As the 50th anniversary of Australia’s 1971 opening to China approaches it is time to tell the true story of how a team of confused ping pong players and journalists hunting for a scoop opened Australia/China relations.
But for the unwillingness of a middle-aged Australian doctor to sleep on Tokyo tatami mats on a cold night in April 1971 it is quite possible there would have been no opening to China in 1971 or many years after.
It is even possible there would have been no ALP election victory in 1972.
The story begins with me working as a correspondent for The Australian in Tokyo in the cold, wet spring of 1971. Following the world table tennis championships in Nagoya in April of that year we discovered that all the participating teams had been invited to visit China after the championships.
Even the Americans had been invited. But there was no word of an Australian team being invited. I managed to contact Dr (medical) John Jackson, the manager of the Australian team to the championships, who was visiting a Nagoya factory. He could not explain why there was not invite.
In any case, he and his team had planned to do some travel and training in Japan and to visit Taiwan after that. I suggested he call me if and when his travels brought him to Tokyo.
A week later he rings. He is at Tokyo Station and needs a place to stay. I give him the address of a ryokan (Japanese-style inn) but an hour later he calls saying he has to sleep on straw mats. He wants a hotel, not a stable. It is late at night and I invite him to stay at my place. Four days later over the breakfast table I discover, thanks to his seeing a photo of the US team in Beijing in the morning paper, that he had been invited to China but Canberra had insisted they visit Taiwan instead.
(It turns out that Canberra, like Washington, had had advance notice that the Chinese would be handing out invitations at Nagoya. But unlike Washington, Canberra was determined to avoid any contact with Beijing and had arranged through the Taiwan Embassy for the team to go to Taiwan immediately after the championships.)
A conversation ensues:
Me: “But you didn’t go to Taiwan.”
He: “Right. The team broke up after Nagoya. Some were invited to go to Tokyo to practise with top Japanese players. The rest went back to Australia.”
Me: “You mean, you turned down this Chinese invitation just because you were supposed to go to Taiwan, and you have not gone to Taiwan any way?”
He: “Well, yes. When we got the invite to go to China I had no choice but to say no. The Canberra people had arranged everything for us, including visas, to go to Taiwan”
Me: “Would you like to go to China now that you are not going to Taiwan?”
He: “Well yes. But I have no idea where the other team members are now.”
I decide to intervene. I send a telegram to Beijing in his name, saying he now wants to accept the invitation, that he will get his team together, and that he wants one Gregory Clark to cover the visit. That evening a message comes back from Beijing inviting him to bring his team as soon as possible, all expenses paid, and for one Gregory Clark to go with the team.
But there are two major problems.
One: Dr Jackson has no team to take to China.
Two: Even if he had a team they have no money to get to China.
Beijing is only paying expenses from Hong Kong and around China. If the team wants to go to China they will have to pay the Tokyo to Hong Kong leg from their own pockets. All they have are pre-paid return tickets to Australia via Taiwan.
I contact Adrian Deamer at The Australian head office in Sydney and he agrees the paper will pay fares in exchange for the scoop. But I still have to locate the three players training in Tokyo. I find them eventually, only to discover they have no interest in going to China.
The man who had invited the Australian members to train in Tokyo after Nagoya was Japan’s table tennis association chief, Ogimura Ichiro, famous for all he had done to promote sporting ties with China. I ask him to help out, and he does. Two days later Dr Jackson, three bleary-eyed Australian table tennis players, myself and one other correspondent are standing at Hong Kong’s Lo Wu crossing, waiting to get into China.
(The other correspondent is Vince Matthews from the Melbourne Herald. He, rather than a journalist from the Fairfax group, has probably been invited because Melbourne hosts the minuscule pro-Beijing faction of the minuscule Australian Communist Party, and Beijing no doubt sees Melbourne as a centre of keen pro-Beijing sentiment.)
