Ping-Pong Diplomacy and a Short History of the Game

Most sports have a founding myth, and table tennis has a good one: a player boards the wrong bus at a world championship, gets handed a silk picture of a mountain, and a few months later the first American delegation in decades is walking into China. The story is true in its outline, but the details are told differently by different sources, and the game’s earlier history is just as interesting. This ninth and final post in the series is a short history of the game, with the 1971 story at its heart. I’ll flag every place where my sources disagree. The full list of posts is on the guide’s opening page.

Image: Viktor Barna in Paris on 4 December 1933, as captioned by the agency by Agence Rol (photograph held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

From parlour game to a sport with laws

Wikipedia says the sport originated in Victorian England, where it was played among the upper class as an after-dinner parlour game, and that it has been suggested that makeshift versions were developed by British military officers in India around the 1860s or 1870s. It calls that a suggestion, and I’d treat it that way too.

The ITTF’s history page says the game probably began as a mild social diversion with improvised equipment in England in the last quarter of the 19th century, after lawn tennis became popular. It lists an 1890 patent by David Foster and Jaques of London’s Gossima game of 1891, and it says the early games failed because the balls were wrong, until the celluloid ball arrived around 1900. I covered the names and the trademark in the names post, including the places where the ITTF and Wikipedia give different years for the trademark.

The ITTF timeline then gives a run of dates for the next stretch, from craze to a sport with laws:

• 1901. A Table Tennis Association and a rival Ping Pong Association are formed in England, amalgamated in 1903. The first books on the game are published.
• 1904. The craze fades, though there are pockets of popularity in eastern Europe.
• 1922. A revival in England and Europe, “though laws varied,” and standard laws are established in England.
• 1926. The ITTF is initiated in Berlin, the first World Championships are held in London, and the ITTF Constitution is adopted along with the first standardised Laws.
• 1936. The tenth World Championships in Prague, where the page says the longest rally took place, the first point taking over two hours because of pushing-style play.
• 1937. The net is lowered to 6 inches, which the page says encouraged a more attacking style, and time limits are imposed on matches.

That 1936 story is a nice link to the expedite rule in the scoring post. I did not find a source that says the one caused the other, so I’ll leave it as an observation and not a claim.

The sponge revolution

The ITTF page labels the 1920s to 1950 the “Classic Hard Bat Era (European Dominance),” and the 1950s the “Age of Sponge Bat and Technology (Beginning of Asian Dominance).” It then gives these markers:

• 1952. The 19th World Championships are held in Bombay, the first in Asia, and Hiroji Satoh of Japan becomes the first player to win a World Championship using a racket covered with thick sponge, and the first non-European winner.
• 1953. China enters the World Championships for the first time, and the thick sponge bat causes major controversies for several years.
• 1959. Rong Guotuan is the first Chinese world champion in any sport, according to the page, and racket standardisation laws are enacted.

Those racket laws are why the bats post has the rules it does. Wikipedia’s rubber article, as I noted there, says the ITTF limited the thickness of the sponge and rubber layer to a maximum of 4 mm.

Image: Two rackets and a ball, from a 2017 U.S. Institute of Peace memorial event by U.S. Institute of Peace, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The bus in Nagoya

Now the famous part. The U.S. State Department’s National Museum of American Diplomacy tells it like this: the U.S. team was at the 1971 World Table Tennis Championship in Nagoya, Japan, when an encounter between Glenn Cowan of the U.S. team and Zhuang Zedong of the Chinese team became an international sensation. Cowan had missed his bus after practice and boarded the Chinese team’s bus. Zhuang approached him, shook his hand and offered him a depiction of the Huangshan Mountains on a piece of silk cloth. When they stepped off the bus, journalists took photos, and two days later the U.S. team received an official invitation to play exhibition matches in China.

