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2 - Ping-Pong Diplomacy’s Return Leg and After

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2022

Pete Millwood
Affiliation:
The University of Hong Kong
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Summary

The visit by the US table tennis team to China in April 1971 famously helped break the ice between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United States. Less well known is the second leg of ping-pong diplomacy, in which the US and Chinese teams faced off again – in the United States. This was nonetheless an historic exchange: The Chinese team was the first official delegation of visitors from the PRC to ever visit the United States. This chapter shows how this successful sporting exchange helped transform Nixon and Mao’s secret diplomacy into a broader rapprochement between Chinese and US societies. It reveals how the success of the ping-pong return leg underpinned the successful effort by the hosts of the table tennis players – the National Committee on US-China Relations – to convince both the US and Chinese governments to recognize their organization and their allies at the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC as the foremost US conduits for managing exchanges with China. The chapter concludes with a connected development: the 1973 creation of a third private US organization to manage Sino-American societal interactions, the National Council for United States-China Trade.

Type
Chapter
Information
Improbable Diplomats
How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations
, pp. 119 - 161
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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