'Pingpong diplomacy' remembered

Ordinary people still affect Chinese-U.S. relations

By Rebecca MacKinnon
CNN Beijing Bureau Chief

BEIJING -- Zhang Xielin is proud to have been part of history. Not long after the United States pingpong team made its historic trip to China in March 1971, Zhang went with the Chinese team to the United States -- where he even shook hands with President Nixon.

It was at the height of the Cold War, and the former pingpong coach remembers that not everyone in America was happy that the United States was growing closer to China.

"When Nixon met us at the White House," he recalls, "some people who supported the Taiwan Nationalists were shouting slogans from across the street. We had bodyguards wherever we went."

The Chinese and U.S. athletes were ordinary people from two nations -- whose ideologies, it seemed, could not be further apart. They were brought together so that their leaders, Nixon and Mao, could meet and form an alliance against a common adversary -- the Soviet Union. But since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia is no longer a factor in Beijing's relationship with Washington. And now, the last remaining superpower and the greatest remaining communist power are searching for ways to coexist in a new, post-Cold War world.

A visible example of the way China has changed since the days of "pingpong diplomacy" three decades ago is the number of Americans now living and working all over China. Christine Lonergan, from Naperville, Illinois, is one of 100 American volunteers who have been teaching English in China's Sichuan Province. She and her fellow teachers are also students, learning about life in modern China. Because they earn the same as local teachers, they're living the same way as their Chinese counterparts.

"Coming to China is like going to Mars," says Paula Winke, one of the volunteers. "It's very different."

Differences aside, the American volunteers can still send e-mail home from the local post office -- in a China that's now a far cry from the days of the first pingpong diplomats. The once-ubiquitous blue and gray Mao suits are gone. Many Chinese try to keep up with global fashion trends and buy many familiar international brands of clothing. Non-Chinese movies like "Titanic" have also been a huge hit in China.

Many analysts now believe the U.S.-China relationship may be America's most important relationship. The Peace Corps' Bill Speidel says encouraging more Americans to live and work in China is the best insurance policy against the two nations ever becoming enemies again.

"I wouldn't predict disasters in our bilateral relationship," he says. "But I feel strongly we just need more, better-trained people with far more experience in the Chinese setting."

Kimberly Ebner, another American teacher, plans to pursue her newfound interest in China when she returns to graduate school in the United States. "I feel as if the American public hears so many negative things, and really the American public needs to know there are some positive things," she says. "We need to get to know just the regular people a little bit as well."

With the presence of the American volunteers in China, it appears another generation of ordinary people is now shaping the course of U.S.-China relations.