Thread: Zhuang Zedong, Chinese 'ping-pong diplomacy' player, dies

Chinese table-tennis player Zhuang Zedong, who had an instrumental role in the so-called ping-pong diplomacy that led to a thaw in US-China relations in the 1970s, has died aged 73.

Zhuang's gift of a silk portrait to US player Glenn Cowan in Japan in 1971 triggered events that led to a US team touring China in April that year.

In 1972, Richard Nixon became the first US president to visit communist China.

The visit opened China to the outside world and shifted the Cold War balance.

Nixon called his visit to China "the week that changed the world".

The US and China normalised ties in 1979.

The incident that triggered the invitation to the US table tennis team to visit China took place at the world championships in Nagoya, Japan, when Cowan missed his team's bus and was given a ride on the Chinese bus.

In an interview with Reuters in 2007, Zhuang said his team mates had urged him not to approach the American, but he ignored them.




Nixon called his visit to China "the week that changed the world"
Through an interpreter he told Cowan: "Although the US government is unfriendly to China, the American people are friends of the Chinese. I give you this to mark the friendship from Chinese people to the American people."


BBC News - Zhuang Zedong, Chinese 'ping-pong diplomacy' player, dies


Thailands ping pong diplomacy policy during the vietnam war also helped to cement friendship for americans and aussies in south east asia in the 60s and 70s and endures to this day!

RIP Ze Dong

Zhuang Zedong (August 25, 1940 – February 10, 2013)[1] was a Chinesetable tennis player, three-time world men's singles champion and champion at numerous other table tennis events, a well-known political personality during the tumult of the Cultural Revolution. His chance meeting with the US table tennis player, Glenn Cowan, during the 31st World Table Tennis Championship, later referred to as Ping Pong Diplomacy, was considered in China to have triggered the thawing of the ice in Sino-American relations since 1949. Zhuang was once married to the pianist Bao Huiqiao, and his second wife is the Chinese-born Japanese Sasaki Atsuko












A credit to the sport and civilisation