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The N.B.A. and China and the Myths of Sports Diplomacy
[The New Yorker] In April, 1971, while practicing at the World Table Tennis Championship, in Nagoya, Japan, an American Ping-Pong player named Glenn Cowan needed a ride, and he boarded a bus carrying the Chinese team. Cowan, who was nineteen years old, had a mop of brown hair that fell to his shoulders and a toothy grin. Most of the Chinese players watched him warily; they had been warned not to talk to foreigners. But after a few minutes Zhuang Zedong, a former world champion, came to the front of the bus and presented him with a gift, a silk-screen portrait of Huangshan mountain, which Zhuang had been carrying in his bag. Cowan rummaged around in his, looking for a way to reciprocate, but he could only come up with a comb. The following day, Cowan presented Zhuang with a T-shirt emblazoned with a red, white, and blue peace sign and the words "Let It Be." Soon afterward, China invited the American team to visit the country, and they became the first delegation of Americans to do so since the communist takeover in 1949.As a parable of the power of sports, the story is irresistible. And you don’t have to stop there: you can, if you like, draw a line from "Ping-Pong diplomacy" to Nixon’s visit to China; to Nike opening its first factory in mainland China, in 1981; to Yao Ming’s selection by the Houston Rockets as the No. 1 pick in the 2002 N.B.A. draft; to the enormous number of Chinese fans who reportedly streamed N.B.A. games and content in 2017‐18‐more than six hundred million, roughly twice as many people as live in the United States. But the truth, of course, is more complicated. As Nicholas Griffin explains in "Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World," the encounter was not as spontaneous as it’s sometimes made out to be. China was consciously using Ping-Pong as a way to initiate contact with the U.S., and the U.S. had its own reasons for being receptive. (Though Cowan’s boarding of the bus may have been accidental, he later said, "I was invited actually to board the Chinese bus with the team, which shocked me, of course.") The two countries initiated several athlete exchanges over the next decade, with mixed success; though the Chinese adopted the slogan "Friendship first, competition second," tensions sometimes threatened to derail the visits. In a recent column in the Washington Post, Pete Millwood, a fellow in East Asian history at the London School of Economics, catalogued some of the more sensational anecdotes: rats thrown by protesters when the Chinese team visited the United States; a fistfight among the U.S. Track and Field team at a formal banquet in 1975, which appalled the hosts. "Americans will be Americans," a senior official travelling with the team said. He added, "The Chinese will have to learn that." Both sides are still learning, clearly. In the two decades since Yao was drafted, the N.B.A. has become China’s most popular sports league, and the league has embraced the notion that it might facilitate a closer relationship between the two countries. "Sport has been used to bridge divides between cultures," Silver said after a meeting, last year, in Shanghai, with Yao, who is now head of the Chinese Basketball Association.  Posted by: Besoeker 2019-10-24 |
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