Ping-Pong Diplomacy by Nicholas Griffin – review

There is a photograph, taken in 1971, of one of the most unlikely groups ever assembled in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. In the back row, Glenn Cowan, a long-haired American college student; at centre front stands the late Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, at his side an elderly bespectacled Englishman. All appear to be looking in different directions, as, indeed, they were.

The occasion was the historic visit of the US ping-pong team to Beijing in response to an ostensibly impromptu invitation from their Chinese counterparts, issued at the World Table Tennis Championship in Japan after Cowan, an American player, boarded the Chinese team bus. It is credited with breaking the ice between China and the US after a 22-year freeze and paving the way for Henry Kissinger's secret trip and President Nixon's 1972 visit. China rejoined the world after decades of isolation.

The men who brought this about, as Nicholas Griffin's deft account Ping-Pong Diplomacy: Ivor Montagu and the Astonishing Story Behind the Game That Changed the World makes clear, were a strikingly motley crew. Montagu was the unsporty son of a British peer who compensated with ping-pong, a game invented by a British toy manufacturer. At Cambridge in the 1920s, he joined the Communist party, codified the rules of the game and founded the English Table Tennis Association, followed by the International Table Tennis Federation. He had a political motive: he saw ping-pong as a vehicle for promoting communism; China was his greatest triumph.

Zhou Enlai's motives were equally mixed. He seized on ping-pong as a non-threatening means of establishing contact with the US and a way out of China's isolation. The "impromptu" invitation was as carefully choreographed as the subsequent visits.

As for the players, the members of the Chinese national team had been feted as national heroes in the early 60s, only to be savagely persecuted in the Cultural Revolution. Two had committed suicide and a third, who had denounced his colleagues, was to suffer ostracism when the political pendulum swung back.

The Americans also had mixed fates. Their Cinderella sport was briefly the fulcrum of world affairs; they were celebrities. Nothing could ever match up. Glenn Cowan, who had kicked off the whole affair, died as a derelict in 2004. Nicholas Griffin interweaves personal histories with the strategic story of ping-pong diplomacy, one of history's more bizarre, world-changing episodes.