Book says how table tennis was potent instrument of diplomacy

NEW DELHI: The real history of table tennis is a bizarre tale of espionage, aggravation, and reconciliation, of murder, revenge, and exquisite diplomacy, says a new book.

" Ping-Pong Diplomacy" by Nicholas Griffin is the story of how Ivor Montagu molded the game, and how the Chinese came to embrace it and then shaped it into a subtle instrument of foreign policy.

Montagu, son of an English baron, was the forgotten architect of Ping-Pong diplomacy. As an 18-year-old student at Cambridge in the 1920s, before he joined the Communist Party against his father's wishes, Montagu codifies Ping-Pong.

"Convinced that the sport could spread Communism throughout the world, he founded the International Table Tennis Federation, eventually engineering its path to Mao's China. He is the only reason that 300 million Chinese play table tennis every week," Griffin says.

The spring of 1971 heralded the greatest geopolitical realignment in a generation. After 22 years of antagonism, China and the US suddenly moved toward a detente - achieved not by politicians but by Ping-Pong players. The Western press delighted in the absurdity of the moment and branded it " Ping-Pong Diplomacy."

The term ping-pong diplomacy describes exchanges of table tennis players in the early 1970s between China and the United States in the hope of normalising their bilateral ties.

But for the Chinese, Ping-Pong was always political, a strategic cog in Mao Zedong's foreign policy. Griffin proves that the organised game, from its first breath, was tied to Communism thanks to its founder Montagu, who was also a spy for the former Soviet Union.

Ping-Pong Diplomacy traces a crucial intersection of sports and society. Griffin tells the strange and tragic story of how the game was manipulated at the highest levels; how the Chinese government helped cover up the death of 36 million peasants by holding the World Table Tennis Championships during the Great Famine; how championship players were driven to their deaths during the Cultural Revolution; and, finally, how the survivors were reconvened in 1971 and ordered to reach out to their American counterparts.