Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World

The Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World has three parts: The West, The East and East meets West. Amazon says this is a book about geopolitics and spying. My reading: this is a book about extraordinary people that all Griffin books bring to light.It follows the life of The Honorable Ivor Goldsmid Samuel Montagu, the third son of the 2nd Baron Swaythling, one of the richest man in England. He is the only British aristocrat to receive the Lenin Prize (the communist equivalent to Nobel Prize) for Peace. He created the game of Table Tennis, which he leveraged in communist China, and he was an agent for the Soviet secret service called GRU.Marcel Proust wrote "the people from bygone ages seem infinitely remote from us. We look at them as animals in a zoo."We can see a photograph of Ivor Montagu. He looks remote, other worldly as if he was a character in the Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris coming back from the 1920s every day at midnight. A British movie web site describes Ivor as a "producer, writer and director. Communist, aristocrat, son of the banker Lord Swaythling, the Hon. Ivor Montagu was a leading fixture in left-wing film activity in the 1930s."In Griffin's book, Ivor Montagu comes out of the metaphoric Proustian zoo of the past. Ivor brother, Ewen, was "a rugby player obsessed with breeding cows... good at pretty everything." But Ivor himself "had the desire, but not the talent to be involved." There was only one game he could play, table tennis. Ping Pong was a Cinderella of the sports blossoming around 1904 in Britain. Quoting Griffin:"Ninety years ago, Montagu revived a sport that really did fit the best and worst of Communism. It was suited for airless, cramped factories, it was humanistic and competitive, it kept the brain engaged and exercised as much as the body. Table tennis became, as Montagu wrote, "a weapon for peace."He married Eileen Hellstern. "She was known to all as Hell. From his parents' perspective, Montagu couldn't have made a worse choice. Hell was a divorced mother of one, the daughter of a maker of surgical shoes. Her mother had been institutionalized shortly after her father's death."For Ivor's father, Lord Swaythling, Montagu's marriage was "an irredeemable calamity.". He changed his will, and the Queen send a note to Ivor's mother: "Gladys I feel for you. May."The newlyweds "made the front pages of all the London papers. "BARON'S SON WEDS SECRETARY," roared London's Evening Standard. For a week, they were on the run from the press, using makeup and a wardrobe department borrowed from Montagu's film contacts."As many times before and after Ivor Montagu marriage, both parents and society proved to be wrong. Their marriage lasted a lifetime. Ivor and Hell died within two week from each other fifty years later.Ivor was a member of the British Communist party and an agent of the Comintern. Shielded by his privileged status, he could afford to be a spy.In any other country in the world, including US - particularly during McCarthy era - Ivor would have been persecuted. But not in Britain. Ivor was not a criminal.Leon Trotsky, one of the fathers of the revolution and founder of the Red Army, had faced off against Stalin for control of Soviet Russia and lost. "Trotsky was protected twenty-four hours a day in exile by Turkish police officers.Trotsky lived in constant fear of assassination by Stalin, yet Ivor Montagu, a secret Stalinist at the beck and call of the Kremlin, was staying in his house. Trotsky ended their late evening by passing Montagu a loaded revolver and telling him to put it under his pillow. Montagu was many things, but not a killer. He barely slept, "terrified that the gun would go off."Trotsky fear was real. He will be assassinated with an ice pick in Mexico a few years later. The killer was a Stalinist agent, just like Ivor, but a totally different breed.The review in New York Review of Books by the distinguished Harvard and Oxford professor Roderick MacFarquhar sums up with this sentence"It is to Griffin's credit that in this book he has finally nailed that misconception of the encounter in Nagoya 1971, the crucial event that initiated Ping-Pong diplomacy"Nagoya is the Japanese city where the World Table Tennis Championships took place in 1971. The Chinese ping-pong team was brutally destroyed during the Cultural revolution, a few years earlier.".. the rumor circulated that the Chinese men's team, which had total dominance in the sport, had been paraded in front of tens of thousands of Chairman Mao's Red Guards. They had been screamed at, spat at, locked up, and tortured. They had been shot as spies. They had been strung up on trees by a vast teenage mob. As their dead bodies twirled back and forth at the ends of ropes, the cadavers came to rest with their bulbous eyes turned toward Taiwan or Hong Kong--a sure sign that they weren't faithful followers of Chairman Mao but traitors to Chinese Communism. It was nearly impossible to believe, yet the rumor was rooted in truth."The top Chinese tennis table star, Zhuang Zedong managed to survive. He must have been an attractive man, Mao's third and much younger wife (Jiang Qing) took him under her protection. She was part of the Gang of Four who terrorized China as older Mao became more senile. Jiang Qing ruled in the name of Mao. After Mao's death, Jiang Qing fell in disgrace and while in solitary confinement, developed throat cancer. She hanged herself. Zhuang Zedong was rehabilitated four years after the death of Mao. He died of cancer last year in 2013But in 1971, what looked as a chance encounter in Nagoya, was a well prepared event. Griffin quoted Henry Kissinger: "A remarkable gift of the Chinese is to make the meticulously planned appear spontaneous."Griffin intuition lead to writing this book. He discovered sports are ideal instrument for politics and diplomacy. He wrote an article before the World Soccer Cup in South Africa. where the Afrikaans elite played rugby and cricket, not soccer. Nelson Mandela was a soccer fan and so was most native and English speaking population.The US Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (BECA) in the State Department is home to Sports United, a program that sends American athletes on international cultural exchange missions. It also welcomes foreign athletes to the United States.The definition of sport for Griffin perhaps includes being an explorer. His books "Caucasus:  Caucasus: Mountain Men and Holy Wars  and  Before the Swarm (Kindle Single)  are about lands and jungles and ants and eccentric scientists, that Griffin takes them out of the Proustian zoo to give them vivid portraits of people, as if we, the readers, knew them in person.His books are painstakingly researched, in library and in face to face meetings. The Ping Pong Diplomacy took four years to complete. There is no replacement for the talent of a writer when processing information. We are not perfect, we make mistakes. We dream, we aspire, we pray, we love, we hate but after all, nothing is black or white. This is the gold Nicholas Griffin extracts from the world aroundNicholas Griffin books will reach exponentially more people if his books, - and in particular the Ping-Pong diplomacy - are made into a TV miniseries suitable for channel like PBS, HBO, BBC, History Channel. The transformation from book to film is natural for this book.I watched the program A Book Discussion on Ping-Pong Diplomacy on BookTV. Someone in the audience asked him, "Why he didn't you fictionalize this book, because you wrote fiction before?"Griffin responded: "Because I would have not been able to sell it. No one would have had believed me. The reality is too preposterous I wouldn't be able to invent a character as Ivor Montagu."Maybe a fiction book is no longer an option, but a movie production, based on a true story is not at all preposterous. Having major stars, a successful director, it can reach audiences around the world that a non-fiction book alone simply cannot.Books and films may be looked as products that catch people attention, desires and form habits. However artists' mind works differently. Some people will not understand why Griffin has chosen Ivor Montagu to begin with. Most probably he ignored a future public and was driven by his own intuition. We are glad he did.

