Ping-Pong Diplomacy

The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World

Nicholas Griffin

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781451642773
• eBook ISBN: 9781451642810
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Combining the insight of Franklin Foer's How Soccer Explains the World and the intrigue of Ben Affleck's Argo, Ping Pong Diplomacy traces the story of how an aristocratic British spy used the game of table tennis to propel a Communist strategy that changed the shape of the world. THE SPRING OF 1971 heralded the greatest geopolitical realignment in a generation. After twenty-two years of antagonism, China and the United States suddenly moved toward a détente—achieved not by politicians but by Ping-Pong players. The Western press delighted in the absurdity of the moment and branded it "Ping-Pong Diplomacy." But for the Chinese, Ping-Pong was always political, a strategic cog in Mao Zedong's foreign policy. Nicholas Griffin proves that the organized game, from its first breath, was tied to Communism thanks to its founder, Ivor Montagu, son of a wealthy English baron and spy for the Soviet Union. Ping-Pong Diplomacy traces a crucial inter­section of sports and society. Griffin tells the strange and tragic story of how the game was manipulated at the highest levels; how the Chinese government helped cover up the death of 36 million peasants by holding the World Table Tennis Championships during the Great Famine; how championship players were driven to their deaths during the Cultural Revolution; and, finally, how the survivors were reconvened in 1971 and ordered to reach out to their American counterparts. Through a cast of eccentric characters, from spies to hippies and Ping-Pong-obsessed generals to atom-bomb survivors, Griffin explores how a neglected sport was used to help realign the balance of worldwide power.

PART ONE | The West

CHAPTER 1 | Not-So-Humble Beginnings

At four years old, the future Communist agent Ivor Montagu stared out of his nursery window in Kensington Court, London, awaiting the Princess of Wales. He expected a gilded carriage, a woman wrapped in ermine and lit by jewels. He was brushed and combed by his nanny, then “dragged downstairs and set astride a footstool.”

The Princess of Wales wore a plain gray suit and arrived by car. Years later, the Princess, by then the Queen of England, would write to Montagu’s mother to commiserate about her son’s scandalous marriage. For now, it was Montagu who suffered the deep disappointment. His only recollection on leaving the drawing room was that of having “felt thoroughly cheated.”

That one of his mother’s closest friends was May, Princess of Wales, wasn’t particularly surprising in the Montagu household. The Montagus were among the wealthiest families in England, raised to the nobility thanks to generous contributions to political parties by Samuel Montagu, the family patriarch.

Ivor Montagu’s father, the eldest son, had inherited the London house. Fires burned day and night throughout the winters, “casting a warmth and amber glow that added to the sense of comfort and luxury.” Generals, admirals, royalty, and ministers all visited, passing under the cut-glass chandeliers and padding across thick carpets. In turn, the family visited the great and good, including a stop at 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s official residence, where young Ivor played in the garden while his father met with the prime minister.

In the south of England, the family maintained two great houses, Townhill and South Stoneham, where Ivor Montagu would spend much of his childhood. In the summers, the houses would play a cricket match against each other. Footmen would face off between the wickets. Montagu played long stop, undisturbed in the daisies while his older brothers reaped applause at bat.

On New Year’s Eve, he would be forced to attend the Servants’ Ball at Townhill, where his mother would break the ice by leading off in dance with either the butler or the head gardener. The rest of the staff would stand awkwardly with their families around the edge of the ballroom, waiting their turn. Montagu, who professed a deep hatred of being “touched by either sex,” would still have to fill his dance card until, on one inspired New Year’s Eve morning, he picked up a large rock and “solemnly . . . dropped it from about waist high on my big toe,” earning an exemption from the ball. It was an early sign of his determination to do things the hard way.

There was no road map for Ivor Montagu. His future decisions would cross continents and political systems. From Hollywood to Hong Kong, Montagu would build bridges between radical ideas and the people ready to receive them. He’d risk his life on several occasions, share secrets with assassins, live in lies, and weave his way safely through two wars, until finally his own secret was discovered.

