourful entry in the encyclopaedia of world politics. In 1994, it was Forrest Gump. This year it was Trump on Show, a surreal Cantonese opera that had a four-day run at the Sunbeam Theatre, in North Point, last month. The show features reimagined versions of Mao and the current American president, and reserves a starring role for table tennis.

At Paddle Palace, there’s no need to turn back the clock: ping-pong diplomacy and the game that spawned it are timeless.

“Everybody loves ping-pong,” says Hoarfrost. “Everybody has a story about when they played and how much they love it. It was like that then and it’s still like that now.”