Documentary revisits Ping-Pong Diplomacy

It was April 1971. Ping-pong player Glenn Cowan missed the United States team bus during the world championships in Nagoya, Japan, and got onto the next one, only to find himself in the bus carrying the Chinese team.

At the time, US-China relations were hostile, and had been so for decades. But that did not stop Chinese player Zhuang Zedong, who noticed the unfamiliar American, from stepping forward and introducing himself.

"They didn't speak each other's languages, but somehow they were able to communicate because they tried. And their picture was taken and traveled around the world. They started a dialogue between America and China that continues today," film producer Bill Einreinhofer told China Daily.

The chance encounter between Cowan and Zhuang led to what became known as Ping-Pong Diplomacy. And Einreinhofer, a three-time Emmy Award-winning producer, documented the period of history in his new film Your Serve or Mine.

A group of nine US table tennis players embarked on a milestone journey to China, helping break the ice between Beijing and Washington and laying the groundwork for the eventual establishment of diplomatic relations.

According to Einreinhofer, Ping-Pong Diplomacy "was the starting point for a back-channel way that two countries with profound differences could find some way to communicate, some way to talk outside of the glare of the media".

The documentary is now streaming on the Public Broadcasting Service in the US. The New York Film Academy hosted a premiere for the film on Wednesday.

"The underlying message of the film is that, in fact, even if we are coming from very different cultures and very different places, there are some similarities," Einreinhofer said.

Ping-Pong Diplomacy unfolded around the time that Einreinhofer was in high school, and he remembers very little about it. "People don't know about this anymore. They have either forgotten or they were too young and never heard about it," he said. So Einreinhofer started researching and realized "how profound that moment in history was".

"At the same time, I wanted to take the lessons from the past and see if there was a way to apply them today. That's when I discovered how powerful it can be when college and university students from China and the US visit each other's countries.

"They can play a really important role in helping both sides better understand one another and in creating a line of communication that might not exist otherwise," Einreinhofer said.

The documentary also tells the stories of present-day people-to-people exchanges between China and the United States, focusing on international students.

Roxanne Roman features in the documentary. She was a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2018, and is a graduate of NYU Shanghai.

"It is really great to see that there's still a lot of effort and desire in working on people-to-people relations, especially in times of tense relations. So I think, in a really chaotic time, it really resonated with some of the messaging, still trying to find ways to talk, to relate and to be interested in different cultures and in each other," Roman told China Daily.

"Whether from the perspective of a scholar or as an individual, it's been a great opportunity for exchange and personal growth. During the production of the film, I also shared what my own life is like … what it means to live in the US and how it's different. These differences can offer new insights for others in the future," Ziheng Wang, associate producer of Your Serve or Mine, told China Daily.

The documentary "highlights the power of people-to-people connections, the kind that continues today through exchanges of students, educators and professionals across all fields," Joy Zhu, executive vice-president for the China region at NYFA, said at the premiere.