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, Pete Millwood argues 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.

About the speaker
Pete Millwood is Lecturer in East Asian History at the University of Melbourne. Dr Millwood studied for his DPhil in History at Oxford, during which time he held fellowships at Peking University and the Library of Congress. Prior to his appointment at Melbourne, he held postdoctoral fellowships at Tsinghua and Oxford universities, the London School of Economics, and in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. Dr Millwood's research has been published in Diplomatic History and the Journal of Contemporary History and his research has been featured in the Washington Post, History Today, the South China Morning Post, and on BBC Radio 4. Improbable Diplomats is his first book and was published by Cambridge University Press in December 2022.

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