Throughout 2025, the World Tribune is featuring on the cover historical acts by people that shifted public sentiment and even thawed tensions between nations. In this issue, we focus on the power of one person to give countless others hope.
A small gesture of kindness can create unanticipated openings. In the case of diplomacy between the U.S. and China, it began with a handshake.
Glenn Cowan was competing at the 1971 World Table Tennis Championship with the U.S. team in Nagoya, Japan. After practice one day, he boarded the Chinese team’s bus after missing his own.
Cowan was greeted by stony silence; the countries had no diplomatic ties since 1949, and the players were raised viewing all Americans as imperialists. Zedong Zhuang, a member of the Chinese team, later recalled looking over at Cowan and thinking, “He is not the one making national policies; he is just an athlete.”1
Zhuang approached Cowan, shaking his hand and giving him a silk cloth depicting the famed Huangshan Mountains. As they disembarked, journalists captured photos of them together that raced around the world.
Just two days later, the U.S. team received an invitation to play an exhibition match against the Chinese team in China. Nine players from the U.S. team became the first delegation of Americans to visit the country in decades. Their trip was dubbed the start of “ping-pong diplomacy,” an apt description of the back-and-forth effort it took to establish official diplomatic ties between the two countries.
The games, called “friendship matches,” were followed by tours of China’s most enduring landmarks, including the Forbidden City and the Great Wall of China, at which the U.S. team members took a group photo that eventually appeared on the cover of Time magazine.
On April 14, at a banquet in the Great Hall of the People, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai told the table tennis players that they had opened a new chapter in relations between the two countries, and extended an invitation for U.S. journalists to visit the country. The same day, the U.S. announced plans to lift a two-decade trade embargo on China.
Following a series of back-channel negotiations, Richard Nixon, in February 1972, became the first U.S. president to visit the People’s Republic of China, restoring communication and diplomatic ties for the first time in 25 years.
Zhuang visited the U.S. in 2007, on a lecture tour, during which he gifted a commemorative ping-pong paddle to former national security advisor Henry Kissinger, who’d traveled twice to Beijing in 1971 to discuss normalized relations. But Kissinger was not the only person Zhuang had come to see. Three years earlier, Cowan had died, suddenly, of a heart attack. Zhuang never said farewell, the biggest regret of his life. A mutual friend remained, however—Cowan’s mother, Fran, who’d befriended Zhuang on her own trip to China the year of her son’s passing. When Zhuang visited in 2007, it was not only to lecture, but to see her. Visiting Fran at her modest apartment, he found a familiar sight: the silken Huangshan Mountains, the gift he’d given Cowan years before, framed on the living room wall.
March 14, 2025 World Tribune, p. 11
You are reading {{ meterCount }} of {{ meterMax }} free premium articles