If Ivor Montagu’s beginnings were all velvet knee pants and frilly baby bonnets, his grandfather’s were modest. As Montagu would later put it, if you looked among the books in the family library, “the thin one was the family pedigree.” It contained a coat of arms and then his father, his grandfather, and “nothing else.” That was an exaggeration, though the Montagus’ rise to nobility was rapid. Ivor’s grandfather, Montagu Samuel, was born to an observant Jew in Liverpool in 1832. By the time he was twenty-one, he had founded his own bank, which thrived under a near-monopoly in Britain’s foreign exchange transactions. There were offices dotted around the world, within and beyond the borders of the British Empire.

His first name change took him from Montagu Samuel to Samuel Montagu. Thanks to hefty contributions to political parties, he next added the title of Lord Swaythling, a name borrowed from a village between the family’s two Hampshire estates. He’d have preferred Lord Montagu, but the current Lord Montagu would agree to share his name only if Lord Swaythling would share his money.

Although he’d anglicized his name, he hadn’t forgotten his Jewish roots. Lord Swaythling gave generously to Jews escaping pogroms in 1880s Russia and to numerous charities near his Hampshire home. As a member of the Houses of Parliament for fifteen years, he carried a deep love of Prime Minister Gladstone’s version of England but never forgot his own childhood, when he’d fought “with young bigots of other faiths.” Anti-Semitism was a virus that could emerge in any country. Hilaire Belloc, England’s satirist in chief, couldn’t resist a passing shot:

Lord Swaythling, whom the people knew,

And loved, as Samuel Montagu,

Is known unto the fiends of hell

As Mr. Moses Samuel.

There was nothing fiendish about Lord Swaythling. He built temples, poorhouses, schools for the teaching of Hebrew. On his death in 1911, the poor streamed out from the slums of London’s East End to follow in the wake of his funeral procession. Ivor Montagu, almost seven, was kitted out in a black velvet suit and a ceremonial sword but was not allowed to join the throng following the cortege. Three miles divided the last carriage from the hearse. Streets from Camden Town to Bayswater were closed as the police kept the black-coated traffic moving.

Lord Swaythling had died a millionaire, one of only a handful in England. Much of the land, money, and other interests were left to Ivor’s father—the second Baron Swaythling. Ivor had two older brothers and a baby sister, all guaranteed healthy inheritances as long as they married within their faith. There would be no title waiting for him. He was and would remain the Honorable Ivor Montagu.

The family followed an established pattern. Money made in the cities would be paraded in the countryside. Part of being a good Victorian was to embrace land and sport of all kinds. Father was a keen shot and a member of the famed Middlesex Cricket Club (MCC). Stuart, the oldest of the three brothers, was a rugby player obsessed with breeding cows. Ewen was good at pretty much everything.

Ivor had the desire but not the talent to get involved. He was the boy with glasses keeping score, the umpire, the referee trotting up and down the sidelines with a whistle in his hand. But there was one game he could play: table tennis. Before he was six, he had petitioned his father to get a table for the house in London, and there it sat on the vast landing, overlooking the front hall. When he wasn’t playing on it, it was cleared and used for bridge by his father and his friends, the foreign secretary and the home secretary.

The year of Ivor’s birth, 1904, was also considered the year that Ping-Pong had died. For a short time, Britain had been creating and exporting games at an extraordinary rate. Soccer, rugby, cricket, tennis, hockey, billiards, and badminton spread across the British Empire and beyond. At the turn of the century, table tennis had become a full-blown fad and had sped across the world—not as an organized sport; more as an after-dinner amusement, to be mixed with a brandy or a port and flirtatious chitchat with the opposite sex. It was called gossima, whiff-whaff, table tennis, but Ping-Pong, a name trademarked by Jaques & Son, was the most popular name. Much was written about watching girls on their hands and knees searching for balls under sofas and side tables. There were Ping-Pong parties, tournaments, picnics, and even Ping-Pong poetry. “Pingpongitis” captured the happy mood:

Oh what’s this very funny game, Pray tell me, if you please,

That looks like tennis, feels like golf, And sounds like Cantonese. . . .

