Ping Pong Diplomacy
The Americans go wild for baseball, and the Brazilians wow everyone with their soccer skills... But when it comes to table tennis, China beats the other countries hands down. Anyone who watches sport on television knows that the Chinese team tends to do pretty well in the world championships, to say the very least. China has dominated both men’s and women’s table tennis since the 1960’s and account for at least half of the global top ten (Men’s and Women’s).
What is wonderful about ping pong though, is that it is incredibly accessible. It seems every Chinese playground has a table. It’s by no means a sport reserved for the professionals with fancy and expensive equipment. In China, everyone learns how to play, and (from this foreigner’s perspective it appears) everyone plays well. Chinese friends invite you for a game of table tennis, insisting that their skills are nothing special… then you red facedly discover that they are just being modest, and spend most of the game running after the ball each time as they win every rally.
A look into the history of the game suggests that it has British roots rather than Chinese ones. There are records in the 1880s of an upper class Victorian adaptation of lawn tennis into an after dinner parlour game. A cigar box lid was used to hit a rounded champagne cork over books on the dining room table. By the early 1900s, a modified version is said to have been introduced to Japan, where it soon spread to Korea and China. But even if the game was not of their invention, China certainly soon became its master.
1953 saw China entering the Table Tennis World Championship for the first time and by 1959 table tennis player Rong Guotan became the first Chinese world champion in any sport. This was the beginning of Chinese domination of the sport, which continues to the present day.
Ping pong even played an important role in Chinese diplomacy. In 1971, while the American ping pong team were playing in Japan, they were surprised to receive an invitation for an all expenses paid trip to China. When the group of nine players, four officials and two spouses crossed the bridge from Hong Kong to the mainland on 10 April 1971, they were the first Americans to enter the country since the formation of the People’s Republic of China. Premier Zhou Enlai received the team at a special banquet and told them “Your visit to China has opened the door for people-to-people exchanges between China and the USA.”
The Chinese have also developed a distinct style and technique when it comes to playing table tennis. The traditional way of holding the racquet in the West is called the handshake style. As the name suggests, the player grips the racket as if he is shaking someone's hand and uses one side of the racket for forehands and the other for backhands. However, a style that is very popular in China and the rest of Asia is called the penhold grip. A traditional penholder uses only one side of the racket for both strokes and grips the racket as if holding a pen. In the 1990s, player Liu Guoliang pioneered a new kind of penhold style: he stuck rubber onto both sides of the racket and played topspin with backhand. Such was the scale of the success of his style that most of the rest of the Chinese team now emulate it.
Today table tennis remains wildly popular across China. A massive table tennis tournament in Tiananmen Square in June this year marked the first non political event to take place there since the formation of the PRC. The “play to win” mentality is perhaps best summed up by Zhang Yiming, a multiple world and Olympic table tennis champion: “We are expecting to win. Coming second is failure for us and the team. As long as we don’t mess up ourselves, we’ll be okay because nobody can beat us” .
