Ping Pong Diplomacy

  • 1972
  • Establishment of Sino-America Détente

School children parading a portrait of the Great Helmsman dominated the LIFE magazine cover.

In the late 1960s, banned from South Africa, Frank Fischbeck joined LIFE magazine in its Hong Kong bureau. The city was an ideal base from which to “China-watch”. One of these occurred in April 1971, with the beginning of what was nicknamed “ping-pong diplomacy”. It involved actual table-tennis; but the real match was being played out between Mao Tse-tung, leader of China, and Richard Nixon, president of the United States. As Frank was fortuitously based in Hong Kong, this amazing assignment fell into his lap.

The opening serve was unexpected. China, mostly sealed-off from the West for two decades, had invited Great Britain, Canada, Colombia and Nigeria to compete in table-tennis matches in Beijing and Shanghai. A week beforehand, that invitation was surprisingly extended to the United States. With that, China the greatest mystery of the 20th century was emerging from the worst excesses of its Cultural Revolution and nobody outside its metaphorical ‘bamboo curtain’ knew quite what to expect. Having deliberately kept itself immured, China was ready for a – carefully managed – close encounter.

And it sought global attention. Previously impossible to obtain visas were quickly granted to America’s most influential media, including LIFE magazine. Frank and LIFE’s Far East Bureau Chief, John Saar, were handed the extraordinary eight-day assignment. Frank was the only professional photographer to cover the United States team. LIFE’s issue of 20 April 1971 had one of his memorable images on the cover; more filled the 21-page coverage inside. “The best look the U.S. has had at China in 20 years,” stated the magazine

In the entire essay, there was only one photograph of a table-tennis match in progress; “it was never about the sport” his minders told Frank. The rest of his reportage focused on the people, schools, factories, rice-fields, communes, the Great Wall and Tiananmen Square – all dominated by the vigilant portrait of the omnipresent, Mao Tse-tung. Though Mao himself didn’t put in an appearance during the visitor’s stay in Beijing, premier Zhou Enlai attended a 90 minutes press conference in the Great Hall of the People. “You have opened a new page in the relations between the Chinese and American people,” he said of the visiting table-tennis players.

Zhou was correct in his pronouncement. The next chapter was President Nixon’s visit to Beijing, the following year in 1972.

Five decades later, the match is still being played – faster, more furious, with higher stakes. China remains number one in table tennis. Soon it will be the world’s foremost economy. Under their red flag, those unsmiling children in LIFE’s cover photo were determined to march their nation out of its grey past into its unimaginable bright future.

This was the cover of LIFE’s issue of April 30, 1971. The children are headed to school carrying a portrait of their Great Helmsman, Mao Tse-tung, as if it’s an icon in a religious procession. Officially, there was no religion in Communist China; but wherever we went, Mao was revered as an all-seeing, all-doing presence.

This was a street corner in Guangzhou. Then China didn’t have advertising. Instead, it was Mao who was idealised as the one necessity in life and so it was his image that was promoted on the billboards through the land.

In Shanghai, we stayed at the Peace Hotel on the Bund, one of China’s first high-rise buildings. I took this grey, leafless image from its windows. In 1971, there were still junks on the Huangpu River and Pudong, the area on the opposite bank which is now a city of 5.6 million people, was then still rice-fields. The only colour emanated from Mao, blooming over everything.

The Great Wall is about 20,000km long, dates back at least 2,500 years and was supposedly built to keep the barbarians out. But in those extraordinary eight days in 1971, it provided the perfect backdrop as proof that inclusivity might be possible between nations. A day-trip from Beijing was arranged so the five visiting table-tennis teams – from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Colombia and Nigeria - briefly straddled the steep divide.

China was keen to display its military capabilities on posters. These lurid warnings lined the routes to the various venues where the table-tennis teams met for less bellicose encounters. In this image members of the United States team were obviously not daunted by the imagery which offered tempting targets for the visitor’s cameras.

In the Beijing sports stadium, 18,000 spectators gathered to witness diplomacy in action. Their manners were impeccable: each point won by the opposing side was enthusiastically applauded. At the conclusion of the evening’s matches which China easily won, the audience rose and gave the teams a 20-minute standing ovation.

The climax of the Beijing visit was a reception in the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square, hosted by premier Zhou Enlai.

Immaculate in a grey flannel suit with knife-edge creases and a small gilt ‘Serve the People’ pinned on his breast pocket he relished the outlandish views of several of the table tennis players. Here Graham Steenhoven, the head of the U.S. team, has just said that his players can hardly move after so many banquets. Zhou suggested being more selective with courses.

LIFE’s editors had emphasised that we should stick to the assignment, which was to document the table-tennis matches. Our minders, however, turned out to be unexpectedly keen for us to witness additional aspects of Chinese life. This photograph of soldiers and workers was taken at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Would-be students had to have toiled in factories, communes or the army before they qualified for a place – and then only if chosen by fellow workers.

School groups from the furthest corners of China were obliged to visit Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, which was dominated – and still is – by the iconic portrait of Mao at the entrance to the Forbidden City. As if this wasn’t sufficient, each of these rural children proudly displayed a badge bearing Mao’s image – the red sun in their hearts.

Women in China either had short or plaited hair. Free flowing locks definitely weren’t a Mao-era look. Here, 17-year old Olga Soltesz – born in Hungary but raised in Florida and her opponent Chu Nai-chen amused each other over lunch with an hirsute discussion. The fact that neither of them spoke each other’s language didn’t impede matters; patting and miming made up for lack of words.

On 4 April 1971, at the World Table Tennis Championships in Japan, American player Glenn Cowan had missed his team’s shuttle bus and was instead offered a ride on the Chinese team’s bus. A chance conversation with a Chinese player, Zhuang Zedong, set in motion China’s invitation to the U.S. team for later that same month. Cowan, 18, favoured floppy hats and bell-bottomed trousers. During matches he wore a red bandana and sported a Mao badge. Wherever he went on the eight-day trip, Cowan’s long hair, colourful clothes and breezy friendliness attracted amused fascination.

If the ping pong-playing visitors were vigilant, soaking in every detail of the panorama, the populace among whom they moved proved equally if not more so. It was if the authorities had an unspoken purpose in mind—to provide a travelling roadshow that would give our hosts a chance to see what the West looked like, perhaps even to prepare the country for things to come, once the rest of the world came squeezing through that narrow window this visit had opened.

Conversing here with LIFE’s Far East Bureau Chief correspondent John Saar is Nancy Tang, born in the US and who would later be involved in Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s visit. She acted as official interpreter throughout the competition.

A new form of opera now existed in Communist China. Gone were old bourgeois tales about money and marriage: the people’s revolution was what mattered. To their surprise, the players were taken to see Red Detachment of Women, a 1964 ballet that substituted military garb for tutus and guns for garlands. (It was also performed for president Richard Nixon when – as a direct result of ping-pong diplomacy – he visited China the following year.)

Mao famously said that ‘Women hold up half the sky’. They also held up his Little Red Book of quotations, even while performing on stage. When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Jiang Qing – Mao’s fourth wife and herself an actress – ensured that only revolutionary productions with such stirring names as Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, entertained the masses.

At Canton’s old White Cloud airport a chorus of stewardesses sang the Great Helmsman’s praises while clutching his Little Red Book. In the mural behind, Mao applauds; next to him is Lin Biao, who compiled the chairman’s quotations for publication of which it is estimated 740 million copies were published during the Cultural Revolution. Lin was responsible for Mao’s cult of personality. But in September 1971, five months after this photograph was taken, Lin Biao and his family would perish in – ironically enough – a mysterious plane crash.