A01615 - Zhuang Zedong, Noted Practitioner of Ping Pong Diplomacy

 

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Zhuang Zedong (Chuang Tse-tung; b. August 25, 1940, Yangzhou, Jiangsu, China – d. February 10, 2013, Beijing, China)^[1] was a Chinese table tennis player, three-time world men's singles champion and champion at numerous other table tennis events and a well-known political personality during the tumult of the Cultural Revolution. His chance meeting with American table tennis player, Glenn Cowan, during the 31st World Table Tennis Championship, later referred to as ping-pong diplomacy, triggered the first thawing of the ice in Sino-American relations since 1949. Zhuang was once married to the pianist Bao Huiqiao, and his second wife was the Chinese-born Japanese Atsuko Sasaki (佐々木敦子).^[2]

Zhuang was born in August 1940 and he joined the Chinese National Table Tennis team as a teenager. His coach was Fu Qifang. In 1961, at the 26th World Table Tennis Championship, he won his first men's singles championship, and at the next two World Table Tennis Championships, the 27th and 28th in 1963 and 1965 respectively, he again won the men's singles championship.^[2]

On January 20, 1968, two years into the Cultural Revolution, he married Bao Huiqiao in her dormitory room at the National Music Conservatory in Beijing. During the Cultural Revolution which began in 1966, Zhuang was not able to pursue his career as a table tennis player as usual, nor was Bao hers as a pianist.

Influenced by a veteran national team member and national champion Wang Chuanyao, and encouraged by his coach, Zhuang picked up the "Dual-sided Offense" style in the 1950s when he was a teenager.^[3]

During the 50s to 60s, the majority of the pen-holding style players lacked attacking or counter-attack capabilities on the backhand side, and relied solely on push-blocking. Wang is believed to be among the pioneers of the "Penholding Dual-sided Offense" style that emphasize on offensive backhand strokes and drives.

Zhuang adopted but modified Wang's style by:

1. Shortening the strokes of backhand drives – sometimes even by simply using wrist or finger actions to flick the racket (referred to by himself in his book as to "knock" or "snap" the ball).
2. Standing closer to the table than Wang – but still two to three feet away from the table, which is farther away than most push-blocking penholders who are normally within two feet.

He did so as a result of his meticulous analysis of the physical differences between him and Wang – Wang was much taller and had a longer arm-coverage which enabled bigger, more powerful swings and strokes.

Zhuang had to streamline his strokes and instead attempted to generate a sudden burst of explosive power via a smaller motion, similar to the "one-inch punch" in the Wing Chun Kung Fu style.

He won and dominated three World Championships with this unique style, and encountered almost no competition from the Japanese, European and his fellow Chinese players. Table tennis observers generally believe that he could have won one to two more world championships if the Cultural Revolution had not occurred. This is evidenced by the fact the next two champions both had lopsided losing records against Zhuang during the time when the Chinese team did not participate during the Cultural Revolution.

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, American team member Glenn Cowan missed his own bus and in his haste got onto the bus of the Chinese team. Unlike his team mates, who ignored Cowan, Zhuang Zedong greeted him and presented him with a silk-screen portrait of the Huangshan Mountains, thus starting the so-called ping-pong diplomacy.^[4][5] Ten months after Zhuang's chance meeting with Cowan, Richard Nixon, then 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^[6]: 141 18 to 30, as part of an 18-day trip including Canada, Mexico and Peru. American media during Zhuang's trip highlighted friendly encounters between the Chinese players and Americans.^[6]: 141

The ping-pong diplomacy eventually led to the normalization of Sino-American relationships in 1979.

In 1973, Zhuang Zedong became a favorite of Jiang Qing, wife of Mao Zedong. After the downfall in October, 1976 of the Gang of Four of which Jiang Qing was a member, Zhuang Zedong was jailed and investigated.^[5] In 1980, the investigation ended and he was sent to Taiyuan, Shanxi to work as a coach of the provincial table tennis team.

In 1985, Zhuang was allowed to return to Beijing again, and it was arranged that he would coach the young table tennis players at the Palace of Youth in Beijing. Zhuang's relationship with Bao Huiqiao had been reportedly deteriorating during the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution and was not to be repaired. On February 2, 1985, he and Bao Huiqiao were officially divorced.^[7] They had one daughter and one son before their divorce.^[8]

About this time, Zhuang Zedong published his book Chuang Yu Chuang (闯与创, "Adventure and Creation").^[3]

Later in 1985, the Chinese-born Japanese Atsuko Sasaki met Zhuang in Beijing. Sasaki was born in 1944 in Zhangye, Gansu, China to Japanese parents. Her family did not move back to Japan until 1976. By this time, Sasaki had finished her high-school education in China and her father had died of cancer in Lanzhou. Sasaki Atsuko had met Zhuang Zedong previously in Japan in 1971 and 1972 and was a fan of Zhuang.