What, that’s the game, That’s known to fame

As Ping-Pong, Ping-Pong, Ping-Pong Ping.

That’s one of the better ones. Within the same volume, you can feel the zeitgeist itching to move on. “The Ping-Pong face, too well we know it; But please, oh please, won’t some one kill, The puling, punning Ping-Pong poet.”

The game’s origins were hotly contested. It was devised by the British Army in India, Malaysia, or Asia Minor, in a mess hall, cavalry club, or pavilion. The balls were carved from champagne corks. The bats were the lids of cigar boxes. Beneath all the creation myths lurked the frivolity that would irk its adherents for the next hundred years. Ping-Pong was for boys (and girls!), it could be played sober (or drunk!), you could hit the ball with a book (or a hairbrush!), in the billiard room, or even in the kitchen.

While other sports developed teams, trophies, leagues, and stadia, Ping-Pong suffered from a lack of coherence. Arguments erupted frequently because no official rules had been written. So, as one future world champion would lament, Ping-Pong “suffered no slow lingering agonies, but burst like a soap bubble into nothingness from one day to the next.”

That same year of 1904, when Ping-Pong expired and Ivor Montagu was born, the Russo-Japanese War began. China wasn’t yet ready to stand up; it still had another half century of humiliation ahead of it and was already deeply scarred thanks to losses to the British in the Opium Wars and to Japan in 1895. But in 1904 Japan did something considered impossible for an Asian country. It confronted a European power and then defeated it. Two Russian ships were crippled in Port Arthur early in the war after their crews had been surprised during a game of table tennis. “Apparently the Ping-Pong nets were up, all taut and ready: it was only the torpedo nets that had been forgotten.”

Ivor’s father, the second Baron Swaythling, was fascinated by the Japanese victory. The Financial Times would write in his obituary that he, “like all great men, had no hobbies outside of his passion for work.” But there was one, an obsession with Japan that would in turn prove crucial in his son’s adventures in Asia. Lord Swaythling wasn’t the only foreigner amazed by Japan’s victory. China’s future leaders, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, still young students, considered it a key moment in their development. It led them to wonder: If Japan was capable of such a victory, what could a unified China do? But few saw how quickly the repercussions of Japan’s victory would rock the world. Russia’s defeat was a fatal slash at Tsarism—it would struggle on for just a few years until the rise of Communism heralded the Russian Revolution. The moment would inspire such disparate men as Mao Zedong and Ivor Montagu, though their approaches could not have been more different.

CHAPTER 2 | Gentlemanly Rebel

By 1917 Ivor Montagu’s oldest brother and his cousins were at war on the other side of the English Channel. To the thirteen-year-old, it seemed he was missing out on a thrilling adventure. The closest the teenager would come to combat was witnessing the first ever Zeppelin raid over London as he blithely walked through arcing shrapnel with his Brownie camera held high.

Air aces would land at Townhill, and on the weekends the family would drive down to look at the warships in Portsmouth Harbor. Many of the footmen were mobilized into the military, so Montagu laid out great sheets of white linoleum in one of their empty apartments and started charting out the sea battles according to his own algorithms. Only in a family as well connected as the Montagus would the Admiral of the Fleet visit. He spent “several hours on hands and knees with the small boy” and then astonished the Montagu family by inviting Ivor to give a lecture on his system at the Naval Staff College.

Montagu kept up his studies at his new school, Westminster, where he was forced into an Eton suit and top hat. After school, he’d leave the hat at the lost luggage office in St. James’s Park underground station and pick up his light coat and cloth cap. It was a halfhearted attempt to pass as a member of the working class, betrayed by his favorite accessory, an ebony silver-headed cane.

