Title
Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations
Abstract
This talk by Pete Millwood (University of Melbourne) was based on his new book, Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations.
In 1971, Americans made two historic visits to China that would transform relations between the two countries. One was by US official Henry Kissinger; the other, earlier, visit was by the US table tennis team. Historians have mulled over the transcripts of Kissinger’s negotiations with Chinese leaders. However, they have overlooked how, alongside these diplomatic talks, a rich program of travel and exchange had begun with ping-pong diplomacy.
Improbable Diplomats reveals how a diverse cast of Chinese and Americans – athletes and physicists, performing artists and seismologists – played a critical, but to date overlooked, role in remaking US-China relations. Based on new sources from more than a dozen archives in China and the United States, Dr. Millwood argued that the significance of cultural and scientific exchanges went beyond reacquainting the Chinese and American people after two decades of minimal contact; exchanges also powerfully influenced Sino-American diplomatic relations and helped transform post-Mao China.
Biography
Pete Millwood is a historian of the Chinese world’s international and transnational relations, particularly with the United States. He is a Lecturer (equivalent to Assistant Professor) in East Asian History at the University of Melbourne. Improbable Diplomats is his first book and was published by Cambridge University Press in December 2022. Millwood’s research has also been published in Diplomatic History and the Journal of Contemporary History, and his writing and research has been featured in the Washington Post, History Today, the South China Morning Post, and on BBC Radio 4.