The Origin of Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Forgotten Architect of Sino-U.S. Rapprochement by Mayumi Itoh (review)

What most scholars can only dream of accomplishing in a lifetime, political scientist Mayumi Itoh has managed to do in the span of just a few years. Between 2010 and 2012 alone, she published four scholarly monographs covering topics ranging from Japanese wartime zoo policy to abandoned Japanese war orphans in Manchuria to postwar Sino-Japanese relations. What unifies these books is the common theme—forgotten or little-known actors or victims (including “silent victims”: zoo animals) in the history of twentieth-century Japan.

As its subtitle suggests, The Origin of Ping-Pong Diplomacy is devoted to what Itoh calls “the forgotten architect” of Sino-U.S. rapprochement at the beginning of the 1970s. In 1971, the Table Tennis World Championships were held in Nagoya. Following the event, the U.S. team was invited to the People’s Republic of China (hereafter, China), a move that took the world by surprise and later gave rise to the term “Ping-Pong Diplomacy,” defined in her book as “the use of international table tennis tournaments as a diplomatic vehicle during the Nagoya World’s in 1971” (p. 3). According to Itoh, the Nagoya championships took place at a particularly critical time. The United States and China had attempted to establish channels of communication via third countries such as Pakistan and Romania but had reached a deadlock due to the expansion of U.S. bombing into Cambodia. However, at the Nagoya championships, the table tennis delegation from China not only showed up for the first time in decades but also interacted with the U.S. team in a friendly manner. After the event, the U.S. team and several other teams received an invitation to visit China. The invitation was perceived as an indication of the openness by Chinese leaders to having direct talks with the U.S. administration.

Three months after the successful visit of U.S. table tennis players, Henry Kissinger, special assistant to the president on national security, made his now-famous secret visit to Beijing via Pakistan. Kissinger’s visit in turn set off a seismic change in international politics. In early 1972, President Richard Nixon made his own historic visit to China, which was followed by Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei’s visit later that year. As one Chinese saying repeatedly quoted by Itoh goes, “a tiny ball turned the globe upside down” (pp. 12, 178). Without this sport, Itoh argues, China and the United States would not have ended the “ice age” in their relations. It was this “Ping-Pong Diplomacy” that “paved the way for the Sino-U.S. rapprochement in 1972” (p. 3).

The chronology of Sino-U.S. rapprochement has been the subject of numerous studies and is familiar to students of international relations. Nearly all existing works, however, focus on the part of its main players—Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger on one side, and Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai on the other—as well as on geopolitical calculations. The role played by Japan and the Japanese in Ping-Pong Diplomacy has been largely overlooked in English-language works. The name Gotō Kōji is certainly never mentioned. This is what Itoh’s book attempts to redress.

The book adopts a relatively straightforward manner. An introduction offers a brief history of the sport and includes the standard literature survey. The following chapter presents a general background of the international politics of the time. Then, four chapters, by far the largest section of the book, recount the life story of Itoh’s protagonist, Gotō Kōji, a businessman and founder of a technical school in Nagoya with a deep involvement in table tennis from a young age. As president of the Table Tennis Federation of Asia (TTFA), Gotō decided to invite China to the 1971 World Championships in Nagoya, and his subsequent visit to China and meeting with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai...