Ping-pong diplomacy: Australian table tennis players return to China, five decades after historic tour
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星期五, 十月 27, 2023
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Only weeks after the team’s headline-making tour, Australia’s then opposition leader, Gough Whitlam, led a delegation to Beijing promising to open diplomatic relations “when elected”.
Key Points:
- Only weeks after the team’s headline-making tour, Australia’s then opposition leader, Gough Whitlam, led a delegation to Beijing promising to open diplomatic relations “when elected”.
- One was table tennis, one was basketball and one was volleyball.
- One was table tennis, one was basketball and one was volleyball.
‘A crowd of 8,000 people’
- A revolutionary who became one of China’s most revered statesmen, he advocated peaceful co-existence with the West and other nations.
- The American team embarked on their tour first – setting the stage for then-President Richard Nixon’s famous visit to Beijing in 1972.
- Paul Pinkewich had just turned 20 at the time of the visit, teammate Steve Knapp was only 18.
- Our first match in Canton, now Guangzhou, I think it was a crowd of 8,000 people,” he recalls.
- “Do you wear this hair because of your disagreement with society or because it is a style?” Knapp replied, “It is the fashion.”
- “Can you believe, one table in the middle of the Capital Stadium [in Beijing] with 18,000 spectators, and that was just an amazing experience.
- But they always let the woman win.” That woman was Anne Middleton, the other player on the 1971 tour, who has since passed away.
- After the trip we were labelled as communists […] but we were interested in friendship first, competition second.”
Why sport diplomacy matters
- Beijing has continued to use sport as a diplomatic tool, including becoming the first city in the world to host both a summer and winter Olympic Games (Beijing in 2008 and 2022).
- French educator Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee in 1894, believing Olympics were a global event.
- A new term has also emerged in recent years – almost always applied by researchers in democratic nations – to describe undemocratic nations’ forays into global sport: sportswashing.
- “Amity between people holds the key to sound relations between countries.” At the heart of such amity, sport continues to play a significant role.
Tracey Holmes was one of the fifty Australians interviewed in the 'Fifty People, Fifty Stories' book due to her experiences of previously living and working in China.