But our problems are still not over. Entry to China is refused because of Taiwan visas in our passports. Eventually, and only after many calls to and from the Beijing office back in Hongkong, we are allowed in. First stop is Guangzhou where we discover that Beijing has not yet organized press accreditation for myself and Mathews. Cables will cost us one dollar a word. Regardless, Mathew sends out a 3,000-word article, tells the cable office he will pay later, and heads for the bedroom I have to share with him.
At midnight a group of angry young radicals pour into our room demanding that the non-Chinese speaking Mathews pays his $US3,000 bill immediately. I tell them it is not his fault he cannot pay his bills, that Chairman Mao has instructed the young radicals to serve the people, and they clearly are not doing anything to serve us.
The radicals leave and the next morning Mr Yu tells me he and other officials have been up all night dealing with them. They have been demanding our immediate expulsion from China for unacceptable behaviour – the defamation of Chairman Mao especially.
We can only be allowed to stay if I apologise. I apologise. Finally, I get into the county whose language and politics I have been studying for almost 10 years and which has been excluding all but true believers.
Arriving in Beijing, we are given the welcome usually reserved for African leaders seen friendly to China. At a large official banquet, Dr Jackson is the chief guest. The next day we are taken to the Great Hall of the People to meet Premier Zhou Enlai.
I come away from the meeting with two impressions. One is the cracks in the wall of the hastily built Great Hall. The other is something others have written about – Zhou’s extraordinarily magnetic presence.
April 1971 – Beijing
Melbourne Herald correspondent, Vince Matthews, is between me and Zhou.
Within less than a week Beijing was to be flooded with Australian journalists chasing the ping-pong story.
But few seemed to have realised its true significance – that Zhou, who may already have been suffering cancer, had decided to risk everything to defeat another and much more dangerous cancer – the radical Cultural Revolution extremists still seeking to force China into dangerous isolation.
Inviting the ping-pong players was his attempt to break that isolation, and it worked, eventually.
But not without further efforts in Australia to continue the isolation.
Returning to Tokyo I got a call from an old acquaintance, Mick Young, then ALP secretary-general. There was a move, he said, to persuade Gough Whitlam to follow up on the ping pong publicity and visit China. It was something of a gamble, he said, and much depended on whether he could expect a good reception. The conservative media in Australia were still anti-China. And Whitlam was still with the ALP right over China. But the news of a possible wheat import ban had changed things, he said.
(One of my last moves in Beijing had been to ask for an official briefing on the state of China-Australia relations. A Fairfax representative and I were told that China was not pleased with Canberra’s attitudes and if the hostility continued Beijing would move to Canada as a reliable wheat supplier. Overnight our media had moved from ping pong to politics. Maybe that would help a Whitlam visit, Young had suggested.)
I could only say yes.
In July Whitlam visited China and talked to Zhou. But Canberra and the conservative media were still unimpressed. Whitlam, Billy McMahon intoned, had been played like a trout by Zhou. But on the day of Whitlam’s arrival in Tokyo for return to Australia the news broke that US State Secretary Kissinger had also, secretly, visited Zhou.
When I met him in his hotel room that morning and told him the news, he erupted: ‘Just wait till I get back to Canberra. I will show Billy who was the trout.’
The rest is history, with Whitlam sailing to his strong 1972 election victory, partly due to McMahon’s mishandling of the China question. But in the final analysis it all came back to the unwillingness of a provincial middle-aged Australian to sleep on tatami mats on a cold, wet Tokyo evening in April 1971.
Gregory Clark was the first postwar Australian diplomat trained in Chinese, with postings to Hong Kong, Moscow and the UN before retiring in protest against the Vietnam War. After PhD studies at the ANU he became Japan correspondent for The Australian. A spell in Canberra’s Prime Ministers department led to professorships at Tokyo’s Sophia University and emeritus president of Tama University, Tokyo, before becoming co-founder of the very successful English language Akita Kokusai Daigaku. He has now retired to Latin America (Peru) and Kiwi fruit growing in Boso peninsular south of Tokyo.
