Table tennis champ had inside view of thaw in China-US relations

"China: A Whole New Game" was the headline on the cover of the April 24, 1971, issue of Time magazine. Right beneath it, a group of US citizens beamed for the camera atop China's Great Wall. One of them, a young woman in the center wearing a headscarf, was Connie Sweeris, the US women's singles and doubles champion in table tennis.

On Tuesday, the Time magazine cover appeared on a big screen as Sweeris spoke to a 300-strong audience at the Asia Society in New York, looking back on her weeklong tour of China 48 years ago, an event that opened a new chapter in the Sino-US relationship.

Sweeris was a featured speaker at a Vision China forum,"China-US Relations: 40 Years & Beyond", hosted by China Daily and Bank of China.

"In April 1971, on our last day of competition at the 31st World Table Tennis Championships in Nagoya, Japan, we were told that we had been invited to visit China," she said. "But no US citizen had been allowed to go into China for 22 years."

On April 10, having flown from Japan to Hong Kong the day before, the Americans crossed the bridge connecting Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland.

"Everyone was either walking or riding a bicycle, and before we knew it, we had a crowd following us," Sweeris said."People were very friendly and always tried to talk to us."

A real thrill came when Sweeris played Lin Huiqing, who won three golds at Nagoya, in front of 18,000 people at Beijing's Capital Stadium.

Another fond moment was a meeting with premier Zhou Enlai.

"When I shook hands with the premier, he seemed very personable and gracious," Sweeris said. "The premier asked Graham Steenhoven, president of the USA Table Tennis Association, if he had any criticism of the trip. And he responded by saying, 'You feed us too much food!' Everyone laughed."

Sweeris said she was made aware of the importance of her trip to China before it began. "At the train depot in Hong Kong, we were barraged by reporters from all over the world wielding cameras," she said.

The media sensed right. History was unfolding fast: In February the next year, US president Richard Nixon would visit China, and two months after that a Chinese table tennis team would make a reciprocal tour of the US.

Sweeris was among the hosts, together with her husband and fellow player Dell Sweeris, who also attended Tuesday's event.

These days, the basement of their home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, features a table tennis table and a "ping-pong corner", where glass cabinets are filled with the trophies they won and memorabilia from what is today known as "ping-pong diplomacy".

They include a red pocket book of chairman Mao Zedong's quotes, in English, that was handed to Connie Sweeris when she entered the Chinese mainland for the first time. There are also pictures and media reports, among them the Time magazine cover story that ran for several pages.

One of the inside page headlines pronounced the visit the "Ping heard around the world".

zhaoxu@chinadailyusa.com

(China Daily Global 09/19/2019 page8)