Games Nations Play

By :Alka Acharya

This one’s a thriller — rather, it has all the elements of a thriller. And the coin that Nicholas Griffin spins is that of the Cold War, with an interplay of sport and global geopolitics on the one side, and espionage on the other. It may be instructive to recall the late 1960s and 1970s — full of double/triple agents, defections, spy wars, expelling of diplomat spies, assassinations, and yet it was business as usual. Sports entered the arena as a powerful symbol of the ideological struggle between two power blocs. While there were high-profile sporting victories, sporting boycotts became powerful weapons to achieve diplomatic and domestic objectives.

The People’s Republic of China had sought membership of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) from 1952, but were kept out by tight western control of the international sport architecture. In 1958, China also withdrew from 11 international sports federations, inaugurating an era of long exclusion from the Olympic movement. George Orwell had summed it pithily: “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play… it is war minus the shooting.” L’affaire Snowden has only furthered our awareness of state-sponsored espionage.

Griffin’s book, mirroring the western view in many ways, gives us a slice of history, which establishes how central sports and
espionage were to the Cold War and how both were instrumental in bringing about one of the major geopolitical shifts after the Second World War.

It is a complex plot made simple, skilfully told in 52 chapters, each a crisp, focussed vignette. There are many fascinating side plots, sub-stories and mini-narratives — elements that have been told in bits and pieces in innumerable earlier accounts. For the most part, there are very few real surprises in this tale of the ping-pong teams paving the way for US president Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.

Widespread coverage and many interviews have detailed the “chance encounter” between the American “hippie” member of the team, Glenn Cowan, and the Chinese team during the 1971 Nagoya World Championships; the invitation extended by Chinese player Zhuang Zedong to the American team, and the American diplomat in Tokyo whose close reading of the 1970 Annual Report on Foreign Relations presented to US Congress paid off — athletic exchanges were “permissible”. The American team posing for photographs on the Great Wall, the conversation between Premier Zhou Enlai and Cowan, Kissinger’s secret visit to Beijing, and the return visit of the Chinese team to the US followed, as is fairly well known. Griffin fills this large tapestry with a wealth of detail.

The crucial role of the London-based spy Ivor Montagu had hitherto not been part of the popular narrative. Griffin opens his book by tracing the history of table tennis (which was virtually extinct by the turn of the 20th century and ridiculed as “whiff-whaff”) and shows how the son of an ethnic-Jewish British Baron attempted to restore a serious status to the game, codified its rules and established the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) in 1926. Driven by Stalinist sympathies and dedication to the Communist movement, Ivor Montagu also supplied the Soviet Union with crucial intelligence about British espionage strategies, weaponry and code-breaking.

Montagu was never arrested even though MI5 had enough knowledge of his spying. The reason his focus shifted to the game was
“political.” Ping-pong “could move quietly under the borders and boundaries created by the Communist and capitalist worlds”. At 22, he became the president of the ITTF, a post he was to occupy for the next four decades.

He first visited China on the National Day celebrations on October 1, 1952. Griffin discusses Ivor’s dilemma about the Taiwan question — which was to exercise Nixon and Kissinger later —  but it is a very thin account. Montagu won the Lenin Peace Prize in May 1959 after which he diverted his energies to “taking the game to China” and “taking China to the world”. His shift from Stalinist (Soviet) to Maoist loyalties is not adequately explained, considering that by 1959-60, the Sino-Soviet dissonances were well underway. But after 1966, when he stepped down from the post of president of ITTF, Ivor Montagu starts to fade away – his hour on the world stage is over. Griffin refers to him less and less. In fact, it was Montagu’s successor who suggested that China should invite some teams after the Nagoya Championships.

Griffin’s USP lies in bringing all the bits and pieces together, putting in only as much of the big politics as would give one a sense that world-changing events were unfolding, and throwing in the spicy bits which are getting huge traction lately – the horrors of the famine deaths following the Great Leap Forward in China. And both the informed and general reader can delight in yet another endorsement of the fact that historical truth is stranger than fiction. His attempts to delve into the history and the domestic background, however, do not come across as authoritative. It would also be a huge mistake to see this as a grand narrative, moving with all the ponderous logic of history to a pre-determined conclusion.

Griffin is spot on when he says “there was something cultural about many of the Chinese attempts to communicate with the Americans”. Even though he avers that Montagu changed the game for the state, not the individual, he captures the quirky personas of the players in short, vivid snapshots and leaves us with a more powerful sense of their individuality —  Cowan and his penniless, drug-ridden end, in particular. There is understandable oversimplification of the Cultural Revolution — ideological issues would be an unnecessary distraction in a thriller format. But, more crucially, Griffin should have taken some instruction in how Chinese names are written — he has cited them the other way around.

One ends with a possible counterfactual: were it not for ping-pong diplomacy, would the great rapprochement still have taken place? Griffin thinks not and goes on to say that all this pushed the Soviet Union into strategic errors, which led to its downfall! But this is browning it overly. Reportedly, when Mao directly ordered the Chinese teams to proceed to Nagoya, much had gone before — Nixon and Kissinger (unknown to the US State Department) had been sending clear signals through all manner of intermediaries, and it was only a matter of time before we would witness what Nixon described as the week that changed the world.

Alka Acharya is professor of Chinese Studies, JNU.