Chinese table-tennis
player Zhuang Zedong, who had an instrumental role in the so-called
ping-pong diplomacy that led to a thaw in US-China relations in the
1970s, has died aged 73.
Zhuang's gift of a silk portrait to US player Glenn Cowan in
Japan in 1971 triggered events that led to a US team touring China in
April that year.
In 1972, Richard Nixon became the first US president to visit communist China.
The visit opened China to the outside world and shifted the Cold War balance.
Nixon called his visit to China "the week that changed the world".
The US and China normalised ties in 1979.
'Friends of the Chinese'
The incident that triggered the invitation to the US table
tennis team to visit China took place at the world championships in
Nagoya, Japan, when Cowan missed his team's bus and was given a ride on
the Chinese bus.
Nixon called his visit to China "the week that changed the world"
In an interview with Reuters in 2007, Zhuang said his team
mates had urged him not to approach the American, but he ignored them.
Through an interpreter he told Cowan: "Although the US
government is unfriendly to China, the American people are friends of
the Chinese. I give you this to mark the friendship from Chinese people
to the American people."
Pictures of the encounter were splashed in the media and
Chinese leader Mao Zedong quickly ordered his foreign ministry to extend
the invitation.
"Zhuang Zedong not only knows good ping-pong, he knows good diplomacy too," Mao reportedly said.
Zhuang was a three-time world champion and a huge sporting figure in China in the 1960s.
Zhuang Zedong said his team mates had urged him not to speak to Glenn Cowan
He became sports minister in his 30s and was appointed a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
However, following Mao's death in 1976 and the speedy ousting
of the so-called "Gang of Four", which included Mao's widow Jiang Qing,
Zhuang was detained and not allowed to play table-tennis.
He only returned to Beijing from internal exile in 1985.
He married Chinese-born Japanese woman, Sasaki Atsuko, in 1987.
Cowan died in 2004.
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