Zhuang Zedong - Actor of The Ping Pong Diplomacy

Actor of The Ping Pong Diplomacy

In late 1969, the training of the National Table Tennis Team resumed as a result of the intervention of Premier Zhou Enlai, and in 1971, Zhuang Zedong and the Chinese team attended the 31st World Table Tennis Championship. One day during the championship in Nagoya, Japan, the US team member, Glenn Cowan, got onto the bus of the Chinese team, and Zhuang Zedong greeted him and presented him with a silk-screen portrait of the Huangshan Mountains, thus starting the so-called Ping Pong Diplomacy. Ten months after Zhuang's chance meeting with Cowan, Richard Nixon, then the president of the United States, visited China in February, 1972. Only two months later, Zhuang led the Chinese table tennis delegation to the United States from April 18 to 30, as part of an 18-day trip including Canada, Mexico and Peru. The so-called Ping Pong Diplomacy eventually led to the normalization of Sino-US relationships in 1979.