His works include ‘In Fear of China’ (1969) and several books in Japan on education and foreign policy.
He used to speak Chinese and Russian with fluency. He now speaks Japanese and Spanish.
Comments
8 responses to “How ping pong brought Australia and China together: a story from 1971”
Nice memories, thank you for sharing.
I always like the Chinese characters for ping pong 乒 乓 actually Pīngpāng in Mandarin pinyin.
They suggest a pictographic representation of two equal people with bats playing together.
Great memory Gregory Clark. Thank you.
As a student of Chinese heritage from Malaysia studying medicine at Monash University in 1971. I remembered very well the privilege of having received the Chinese Ping Pong delegation in Melbourne hosted by Chinese Australian community. I am also an admirer of the Honourable Gough Whitlam for his lasting visionary political wisdom helping Australians to realise the importance of Asia in the future including our almighty Australia China relationship in the making at the time. Without his daring initiatives, Australians would not be so well educated, healthy and prosperous overall. Our universal Medicare health system is among the world first etc. I am also grateful that his free universal tertiary education policy helped even to educate an overseas student like me. I will always remember in one of his speeches, he stressed that Australia has to treat all new migrants as equal citizens regardless of their backgrounds or else how would you expect them to contribute wholeheartedly and fully to our Australian society. I was even offered citizenship upon graduation. The rest is history.
Good to see PM Morrison still values our Australia China relations in many words but action speaks louder than words. I hope he and his team can soon restore the glory of the almighty Australia China relationship we have so that we can again celebrate the successes we have at the coming 50th Anniversary of diplomacy with China in 2022 and remember the contribution of our great Stateman, the Honourable Gough Whitlam.
It just goes to show that prior to Whitlam’s visit, Australia was already dutifully appeasing the US by supporting the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek because he was America’s chosen one to become leader of China. This was backed literally by endless buckets of money for his war against Mao and frequent appearance of his photo on the cover of Time Magazine (1). They supported him because he was the Westernized and Christianised leader that would suit US interests. But he never produced a democracy, even in Taiwan during his time, and was frequently more brutal than Mao ever was.
Nothing has changed today, and it is clear that it hasn’t changed in the US either. Mao was to be rejected at all costs, as it is now with Xi Jinping.
I note in Clive Hamilton’s book Silent Invasion, he also accepts the views of followers of the Kuomintang in Australia – no criticism- while the rest turns into a bitter diatribe against the CCP.
(1) https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBF_en-GBAU702AU702&source=univ&tbm=isch&q=chiang+kai-shek+time+magazine+cover&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjvr_Ocir3uAhVC7XMBHb2oDTYQ7Al6BAgDEAM&biw=1904&bih=920
Yes, no change! I think Whitlam, and to some extent, Keating were aberrations in Australian foreign policy settings.
We’ll have to wait for the implosion of the US Empire, which is not that unlikely a prospect, for Australia to get our bearings, geographical and otherwise, right!
Whitlam was definitely a very big exception after many years of conservative rule under the Liberals. It was both a breath of fresh air and a renaissance for this country. He was even exceptional for Labor, and brought so much positive change for Australia. A very well educated man who stood for equality, cultural improvement, genuine change, and uplifting Australia out of its uneducated morass. Only the wealthy could have attended university before he won office.
I realised when Abbott got in, in 2013, that the IPA prepared two lists for him with around 150 dot point directives to achieve. They called these lists “Be like Gough Whitlam”.
I think this meant the objective for Abbott for the IPA was to destroy anything left over from Whitlam’s progressive era that was still in place.
For those of us who remember the days of Whitlam, what we see now in the Liberal party is a reflection of the horribly conservative days before he won his first election in 1972.
Murdoch actually supported Gough to win, but turned on him not long after. He’s been the same right wing anti-Labor, anti-Green bully ever since. He became an anti-Chinese bully as well after his failure to establish an attempted media extension of his power in China, and his rejection from Wendy Deng. He supplies funding to the secretive IPA as well.