Here is where I have to be careful. Wikipedia’s article on ping-pong diplomacy says that Tim Boggan, who went to China with the U.S. team, wrote that three incidents may have triggered the invitation: a suggestion by the then ITTF president, H. Roy Evans, the American player Leah Neuberger travelling with a Canadian team that had been invited to China (after which, it says, China extended its approval of her visa to the whole American team), and the bus meeting, which it calls “perhaps the most likely trigger.” It also says that Mao Zedong initially approved a report advising against inviting the Americans, then two days later told the foreign ministry to invite them. That account is Wikipedia’s summary of other people’s writing, and I haven’t read the underlying sources.

A hall-of-fame profile of J. Rufford Harrison, the U.S. team’s international chair, adds a third version. Tim Boggan writes in it that as play at Nagoya was reaching its climax, a Chinese official, Sung Chung, approached Harrison and asked if the U.S. team would like to come to China in the next few days, all expenses paid. That doesn’t mention the bus at all.

So who started it? My own suggestion, and no more than that: it was probably several things at once, and each source tells the part that is closest to its own perspective. I can’t settle it from what I read.

The trip, and the numbers that don’t match

The State Department page says nine players made the trip. They crossed the bridge from Hong Kong into mainland China on April 10, 1971, travelled to Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin, and exited China through Hong Kong on April 17. Premier Zhou Enlai personally greeted each player, and some 20,000 fans packed the exhibition match in Beijing. The page says the Chinese players seemed to “take it easy” at times, out of courtesy.

Wikipedia, in contrast, says the U.S. team spent 10 days travelling to Tianjin, Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai. The State Department page gives April 10 to April 17, which is shorter, and lists different cities. I’m going with the museum page for the dates, because it describes the passport stamps for the crossing and exit, but I can’t say which source is right about the cities.

What it led to

The State Department says the trip was the start of what became known as “ping-pong diplomacy” and helped lay the groundwork for establishing official diplomatic relations. It does not say the trip caused everything that followed. The Smithsonian article gives some background on the Chinese side: the Chinese felt that by opening a door to the United States, they could put their mostly hostile neighbours on notice about a possible shift in alliances. It also says Nixon later sent Henry Kissinger secretly to Beijing to arrange a presidential visit, and that Nixon’s journey in February 1972 came seven months later.

A State Department history page agrees on the shape: the PRC issued an invitation in April 1971 for the U.S. team to play a match, and in April 1972 the PRC ping pong team visited the United States on a good-will tour. The Smithsonian article says the Chinese team landed in Detroit on April 12, 1972. The same State Department page says Nixon travelled to China in 1972, met Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, and the two governments negotiated the Shanghai Communiqué.

Image: Close-up of the pimpled rubber of a Double Happiness bat by PGYF, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Olympics and the modern game

The last part of the timeline brings us to today. The ITTF page says it received formal recognition from the International Olympic Committee in 1977, that table tennis was admitted to the Olympic programme in 1981, and that it was featured in the Olympic Games for the first time in 1988 in Seoul. Wikipedia agrees that it has been in the Summer Olympics since 1988. The page then lists the ball size going to 40 mm in 2000, the score changing from 21 to 11 in 2001, and plastic balls being used at the World Championships and Olympics in 2016, which I covered in the equipment post.

If you want a way to feel connected to all this history, play a game with a friend and see how long it takes before one of you says “ping” and the other says “pong.” It’s a silly thing, but the sound is, after all, where the name came from.

Where to go next

That’s the end of the series, but you can jump in anywhere. The hub post has the full list. If you’re keen to play, the serving post and the strokes post are the practical ones. And for what the bat has to be made of, the bats post still has the most detail.

Sources

• International Table Tennis Federation: History of table tennis
• U.S. Department of State, National Museum of American Diplomacy: Ping-Pong Diplomacy: Artifacts from the Historic 1971 U.S. Table Tennis Trip to China
• U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian: Rapprochement with China, 1972
• Smithsonian Magazine: Ping-Pong Diplomacy
• U.S. Table Tennis Hall of Fame: J. Rufford Harrison
• Wikipedia: Ping-pong diplomacy
• Wikipedia: Table tennis
• Wikipedia: Table tennis at the Summer Olympics