Mao's Spiritual Nuclear Weapon

Your serve, Great Navigator

Hello and welcome back to the Yellow River Chronicles.  This week we have an Olympics Special Edition:  a first here at the YRC!

To sound the starting gun, so to speak, a few evenings ago the YRC staff stayed up later-than-usual to watch women's gymnastics.  Pixies!  Leotards!  Time differences and no Olympics cable coverage in the YRC staff offices meant that we would go to an local sports bar at around 11:30 in the p of m to watch the finals.

Stay up late?  Hang out in a bar?  We were willing to make the sacrifice, people.

(As a side note, the Chinese are not big drinkers and do not hang out in bars.  Their per capital alcohol consumption is near the lowest in the world. The bar and sports bar is a complete Western invention.  In Shanghai sports bars are generally populated with Australians watching rugby, or Australians watching car racing, or Australians watching...Australians, really.  More on this in a future YRC.)

The US attitude towards Ping Pong...

After watching ping pong for three hours, we convinced the staff to turn the big screens in time to catch the gymnastics competition.  After all, China swept them in 2008, comrades!  

But on this particular night, the big attraction remained, of course....table tennis, AKA ping pong.  So after an hour or so of pixies in leotards, we were back to blinding pong action on the big screen.  What is the big deal with ping pong, we asked after our seventh cranberry and vodka?  It is, after all, the nerdiest Olympic sport.  Why as proof of its epic nerdiness, Bill Gates the uber-nerd, recently announced he is going to help promote table tennis in the U.S.  This from The Global Times:

The International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) plans to work with Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft Corporation, to promote table tennis in the United States, ITTF President Adham Sharara said. 

The initiative was brought up after Gates came to London to watch the game between US teen player Ariel Hsing and Chinese Li Xiaoxia on Sunday, Sharara told Xinhua in an interview.
Sharara didn't disclose the details, but said that Gates offered to help after watching Hsing's match, in which the 16-year-old girl nearly pulled off one of biggest upsets in Olympic table tennis history, pushing No. 2 seed Li to the limit before losing 4-2 in six tight sets. 

"He (Gates) was surprised to see the young American girl played so well. He was very motivated. He asked me what he can do to help promote table tennis in the United States. I think we'll work with him. If the United States becomes very strong in table tennis, it's also good for China," Sharara said.

Uber-nerd Gates Pings the Pong while Buffet coaches

The elite YRC Research staff blasted into action and found this from Table Tennis and Ping Pong Diplomacy Article:  We highly recommend you read the entire article by Jeffry Hays, but here are the highlights:

In the early 1950s, Mao decreed table tennis as the national sport of China. Sinologist saw the decree as a shrewd move by Mao to shore up his legitimacy by developing the sport and producing world-class players as a way for China to build post-revolutionary self-confidence, show the world it can excel at something and get over the humiliations of the previous century and a half. [Source: Matthew Syed, The Times of London, August 10, 2008]

Why Mao chose to highlight table tennis is not known. Perhaps it is because he liked the game himself and realized it was the perfect low-cost game for a nation of peasants. In any case, China was admitted to the International Table Tennis federation in 1953 and it wasn’t long before world-class tennis players emerged.

In 1959, Chinese player Ring Guotuan won the table tennis world champions in 1959, becoming the first Chinese to be a world champion in any sport. Mao deemed the victory a “spiritual nuclear weapon.” He was succeeded by Zhuang Zedong, who won the next three world titles. Mao lavishly praised the player and made light of the fact they played in a Chinese way using the distinctive penholder grip.

Table tennis like everything else suffered in the Cultural revolution. Hounded and tortured by Red Guards, three members of the national team committed suicide in 1968, including Rong Guotuan.

Zhuang was major player in the ping-pong diplomacy that brought the United States table tennis tam to China but also has been linked to some dark episodes in the Cultural Revolution. A devoted Maoist and ally of the Gang of Four, he was jailed along with other members of the Chinese table tennis team for allying themselves to Mao’s rival Liu Shaochi—ironic considering the fact that Zhuang once said, “I owe my entire table tennis success to the study of Ma Zedong philosophy.”

After Mao’s death and the collapse of the Gang of Four Zhuang was lost his government position and was forced to work as a street sweeper. He was publicly denounced for among things “wearing a Swiss-made watch” and was sentenced to prison, where he spent four years in solitary confinement.  After getting out of prison he has held low-level coaching jobs and only recently has been invited to minor sporting events.

Back to our regularly scheduled column:

Since Mao unleashed the "spiritual nuclear weapon" China clearly dominates the international ping pong table. They have won 20 of the 24 golds on offer since it became an Olympic sport in 1988, and 15 of the last 16.

Your elite YRC staff is headed to the rec room to get our paddle on, we'll tell you.  However, we won't be back for a few weeks: we're going camel trekking in Mongolia. Or something like that...  Expect a full report when we get back and thanks for tuning in!