In April 1971, table tennis teams from around the globe traveled to Nagoya, Japan, for the World Table Tennis Championships. Amid the games and other events, American player Glenn Cowan somehow found himself boarding the Chinese team’s shuttle bus. Since then, the two sides cannot agree on whether it happened by accident or by invitation. Nevertheless, Chinese player Zhuang Zedong approached Cowan, and they exchanged pleasantries through an interpreter. Cowan left the bus with a silk-screened print of the Huangshan mountains. The next day, Cowan sent Zhuang a t-shirt inscribed with “Let It Be,” a reference to the Beatles song of the same name. Following their exchange, the government of the People’s Republic of China (the PRC) invited the American table tennis team to visit China after the tournament ended. The American team promptly accepted. When it arrived in China on April 10, 1971, the team became the first group of Americans to visit China since the early 1950s. For ten days the Americans players, as well as the American journalists who joined them, traveled the country—visiting the Great Wall and the Summer Palace, playing exhibition games, and experiencing life in a communist country first hand.

Since the communists came to power in China in 1949, the US government had refused to recognize their government as the legitimate government of the country. Instead, Americans treated the government of Nationalist China, on Taiwan, as the rightful government of China. In the midst of the Cold War, which pitted the capitalist and communist worlds against one another in a battle for supremacy, Americans continually avoided normalizing diplomatic relations with the PRC. Furthermore, Nationalist China represented China in the United Nations. An effective “China Lobby” kept pressure on American politicians to support the non-communists in Taiwan over the communists in China. Few observers expected any shifts in the Sino-American relationship, so the Chinese invitation and the American acceptance took the world by surprise. Commentators quickly began to speak of the positive effects of “ping-pong diplomacy.”

However, the friendly overtures around table tennis did not happen in a vacuum. Prior to the American visit, geopolitical changes pushed both the Chinese and the Americans to reconsider their strained relationship. The Chinese relationship with the Soviets had soured considerably during the 1960s, because both countries wanted to lead the international communist movement. Ping-pong diplomacy was part of an effort by Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai to end China’s isolation from the global community that had come with the founding of the PRC. Meanwhile, President Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger saw better relations with the PRC as a way to pressure the Soviet Union to assist in ending the Vietnam War as well as to negotiate on arms limitation. During his campaign for president in 1968, Nixon spoke of containing communism more effectively than his predecessors through a new approach. In office, the president, along with his national security adviser, developed the policy known as détente, which was an effort to work with the Soviet Union to secure long-term peaceful coexistence. The Americans hoped to use negotiation to modify Soviet behavior. However, they needed to give the Soviet government a reason to negotiate, and the threat of a Chinese-American alliance seemed like a good pressure point because the Soviets would prefer not to see the Chinese and the Americans united against them. Nixon and Kissinger also thought connecting China to the western world before it developed nuclear technology would be help to reduce the risk of nuclear confrontation.

In the years following the invitation, commentators have suggested Nixon and Kissinger seized the unexpected overture to improve Chinese-American relations. But while Americans took the invitation as a sign that the Chinese wanted to change the two countries’ fraught relationship, the gesture did not come as a complete surprise to either the president or his national security adviser. Secretly, they had looked to improve the relationship. In 1969, Nixon had publicly denounced Soviet proposals for a joint anti-Chinese policy and approached Rumanian and Pakistani diplomats to serve as conduit to Chinese leaders. The president also made statements deemphasizing the threat from the PRC. Before his administration, America had maintained a permanent patrol of the Taiwan Straits by American destroyers; in 1969, Nixon approved Kissinger’s plan to end it. The Chinese at first seemed receptive to the American gestures, but two issues seemed to hold up progress. First, the Americans expanded the war in Vietnam to Cambodia, a Chinese ally. Second, and more importantly, the Chinese insisted the Americans abandon their support for Taiwan. The Americans seemed unwilling to budge on the Taiwan issue, and the Chinese broke off contact in January 1971.

For all the posturing, though, neither side had really given up on improving relations. In March 1971, the Americans relaxed trade and travel restrictions with China. The following month, the Chinese launched the ping-pong initiative. Zhou En-Lai explained to the American team that their visit signified a “new chapter” in Sino-American relations. After the ping-pong episode, the Chinese also conveyed their desire for a meeting with a high-level emissary to discuss a broad range of issues. Keeping the State Department out of the loop, Nixon arranged for Henry Kissinger to visit Beijing from July 9 to July 11, 1971. During the meetings, Zhou emphasized the importance of the Taiwan question on the future course of discussions. Kissinger apparently responded that the Americans would neither continue to aid Taiwanese efforts to attack the mainland nor support Taiwanese independence. Additionally, the Americans would not oppose PRC membership in the UN, though they would encourage the UN to support a two-China policy whereby both countries could participate in the organization.

If the ping-pong initiative had taken people by surprise, then Richard Nixon’s revelation on July 15, 1971, about Kissinger’s trip to Communist China, and the intention of the two countries to hold a summit in early 1972 downright astonished them. American allies, especially Japan and Taiwan, had good reason to fret about the decision. In contrast, the American people saw the move in an overwhelmingly positive light. When the UN General Assembly voted in October 1971 to expel Taiwan in favor of China, all but the most conservative Americans saw it as a sign of the new American relationship with China. Nixon’s trip to China in February 1972 was a gamble in advance of the presidential election in November, but it turned out to be exceedingly popular. The Shanghai Communiqué issued at the end of the meeting furthered the American rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China as the two sides identified “peaceful coexistence” as a long-term goal.

In the end, the Chinese effort to use table tennis as a means to reemerge on the global stage proved effective. But so did the prior American effort to capitalize on the poor relationship between China and the Soviet Union to forward détente. Richard Nixon left office in disgrace in 1974 because of the Watergate scandal, but many Americans, including some presidential scholars, have seen his diplomatic initiatives as a notable achievement. Ping-pong diplomacy ultimately showed the role cultural diplomacy can play in easing strains between nations.