‘Sports can open up doors’: How Winter Olympic Games could improve U.S.-China ties
BEIJING – In 1971 at the World Table Tennis Championship in Nagoya, Japan, a butterfly flapped its wings, then nine Americans parted China’s Communist Red Curtain.
That butterfly was Glenn Cowan.
The New York-born table tennis player missed the team bus to the Nagoya venue. So he hitched a ride on the Chinese one, where he was approached by three-time world men’s singles champion Zhuang Zedong. Zedong shook Cowan’s hand and gave him a silk cloth with a depiction of China’s scenic Huangshan Mountains. Two days later, China’s leader Mao Zedong – Chairman Mao – invited the entire American team to visit China.