Ping Pong Diplomacy was a very interesting read. All I knew about the term beforehand was that something happened with Ping Pong a few years before I was born and then Nixon went to China and soon China will own the US. Surprisingly, the history of modern Ping Pong is far more interesting than I would have thought. And this book gives an excellent incredibly succinct recap of 20th century Chinese history. However, I found that it got a little too ambitious in the last section - too many names, not enough of the gripping details that made up the first three-quarters of the book. Still, a good pop-history read.

This was an eminently engaging and fun read about the confluence of ping pong and world diplomacy mixed with a bit of cold war spying. In "Ping Pong Diplomacy", Griffin peels back the proverbial onion to provide deeper historical context behind the rise of ping pong across the world, driven by an enterprising and wealthy upper class Brit, Ivor Montagu, and in particular in China. As the Chinese communists embrace the sport and see sport through the lens of politics, it ultimately plays a pivotal part in restoring diplomatic relations between US and China through Nixon's historic visit 1972. While the writing could be a little uneven at times, this was an interesting read with great context on the intersection of table tennis, politics and East meets West.

This book was a very entertaining, enlightening read about what might seem to be a very small part of history.Rather than be a book simply on the exchange of Ping Pong players between China and the US in the early 1970s, Nicholas Griffin paints a fascinating picture of the background to Ping Pong in the PRC.This picture takes the reader on an entertaining journey through both World Wars, the cold war, and around the world during a fascinating time in history. The journey is well written by the author, and I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in modern history, Chinese history, or a great non fiction read.

This is an excellent book. As a former reporter in China, I am really impressed with how the writer obtained interviews with many of the Chinese involved in the epochal ping-pong diplomacy with the US and weaved their stories into what is truly a riveting read. I highly recommend this book for anyone looking for an out-of-the-ordinary way into a deeper understanding of the ties that bind America and China together. And what's not to like about hippies in purple tie-dyed bell bottoms hanging out with Zhou Enlai?

There's a lot of international politics in this story--it happened during my lifetime, and I still had trouble following all the Chinese characters. But the main story about how ping pong (table tennis) influenced world events is really fascinating. You get a whole different perspective on how different cultures think and how major issues result from what seem to be minor factors. It's worth spending the time to read it. Recommended.

Met expectations

What a surprisingly good book. Hard to believe that such a seemingly minor sport could have such a huge influence. There is a lot of serious history in the book. Very well written.

Wonderful mixture of Sports, Politics and History in this case how the former influenced the latter two. Also for knowledgeable and inquisitive T.T lovers a storehouse of fantastic and interesting historical backdrop, events and personalities of the game itself. A MUST for PING-PONG lovers !@! Well written, reads like a novel... very fine addition.

Brilliantly evocative of the period, British Intelligence and the Chinese in the early 50's

This really is a fascinating book and is about so much more than Ivor Montagu. He was clearly a driver and codifyer of table tennis but this book is about so much more than this toff turncoat. Its meticulous research shows in the second half of the book when Griffin explores the rise of table tennis in the Far East and it's key role in bringing the USA and China together after years in the wilderness. The book very much reminds me of Ben Mcintyres' books such as Operation Mincemeat (which is referenced in Ping Pong diplomacy through Ivor Montagu's brother). The book also offers fascinating glimpses into 1970's celebrity and how quickly Glenn Cowan and Zhuang Zedong, the 2 key players responsible for the 1971 detente, descended into obscurity - Cowan ending up sleeping in his car; Zedong back in state prison in China. This book has everything and if you love sports, modern history, celebrity, ping pong, thrillers, Asia or any combination of the above - then this is a must read book.

Great! A really interesting cultural and sporting history and well told narrative of how China came to dominate world table tennis, mainly as a result of an eccentric English spy. Would make a good film.

Wonderful account of the Cold War ... let alone an amazing history of a wonderful game