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US table tennis player Kanak Jha
Photo: LUISA GONZALEZ / REUTERS
If Kanak Jha hasn’t seen Forrest Gump, now is the time.
The 21-year-old Jha is an American, table tennis player, and at the World Table Tennis Championships in Houston, which starts today, he is doing something that can be understood as an homage to leading actors Tom Hanks and Forrest Gump.
Jha, who is under contract with TTC Ochsenhausen in the Bundesliga, competes in mixed doubles with a Chinese woman.
Jha and China's double world champion Wang Manyu go on the hunt for the title together.
Exactly 50 years after the legendary ping-pong diplomacy began between the USA and China, later immortalized in one of the famous film scenes by Forrest Gump, this is more than a sport-political gesture.
The relationship between the great powers is no longer as shattered as it was in 1971, when there were no talks between the countries, but it is still tense.
And so the President of the World Table Tennis Federation, Thomas Weikert, speaks of an "important symbol", following the "spirit of ping-pong diplomacy".
With Lin Gaoyuan and Lily Zhang there is even a second US-Chinese mixed couple at the start.
The rapprochement between the USA and China through table tennis - that is one of the great and bizarre sports stories of the 20th century.
And it started with a marijuana smoking US hippie named Glenn Cowan.
He often had to tell the story afterwards, but it also sounds too unbelievable.
Cowan was just 19 in the early 1970s, younger than Kanak Jha today.
He has long hair, runs around in hippie clothes, doesn't give a damn about the US government, which was waging its dirty war in Vietnam at the time, and has even deliberately chosen a sport that is anything but US mainstream: Cowan plays table tennis so well that he qualified for the 1971 World Cup in Japan.
Caught the wrong bus
On that April day 1971 in Nagoya, Japan, which was to influence world history, Cowan gets on a shuttle bus that takes the athletes from the hotel to the competition hall. He caught the wrong bus, possibly still slightly foggy, namely the one with which the Chinese delegation was traveling. And so the US boy, long-haired, floppy hat, flared trousers, suddenly stands between a whole group of Chinese who stare at him.
The bus ride takes 15 minutes, Cowan makes full use of the quarter of an hour, asks for an interpreter and gives a spontaneous speech about friendship between peoples and the wickedness of those in power. And a little miracle happens. The three-time world champion Zhuang Zedong gets up from his last row of bus seats, walks forward, shakes the hand of the class enemy Cowan and presents him with a silk scarf from his homeland that he has in his pocket.
Actually, the Chinese are forbidden from any contact with US citizens. After all, they fought against each other in the Korean War, and their interests are hostile to one another in Vietnam as well.
However, China's ruler Mao Zedong has also fallen out with the Soviet Union, and Mao is about to change course so as not to have both superpowers as enemies.
The country is still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, Mao's policy full of radical twists and turns.
This is one of them.
The two table tennis players Glenn Cowan and Zhuang Zedong don't know, but they are now making world politics.
Photographers in front of the hall notice that Gowan is getting off a bus full of Chinese, there are a few shots, and things take their course.
A few days later, when Cowan presented Zhuang with a gift in return - a Beatnik T-shirt with the peace sign and the Beatles' slogan "Let it be" - a few more photographers were there, and the head of the US delegation seizes the chance to suggest to his Chinese colleague that they could play a few friendly matches.
The newspapers in Japan were full of the story.
One newspaper ran the headline prematurely and yet with wise foresight: "USA and Chgina are approaching".
Mao decided immediately
The request goes to the top in Beijing, China Prime Minister Zhou Enlai and Mao himself reached. One of the political myths is the story that Mao could not sleep because the Great Chairman's sleeping pill did not work, and that is why he has reports from his leadership at night read through where he came across the table tennis episode. The next day the decision was made to grant the request. The US team was invited to visit China while still in Nagoya. Instead of going home, the 15-strong delegation went to China for a week. It was the first US group to enter China since 1949.
Even Prime Minister Zhou Enlai took the time to receive the players. Here too, Cowan took the opportunity to point out the advantages of the hippie life to the politician, he was just on a run, Zhou had certainly not heard that before.
The diplomats from both sides were at work in the background and seized the opportunity.
Foreign Minister Henry Kissinger arrived in Beijing for talks a few weeks later, and US President Richard Nixon traveled to Beijing a year later.
When you think back to Nixon, to tricky Dick, you first think of Watergate and ping-pong diplomacy.
In 1979 the USA and the People's Republic established diplomatic relations.
Since then, table tennis has had a place in history, books have been written and films have been made about ping-pong diplomacy.
A question of prestige for Weikert
50 years later, from China's point of view, the joint appearance of Chinese and US players is less of a politics. Most of all, the Chinese have their own market in mind. The country is so dominant in the popular sport of table tennis that the sports management fears that interest at home will diminish if only Chinese people compete against Chinese in the semifinals and finals. Competition stimulates business, and so China's superstar Ma Long played doubles at the 2015 World Cup alongside Germany's Mister Table Tennis Timo Boll. Fang Bo and the German Petrissa Solja won bronze at the World Cup in Germany in 2017.
For world association boss Weikert, however, the US-Chinese joint venture is also important for prestige.
The 60-year-old is giving up his position at the top of the ITTF on Wednesday after five years - also because he would like to be elected boss of the German Olympic Sports Confederation in December.
A Chinese-American table tennis friendship at the farewell to the world federation is doing quite well on the sport-political parquet.
Weikert also points out that under his aegis, the women's teams from North and South Korea appeared together at the World Cup in 2018.
Cowan and Zhuang no longer witness the revival of ping-pong diplomacy.
The US player died in 2004 at the age of 52, while the Chinese died from cancer in 2013.
In Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks says, "Someone said the peace of the world was in my hands, but I only played table tennis." What do you mean, only?