To correct some carefully-cultivated misapprehensions about the Cultural Revolution, we must recall that it was a literacy, numeracy, and public health campaign, designed to politically emancipate 400,000,000 forgotten peasants.
Though it aroused the vindictive fury of elites in China and abroad, the Cultural Revolution fully succeeded in its aimed and became the only successful 60s revolution. Here’s how it happened:
Dismayed by the tendency among the Communist Party officials to live a life of privilege once the Party came to power, Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution to emancipate 400,000,000 voiceless peasants whose social status had not changed in 3,000 years and remained unchanged 16 years after the Communists took power.
Throughout the CR’s ten years, Mao drove inequality to the lowest level ever recorded while growing the economy six percent annually–twice America’s rate–and mechanizing agriculture with a twentyfold increase in tractors; a thirty-five-fold increase in diesel engines; a sixteen-fold increase in electric motors; a sevenfold increase in mills; a fiftyfold increase in grinders and a thirteen-fold increase in sprayers.
By the end, rural literacy was taken for granted and rural people (no longer ‘peasants’) were as intolerant of oppression and corruption, as vocal about their priorities, as enthusiastic about voting, and as eager to voice complaints as their urban cousins. For the first time in history they were full citizens who could point to the infrastructure they built, the agricultural advances they had made, and the problems they had solved.
Yet, though hundreds of millions of rural people benefited from the Cultural Revolution, many elites felt that, by destroying the traditional hierarchy, Mao had destroyed the culture itself–a charge that resonated with foreign elites.
It is true that officials and intellectuals, especially those responsible for running the country, had struggled to maintain their sanity in the midst of an administrative nightmare while many more were subjected to public humiliation or spent years in prison. A handful, crushed by criticisms they found incomprehensible, committed suicide. Some fled abroad and published semi-fictional books about their sufferings and few forgave Mao. A small price to pay for the emancipation of 400,000,000 people.
Mao’s successors, exhausted by luan, humiliation, and persecution sought to discredit him and his revolution. Their revenge was swift, says Mobo Gao[1], who grew up during the CR:
After Mao’s death Deng Xiaoping, scion of an elite family, dissolved the communes, clinics, and schools and, despite fierce resistance, forced peasants back to the status of small producers. His Reform and Opening, says Orville Schell[2], “Rammed Chinese society into reverse gear, stampeding the country into a form of unregulated capitalism that made the US and Europe seem almost socialist by comparison”.
A new generation of illiterate peasants, particularly women, emerged and life expectancy fell as destitution, prostitution, drug trafficking and addiction, the sale of women and children, petty crime, organized crime, official corruption, pollution, racketeering and profiteering returned.
In 1983, when peasants unable to afford their children’s tuition or medical care, teenagers who were forced out of school, and farmers who could not afford privately manufactured fertilizer created a serious crime wave, Deng executed thousands and crushed all signs of dissidence. Seven years later, in a hugely popular film, The Herdsman, a poor herder talks with an intellectual who had been a herder in Mao’s time and later became a teacher, “You were one of us once; now us folk are all done for”.
Says Dongping Han[3], who also grew up in a village during the CR,
Before Mao died he mentioned to a small circle of people that he had accomplished two things in his life time. The first was the founding of the Peopleʼs Republic of China. He fought ten years against the Chiang Kaishek regime before the Japanese invasion. He fought against the Japanese aggressors for eight years, and fought three more years to overthrow the Chiang Kaishek regime to accomplish the first task. The second was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
[1] Mobo Gao, The Battle For China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (London, Pluto Press, 2008), p. 21.
[2] Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation. By Orville Schell
[3] The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village. Dongping Han. 2008.
Thanks Godfree, for some background that the West and others have covered up. What is new to me is the powerful explanation of negative attitudes to the Cultural Revolution in educated Chinese whose careers were thwarted. It fits well with selfish, nose-in-the-air careerism that blights our own scientific research/education system.