Ping-Pong Diplomacy

October 21, 2013
Griffin, a journalist, novelist, and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, merges sport and diplomacy in a surprising story of how, for a moment in 1971, ping pong became a key player in world affairs. He analyzes the role the game played in Chinese politics while also profiling Ivor Montagu, a Jewish-British aristocrat who, driven by his love of ping pong and more private career as a communist spy, championed the growth of the International Table Tennis Federation. The invitation the American ping pong team received from China in 1971 was an unprecedented surprise, as was the impact of the match on world affairs. Griffin makes a strong case that the success of the American team’s China trip played perfectly into President Richard Nixon’s own historic China trip and the detente that altered world politics. Throughout, Griffin balances geopolitical context with sympathetic depictions of the world-class ping pong players who competed. Among them was Zhuang Zedong, the Chinese world champion who was disgraced during the dangerous days of the Cultural Revolution, and American star Glenn Cowan, who died homeless in 2004. Griffin has found an intriguing story with which to illuminate several important political events of the later 20th century and told it well.

November 15, 2013
A quirky, thoroughly enjoyable trek through the implausible beginnings of international table tennis and the colorful characters-cum-diplomats behind it. Griffin (Dizzy City, 2007, etc.) has the dexterity and cleverness to take on the story of British aristocrat Ivor Montagu, son of an English baron who was schooled at Cambridge, where he took up Ping-Pong at the end of World War I. An imperial British entertainment on the wane at the time, "teetering between sport and punch line," Ping-Pong would get its boost when Montagu renamed it table tennis (he discovered that Ping-Pong was trademarked by a toy manufacturer) and established its rules and regulations, organizing the Table Tennis Association and promoting championships, first across Europe, then behind the Iron Curtain and into Asia. He wrote: "I saw in Table Tennis a sport particularly suited to the lower paid," he wrote. "I plunged into the game as a crusade." Indeed, Montagu became a devoted communist; he also worked in film, importing the work of Soviet filmmakers and helping Alfred Hitchcock "weave outlandish plots into ordinary settings." Shadowed by MI5, Montagu traveled seamlessly from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War to the world tennis championship in Prague. After the war, he lobbied to include the Soviets in international competition, as well as Japan and communist China, where the sport was highly popular and political. Griffin delineates the significant championship matches held in Tokyo in 1956 and in China in 1961, at the height of Mao Zedong's catastrophic famine, which the world did not yet fathom. The same Chinese players disgraced during the Cultural Revolution were quickly rehabilitated in 1971 in order to act as convenient instruments of detente for the two frosty antagonists, Mao and Nixon. Griffin bites off a huge story but manages to maintain lively interest in the array of personalities involved.

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Starred review from September 1, 2013
It was 1971. The U.S. Table Tennis team was in Japan for the World Table Tennis Championships when they received an unusual invitation: Why not pop over to China for a few informal matches against the Chinese national team? The U.S. team became the first official American delegation to enter China since the late 1940s, the occasion leading to the phrase Ping-Pong diplomacy. But what appeared to be a friendly competition sparked by a chance meeting between an American and a Chinese player was actually, the author explains, the culmination of a plan conceived years earlier, designed by the Chinese to be the first step in an eventual rapprochement between the two countries. (Would Nixon have been able to go to China in 1972 if it hadn't been for the 1971 table-tennis tourney? Doubtful.) Full of eyebrow-raising surprisesthe British man who codified the rules of Ping-Pong in the 1920s and brought the game to China, was a spy for the Communiststhe book tells the secret history of Ping-Pong, a story of violence and intrigue and political machinations. Ping-Pong as a vehicle for international espionage? It's an idea so outlandish that, if it weren't true, some novelist would have to invent it. A remarkable story, well documented and excitingly told.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)