Ping Pong Diplomacy - Definition and Overview

Ping Pong Diplomacy refers to the cultural exchange of ping pong players of the United States and People's Republic of China in the 1970s. This marked a thaw in U.S.-China relations that led the way to a visit to Beijing by President Richard Nixon.

On 6 April of 1971 the US Table Tennis team was in Japan for the 31^st World Table Tennis Championship when they received an invitation from their Chinese counterparts to visit China. On 12 April 1972 the team and accompanying journalists became the first Americans to set foot in the Chinese capitol since Mao's communist party had come to power 22 years earlier, in 1949.

External links

• San Diego Table Tennis Association article (http://www.sdtta.org/pp_diplomacy.html)
• PBS article (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/china/peopleevents/pande07.html)
• Smithsonian Magazine article (http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues02/apr02/diplomacy.html)