The Secret to Global Mutual Understanding: Ping Pong Diplomacy, K-Pop, and China’s New Challenge
In 1971, in the midst of the Cold War, American Ping Pong Player Glenn Cowan arrived late to the U.S. team’s bus while practicing for the World’s 31st World Table Tennis Championship held in Nagoya, Japan. So, Cowan temporarily started practicing with a Chinese player in the Chinese team. When the facility abruptly closed, Cowan then joined the Chinese team on the bus ride back. While most Chinese players treated him with suspicion as a foreigner, another Chinese player Zhuang Zedong decided to strike up a conversation through an interpreter. Finally, at the end of the ride, Zhuang gave a silkscreen portrait of the Huang Shan Mountains and Cowan gave back a T-shirt with the words “Let it Be” from The Beatles. The media took pictures of this interaction and ensuing news stories led to Mao’s consideration of inviting an American Ping Pong Team to China, breaking the ice between China and the U.S. for the first time.
The result of this Ping Pong Diplomacy was that both sides learned about each other through the entirely new lens of sports. After returning to the U.S., the American players would comment that -
“The people are just like us. They are real, they’re genuine, they got feeling. I made friends, I made genuine friends, you see. The country is similar to America, but still very different. It’s beautiful. They got the Great Wall, they got plains over there. They got an ancient palace, the parks, there are streams, and they got ghosts that haunt; there are all kinds of, you know, animals. The country changes from the south to the north. The people, they have a, a unity. They really believe in their Maoism”
It is an amazing story of how culture, serendipity, and international politics came together to change the course of history. Yet for me, it was always the most fascinating that the vehicle of change was through Ping Pong…
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After the Asian Financial Crisis which severely affected Korea, the Korean State put in place the Basic Law for the Promotion of Cultural Industries. This new law dedicated one percent of their state budget to promote the exportation of Korean culture to the rest of the world. It was seen as a way to possibly encourage new revenue-generating industries to grow so the country can further diversify its economy.
K-Pop blossomed from this government-wide push and gradually became a global phenomenon within the next two decades. In 2018, K-Pop brought in a total export value of 562.24 million U.S. dollars to the economy of South Korea. Psy’s Gangnam style was the first-ever YouTube video to reach a billion views, and fans in every corner of the world waited patiently for BTS’s new album.
But another more subtle effect maybe even more powerful. K-Pop brought parts of Korean culture to people around the world. Through this combination of catchy music and incredibly well-choreographed dances, the world began to understand South Korea through a unique cultural lens.
This means, for many Gen Z’s, their first introduction to South Korea is through a group of good-looking young Asian pop idols dancing to an optimistic beat. This is in stark contrast to learning about South Korea through reading a news article on how Korea’s rapid development of 5G technology may pose a threat to the global tech industry.
The U.S. market has been very hard to break into. But even in the U.S, K-pop has become more and more well known. Like most westerners, American’s who watch K-Pop music videos for the first time are still often very confused (just rethink to the first time you watched Psy’s Gangnam Style music video…), but through this confusion, they build an association with a culture, a population that lives on the other side of the world. Recently K-Drama and movies like Parasite have further introduced this unique culture to the western world
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However, China, which first built its diplomatic relationships with the U.S. through the means of sharing culture, has not been as successful in its efforts to globalizing its culture. In a country with 5,000 years of history, culture is a huge part of China’s identity. However, China’s cultural exports lag way behind that of Korea and Japan.
When we think of Chinese culture in western countries, we most often consider Chinese restaurants. Through the efforts of individual Chinese American business owners, and larger chains like Panda Express, Chinese food has become a staple of many American lives. Just as how McDonald’s and KFC shed light on the U.S. for mainland Chinese, Chinese restaurants have been instrumental in facilitating understanding of parts of Chinese culture.
Another huge export of China is its people. With 1.3 Billion people in the country, for the past two centuries, Chinese Americans have immigrated around the world, bringing a unique view of Chinese identity to the places they relocate.
Yet, If you are not a Chinese-American when was the last time you watched a Chinese Mainland movie? When was the last time you listened to a Chinese song? The result of this lack of expansion of Chinese popular culture is that fewer people can see the country through this new lens.
This lack of understanding, further exacerbated by the media focus on negative, fear-inducing news that sells makes the only looking glass into China come from a warped lens. The narrative of China as a superpower potentially able to surpass the U.S. continues to guide public perception. As a result, we see that western countries continue to build this wall of fear. This is in turn makes it more difficult for Chinese culture to be accepted.
During the Cold War, Americans were not reading contemporary Russian literature or watching Russian films. Through a warped glass into Russian society, we only saw a fearful ideology, but not the people.
Learning from history, China needs to seek distribution channels to communicate its culture to the rest of the world. It is an incredibly daunting task in this current political climate but it has a paramount role in shaping public sentiment. Investment in exporting culture can introduce China to the world through another light. This will lead to greater mutual understanding and serve as a foundation for building bridges of trust between China and western countries
Just as K-Pop helped share Korean culture with the world, China needs to find its own cultural exports, to share its art and people to a global audience.