The path from the underground station to school took him directly past the offices of the Fabian Society in Tothill Street. That spring, he paused before the window to peer at a pamphlet that he thought “appropriate to me”; George Bernard Shaw’s Socialism for Millionaires. Socialism, he decided, was “the only plausible explanation of man’s history and the processes of the universe.” It was a big leap for a young aristocrat to make, but for Montagu it was a sure foundation that he would construct the rest of his life around. Instead of helping his mother organize his messy notes for his upcoming lecture on war games, he told her that he had become a pacifist and would cancel his engagement.

By October 1917, as the bloody details of the Russian Revolution filtered through the British press, Montagu noticed that a kind of fear had entered the public consciousness. Was revolution contagious? Would his mother’s friend, Queen Mary, soon suffer the same fate as the tsarina and end up executed by radicals? Montagu watched the incessant marches that filed past his school, just steps from the Houses of Parliament and his father’s seat in the House of Lords.

One night, finished with his classes, Montagu emerged from school into a scuffle between charging policemen and unemployed war veterans. He was knocked to the ground and watched a policeman crack a banner from a man’s hand. Montagu swung his cane and brought the policeman down. Had the policeman tried to identify his attacker in the melee, the least likely suspect would have been the retreating schoolboy, the Honorable Ivor Montagu. From the beginning, Montagu understood that his class offered a thick smoke screen of protection, one that would linger around him for decades. He walked home to the mansion in Kensington Court and said nothing of the afternoon’s events to his father.

At fifteen, the precocious schoolboy passed the entrance exam to Cambridge University, but his chosen college, King’s, asked him to wait two years before beginning university. Tall and slightly hunched, with a tendency to wear his glasses halfway down his nose, Montagu busied himself with a mixture of zoology and politics. He studied botany and biology at the Royal College of Science, eating at the same small restaurant every day his chosen fare of “minestrone and wobbly pink blancmange.” Through his father’s connections, he met the heads of the British Museum and the Royal Geographic Society. Another family friend, the head of the London Zoo, allowed Montagu to spend a night on the zoo grounds listening to the wolves howl at the lions and the lions roar at the wolves.

His rebellious streak remained hidden. On weekends down at Townhill, he’d sneak out to canvass his father’s tenants in support of the Labour Party; back in London during the week, he befriended socialist sympathizers H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. To prove his commitment, he helped the British Socialist Party by volunteering to hide a consignment of Lenin’s booklet State and Revolution. They were being sought by Scotland Yard. He put them on the landing at home, right by the Ping-Pong table. The sense of openness would be Montagu’s way of hiding in plain sight throughout his life.

He was still honing his skills. A speech he was writing to present at the British Socialist Party was discovered by the butler and handed to his parents. Lord Swaythling asked him to leave the party at once and forbade him to spend any more family money on political memberships. Montagu decided that being a child was like being a “worker without a union.” From then on, he wrote, he began to repay his family’s love “with wariness.”

Finally arriving at Cambridge, he reveled in being away from his family. A compulsive joiner of clubs, he also founded two: the Cheese Eaters’ Society, where he led the charge to try to find whale’s milk cheese; and the Spillikins, a left-wing society where they talked about the rise of Communism and wore black ties with little red dots.

The one thing he didn’t do at Cambridge was study. “Quite frankly,” he wrote, success there depended entirely on extracurricular activities, and the ones that he “went a-whoring after” were “politics, art, sport (and) new friends.” Montagu understood that team sports dominated university campuses and he longed for the associated popularity. After failed attempts at soccer and tennis, Montagu had a eureka moment: Ping-Pong. Using a portion of his allowance, he had two tables made to order. It was a recourse only a very wealthy undergraduate could take, but over the next fifty years it would be hard to find a fellow Communist who would have begrudged the extravagance for the effect his decision would have on the greater world.

Montagu’s first tournament amazed him: 140 players registered. Ping-Pong wasn’t dead after all. Montagu saw a player in a wheelchair beat Cambridge University’s finest runner. M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Author’s Note
• Prologue
• Part One: The West
• Part Two: The East
• Part Three: East Meets West
• Part Four: Aftermath
• Epilogue
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About Nicholas Griffin
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright