Ping Pong Diplomacy

HISTORY This Week

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History, Education, Society & Culture

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2023

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

April 10, 1971. A team of ping pong players leaves Hong Kong to step across a border and become the first group of Americans welcomed to China in over 20 years. These competitors find themselves becoming unlikely diplomats at the center of a media frenzy, and at the heart of one of the 20th century’s major geopolitical shifts. How did table tennis turn into a powerful tool of foreign policy? And how did these athletes leave an impact that went far beyond the ping pong table?

Special thanks to our guests: professional table tennis athletes Judy Hoarfrost, Olga Soltesz, and Connie Sweeris; Yafeng Xia, senior professor of social science at Long Island University Brooklyn, and author of Negotiating with the Enemy: U.S.-China Talks during the Cold War, 1949-1972; and Nicholas Griffin, author of Ping Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The History Channel, Original Podcast.
0:02.8	Hey, history this week listeners, it's Sally here. Before we get started, I have a big announcement.
0:08.0	History this week has been named as an honoree for this year's Webby Award for Best Documentary
0:13.2	Podcast, and we were also nominated for best featured guests for our Reconstruction mini-series,
0:19.2	and we need your support to win. Go to bit.ly slash htw to vote and make your voice heard.
0:26.6	That's b-i-t dot l-y slash htw vote. And now here's this week's episode.
0:35.8	History this week and sports history this week. April 10th 1971. I'm Sally Helm and I'm Kaelin Jones.
0:47.1	Kaelin, we are sort of ping-ponging back and forth here. We are and that's for a reason. This story
0:53.6	is about ping-pong. It is about ping-pong and about one of the biggest geopolitical shifts
0:59.3	of the 20th century. I think that is fair to say. And it has to do with relations between the US and China.
1:09.9	We are starting our story on April 10th of 1971. And at that moment, no American group has been
1:17.7	invited to China in over 20 years. And against all odds, the people to change that are a rag-tag
1:26.4	group of American table tennis players. And we got to talk to three of the four living members
1:31.0	of the team. One of them is Connie Swears, who was just 23 when she stepped off the bridge leading
1:36.6	from Hong Kong to China. The border crossing that we went was an old train bridge, I think, that we
1:43.7	walked across. We had to haul our luggage across that border. There were red-arney guards standing
1:50.4	there with rifles. And they told us they would take our passports. And I thought, oh my goodness,
1:57.6	I'm going into a communist country. I'm not going to have a passport. If anything happened,
2:04.3	would we get out? Today, ping-pong diplomacy. How did table tennis turn into a powerful tool
2:12.4	of foreign policy? And how did these athletes live an impact that went far beyond a nine by five
2:18.7	foot ping-pong table?
2:27.2	Kaelin, before we get into this story, which is a high stakes geopolitical drama, I want to start
	...

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