When Zhuang and Sasaki decided to get married, both had to go through a difficult political process due to the political environment in China. Zhuang had to write to Li Ruihuan and Deng Xiaoping about the matter, and Sasaki had to give up her Japanese citizenship and apply for Chinese citizenship. Eventually, Zhuang and Sasaki got married in 1987.^[9]

Zhuang and Sasaki lived together for 26 years. Zhuang wrote a book about their story, entitled Deng Xiaoping approved our marriage. Zhuang opened an international table tennis club in Beijing. He visited the United States in 2007, speaking at USC and other universities about his role in fostering better relations between China and the United States.^[4]

Zhuang Zedong was diagnosed of late-stage colon cancer in 2008. Although he sought treatment in various hospitals around China, the tumour metastasized to his liver and lungs. Five months before his death, he only had one eighth of his liver left. He requested euthanasia, but was denied by his doctors.^[10] On 10 February 2013, the first day of the Chinese New Year, Zhuang died at You'an Hospital in Beijing,^[10] at the age of 72.^[11] Within a day there were 300,000 messages about this death on Chinese microblogging sites.^[10]

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Zhuang Zedong, Skilled in China Foreign Relations and Ping-Pong, Dies at 72

Zhang Hesong/Xinhua, via Associated Press

Zhuang Zedong, right, in Beijing in 1961, the first of three victories at the world championships.

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: February 11, 2013

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In 1971, at the world table tennis championships in Japan, an American player mistakenly boarded a bus carrying the Chinese team. The team had been told not to talk to Westerners, and an awkward silence descended. Ten minutes elapsed. Then the best player in China stood, greeted the American and offered him a gift, a scarf.

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Zhuang Zedong getting a kiss from a young fan in 1972.

An interpreter asked the American, Glenn Cowan, if he knew the man’s identity.

“Yes, the world champion, Zhuang Zedong,” Mr. Cowan replied. “And I hope your team does well.”

At the time, the Chinese leader, Mao Zedong, had been looking to improve relations with the United States, though the countries were on opposing sides in the Vietnam War and had been fierce adversaries since the Communist takeover of China in 1949. Both nations were eager to find a geopolitical counterweight to the Soviet Union, and a rapprochement, the thinking went, might provide that.

Writing about the two players, Sports Illustrated told of a report in which Mao, lying in bed looking at press photographs of the encounter between Mr. Cowan and Mr. Zhuang, exclaimed, “My Lord, Zhuang!”

Mao promptly invited the American team to visit China after the world tournament — a signal to Washington of Beijing’s openness to a thaw in American-Chinese relations. Ten months later President Richard M. Nixon made his historic visit to China, and by 1979 the two countries had established diplomatic ties.

For Mr. Zhuang, who died on Sunday in Beijing at 72, the encounter on the bus was a more benign moment in a life buffeted by the gales of modern Chinese history. During the Cultural Revolution — the violent mass movement Mao started in 1966 to purge China of any taint of capitalism — he was denounced as having put too much emphasis on winning and disappeared from public view. But he regained his stature by cultivating a friendship with Mao’s wife and was appointed sports minister and a member of the ruling Central Committee. When Mao’s wife fell from favor, however, his fortunes crumbled again. He was assigned to sweep streets in a spirit of “self-criticism” and attempted suicide.

Later, restored once more to good standing in Chinese society, he became a table tennis coach and pursued a passion for calligraphy.

In China, table tennis was more than a game. In the early 1950s, Mao had decreed it the national sport, in part because it was a low-cost game that peasants could play. Moreover, the International Table Tennis Federation became one of the few governing bodies in sports to recognize the People’s Republic, rather than the Republic of China on Taiwan, as its Chinese member nation.

Mr. Zhuang had become a national hero by winning three world championships — in 1961, 1963 and 1965.

“It was amazing,” he said of his first crown. “We needed a spiritual nuclear weapon, and I was like a newborn tiger, afraid of nothing. Mao Zedong watched my matches on television. Later they told me he kept saying, ‘Please win, Mr. Zhuang.’ ”

Mr. Zhuang said it was impossible to separate table tennis from politics and history, a point Mao made even more emphatically. “Regard a Ping-Pong ball as the head of your capitalist enemy,” the chairman was quoted as saying. “Hit it with your socialist bat, and you have won the point for the fatherland.”

Xinhua, the official Chinese press agency, announced Mr. Zhuang’s death, saying the cause was rectal cancer.

Zhuang Zedong was born in Yangzhou, China, on Aug. 25, 1940, and joined the Chinese national table tennis team as a teenager. He developed a much-imitated technique for hitting a strong backhand to accompany his powerful forehand. Dick Miles, a 10-time American champion, called the technique “the most perfectly executed stroke in the game.” In the 1960s, Mr. Zhuang and Li Furong, also Chinese, dominated the international game.

But table tennis was banned as bourgeois during the Cultural Revolution. Several top players killed themselves, and many feared that Mr. Zhuang, who had dropped out of sight, was dead. But he surfaced in 1971 for an exhibition match, and then led his team to the world championship in Japan. Mao seemed to give Mr. Zhuang at least some credit for the diplomatic breakthrough. “This Zhuang Zedong not only plays table tennis well, but is good at foreign affairs,” The New York Times once quoted him as saying.

When Mr. Zhuang became a favorite of Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, there were rumors of an affair. He denied the gossip, characterizing the relationship as motherly. Under Ms. Jiang’s tutelage, he rose to sports minister and a member of the Central Committee in 1975. He organized mass meetings at which denunciations, beatings and self-criticism were common.

“I did many dreadful things that I now regret,” he said in 2007.

After Mao died in 1976 and Jiang and her allies, collectively called the Gang of Four, fell from power, he found himself under house arrest for two and a half years. He then spent five years in internal exile in Shanxi Province before returning to Beijing.

His first marriage, to Bao Huiqiao, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Sasaki Atsuko, and a daughter.

When he presented Mr. Cowan with the scarf, Mr. Zhuang once said, politics was the last thing on his mind.

“I only know how to play Ping-Pong, how to hit the ball from this side of the table to the other,” he said. “Sometimes the ball drops. Sometimes it goes out of bounds.”