Driver of Peace? Ping-Pong Diplomacy on The Korean Peninsula

International Journal of Korean History (Vol.25 No.2, Aug. 2020) 75 Driver of Peace? Ping-Pong Diplomacy on The Korean Peninsula * Brian Bridges* Introduction “Table tennis has had a long history as a driver of peace, and we are happy to open a new chapter of table tennis diplomacy to promote peace on the Korean peninsula.” With these dramatic words, Thomas Weikert, President of the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF), welcomed news of a joint Korean women’s doubles team being created in July 2018.1 Weikert has certainly not been alone in depicting sport as a positive force that brings together and even unites peoples and countries. The Olympic movement, indeed, was grounded in the beliefs of its founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin that sport would support and promote peace and friendship amongst peoples and countries. This idealism has continued to prevail within the Olympics and across a range of other global sports. But irrespective of the degree of justification for this idealism, there is little doubt that sport has become a major element of global socie- * Affiliate Fellow, Centre for Asian Pacific Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong and Honorary Professor, Department of Social Sciences, The Education University of Hong Kong. 1 ITTF, “North & South Korea to Join Forces at ITTF Korea Open,” Press Release of International Table Tennis Federation, July 16, 2018. https://www.ittf.com/201 8/07/16/north-south-korea-join-forces-ittf-korea-open. 76 Driver of Peace? Ping-Pong Diplomacy on The Korean Peninsula ty and culture. The modern social history of any country cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the place of sport. Conversely, a country’s sporting history and development cannot ignore the role of politics. But, the interaction of sport with a nation’s political history – and a nation’s relationships with external powers - is complex. Domestically, sport provides a political resource that governments, political parties and interested groups utilize for a variety of policy objectives. Sport can improve people’s health and well-being, create jobs and business activities, forge social cohesion, enhance nation-building and national identity, and serve as a distraction from policy difficulties. 2 Sport contributes to social change, but occasionally can act as catalyst for political change, as happened, for example, in the case of South Korea (Republic of Korea) in 1987-88 when the democratization process was influenced by the imminent hosting of the 1988 Seoul Olympics. 3 In recent years, academic sports studies increasingly have picked up “sports diplomacy” as one instrument in a country’s diplomatic outreach – an example of “soft power.” Therefore, externally, sport has been depicted as contributing to improving international relations by promoting interactions and reconciliation and even preventing conflict. In this context, sport can be a mediating factor through providing opportunities for leaders to meet informally at sporting events, acting as a bridge over cultural and linguistic differences, giving insights into other countries’ society and acting as a platform for new agreements in other fields. 4 Yet, the other side of the coin is that sporting contests can frequently take on the appearance of surrogate wars, with violence on and off the field of play, 2 3 4 Grant Jarvie, Sport, Culture and Society: An Introduction (London: Routledge 2006). Brian Bridges, The Two Koreas and the Politics of Global Sport (Leiden: BrillGlobal Oriental, 2012), 66-78. Judith Trankos and Bob Heere, “Sport Diplomacy: A Review Of How Sports Can Be Used To Improve International Relationships,” in Case Studies in Sport Diplomacy, eds. Craig Esherick and Robert E. Baker (Morgantown,WV: FiT Publishing 2017), 1-15. Brian Bridges 77 which actually “accentuate inter-national dissonance.”5 During the Cold War era, the ideological confrontation between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, may not have descended into direct military engagement, but it was fought out fiercely in a number of other dimensions, including cultural and sporting arenas. Sports competitions therefore often became high profile events through which the “respective merits of the competing social and political system, ideologies and moral orders were contested in symbolic combat.” 6 Against this global Cold War background, the cases of ideologically divided societies or divided countries can be seen to further reinforce the positive and negative roles for sport. Sport can be utilized as the “first step,” one means for promoting contacts and peaceful exchange between the two “part-nations,” and in the event of eventual unification, act as a force for consolidating socio-political unity. However, the very fact that these two political entities are usually involved in a highly-charged competition for legitimacy means that sports tournaments and even sporting exchanges can become arenas for nationalistic posturing and political manoeuvring.7 These contradictions have been found in the cases of the two Germanies (1945-90), China and Taiwan (1949 to the present) and, of course, the two Koreas. The argument advanced here is two-fold: that the characteristics of the politics-sport nexus in the Korean case ensures that politics dominate sporting interactions in inter-Korean relations, and that the “mythology” that has arisen over the efficacy of using table tennis as a medium of po5 6 7 Paul Close, David Askew and Xu Xin, The Beijing Olympiad: The Political Economy of a Sporting Mega-Event (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007) 54-5. George Orwell famously described sport as “war minus the shooting”. Cited in Victor D. Cha, Beyond the Final Score: The Politics of Sport in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press. 2009), 8. Stephen Wagg and David L. Andrews, East plays West: Sport and the Cold War (London: Routledge 2009), 4. John Sugden and Alan Bairner, eds, Sport in Divided Societies (Oxford: Meyer and Meyer, 1999). 78 Driver of Peace? Ping-Pong Diplomacy on The Korean Peninsula litical reconciliation has proved misplaced in the Korean case. Therefore, this article examines the extent to which sport plays positive or negative roles in inter-Korean relations by analyzing the limited attempts to recreate “ping-pong diplomacy” on the Korean peninsula. Unpublished British and American archives provide new light on the details of such sporting diplomacy. The Sino-American Precedent The term “ping-pong diplomacy” originates from the way in which interactions between table tennis players from the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the early 1970s opened a window of opportunity for establishing political connections between the two previously antagonistic states, which at that time did not recognize each other diplomatically. Both the US and PRC national teams participated in the 31st World Table Tennis Championships, organised by the ITTF and held in Nagoya, (...truncated)