Your Serve or Mine

[soft music] - [Narrator] Table tennis has never been taken seriously in America, despite elite players representing the United States internationally and at the Olympics.

- [Spectator] Wow!

- [Narrator] While derisively called "ping pong," there was a time when a small group of American table tennis players changed history.

And in doing so, opened lines of communication between the United States and China still vital today.

Table tennis has been played by Americans for decades.

It's considered simple and sedate.

That's not true.

Amazingly, it was also central to one of the biggest diplomatic surprises of the 20th century.

[crowd chatter] America in 1971 was at least metaphorically a country at war with itself.

In large part, that was a reaction to American military forces fighting and dying in Vietnam.

Young people led the way as many rejected the politics of their parents and the lifestyle which those parents had worked so hard to build.

These young people wanted to change the world, but many Americans disagreed with them.

The country was incredibly divided.

One reaction to the protests saw angry construction workers in New York City physically attack and injure, anti-war demonstrators.

Self-proclaimed "revolutionaries," planted bombs in college buildings, and even America's National Capital Building.

China in 1971 was a country literally at war with itself, but America's Central Intelligence Agency knew so little about what was happening there.

They were reduced to using an American TV documentary to brief members of Congress and senior government officials.

- [Narrator] I woke at midnight and saw my little brother smiling.

I asked him why he smiled, and he said, "I dreamed of Chairman Moa."

- [Narrator] Young people in China also wanted to change the world, but in a totally different way.

The documentary argued that Chinese leader, Mao Zedong, utilizing a powerful cult of personality, had called upon college and high school students, as well as the military to reject anything deemed "counter-revolutionary."

That included much of the Communist party leadership along with parents, teachers, and almost all authority figures.

It was called the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution.

- [Reporter] Under the leadership of Chairman Mao, and the Chinese Communist Party, under the guidance of the general line for socialist construction of the party to strive hard and strive to advance, and to get greater, faster, better, and more economical results.

And under the three great movements of class struggle, production struggle and scientific testing, our Chinese people have achieved great successes.

- [Narrator] In 1971, the United States recognized the government on Taiwan as the legitimate government of all China.

What the world did not know was that America and China's leaders wanted to talk, if only about the Soviet Union, their common enemy, and Moscow's Warsaw Pact allies.

Enter nine American table tennis players.

They played a decisive role in something American media would dub "ping pong diplomacy."

- My parents had a table tennis table in our basement and my brother was still living at home and he was a good athlete and he played table tennis and tennis and all different kinds of sports and he knew how to play.

So I would go down there and he would teach me how to play table tennis.

And I just fell in love with it.

- I had met Connie through table tennis.

My dad and Connie's brother, Bob, decided to start the Grand Rapids Table Tennis Club in 1956.

And my dad was the city champion that year.

And I was actually in the initial membership of that club, and I was 12 years old.

- [Narrator] Table tennis can look deceptively easy.

In fact, it is both complex and challenging.

- There's probably as many different styles of play as there are personalities in the human race.

But the two main styles I would say are offense and defense.

And it's just seems like people often are just either offensive minded, or they're defensive minded when they come to the table.

I have to say I'm an offensive minded player.

I wanna hit the ball.

I wanna spin the ball, I wanna overpower the appointment.

I wanna make it quick and hit hard.

I mean, it's fun to hit the ball hard.

It's fun to make a shot and put it away.

And that wins the point.

- [Narrator] Japan in late March and early April, 1971 was the site of that year's world table tennis championships.

Though America wasn't expected to be competitive, it still sent a team.

- In 1971, we went to Nagoya, Japan for the World Championships.

And that was the first of about 10 years.

10 or 12 years of being on the US team and going to subsequent US team trips to the world championships.

But Nagoya, Japan was the first 1971, 15 years old.

And it was pretty exciting.

I'd never been outside of North America.

It was my first, you know, international tournament.

It was a brand new experience for me.

- [Narrator] Dale Swears was supposed to make that trip too.

- Everything was going well until I asked my employer if I could have the time off to go with the US team to Japan.

And timing is everything.

And my profession is that I am a CPA, and CPAs get real busy in March and April.

And so my boss would not let me have time off from work to go for two or three weeks to Japan.

And so Connie went and I didn't.

- [Narrator] In China, table tennis called "ping pong" there, is a major sport.

- It's so important, I mean it's a national pastime and it's a core part of Chinese sports culture.

And also because Chinese table tennis players have been dominating the international competitions for decades.

So for Chinese, the game also stands as a significant source of national pride.

I know that in the United States for a very long time, Table tennis has been viewed as a basement sport.

But in China is obviously a highly popular public park activity where a skilled player is expected to put on a show to dazzle his spectators that surrounded around him.

- [Narrator] The fact table tennis requires minimal equipment, certainly played a role in its popularity.

Given that popularity, it became the one international sport in which China could not just participate in, but excel.

In the 1970s, and today Chinese table tennis players were the best in the world.

Glenn Cowan was a member of the 1971 American table tennis team.

He was very much a part of his generation.

- Glenn was a interesting character.

He was very gregarious and was just out there.

He thought about things and he did things his own way.

And he was just kind of a happy go lucky person.

He had this big floppy hat and he wore bell bottom trousers and purple dyed shirt.

So he was, he kind of stood out.

- [Narrator] Transportation is an essential element of any international sports event.

- One night we all came back from the practice hall together on a bus that they provided for us to the hotel.

And Glenn missed that bus.

And so the next bus that came along, he got on.

And of course it was the Chinese bus with the players on it.

And he realized when he stepped inside that it was all Chinese [soft music] - [Narrator] Photographers were present to witness the scene.

The images they captured were picked up by news agencies around the world.

American Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai had found the opening they were looking for, a way of "unofficially" communicating.

No Americans had legally visited China in more than 20 years.

The US table tennis team was invited to visit for a series of what were called "friendship matches."

But would the team even go?

- That was the last day of the tournament.

We had to decide, are we gonna go to China and is it safe?

Do we wanna go?

And we had a team meeting and of course I said, "I wanna go.

Yes."

- [Narrator] Simply getting to China required plenty of improvisation.

US passports specifically stated they could not be used for travel to China.

An American consular officer solved that problem with a black marking pen.

- It was a big surprise of course.

And immediately it was a huge media sensation.

There were cameras in our faces, there were, you know, everyone's taking photographs.

All of our teammates, everyone was being asked, can you write something?

Can you write for the "New York Times?"

Can you write for "Life," can you write for "Newsweek?"

Can you know, you know...

They all wanted us to go into China and, you know, bring back information.

- [Narrator] With no international flight service.

The Americans would walk into China over an old railway bridge linking Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China.

[soft music] Connie Suarez managed to get a quick photograph.

- There were red guard army standing on that bridge with rifles.

Needless to say, I was a little nervous about it, especially when you see the armed guards.

'Cause I thought to myself, "Here we are, I'm going into a communistic country.

And I know very little about it other than we had no relationship with them."

But yet at the same time, I was excited because I realized they had initiated the invitation for us to come into China.

And so they would do everything in their power to get us back out safely.

They didn't wanna have any international incidents.

- [Narrator] While teams from Canada and several other countries were also invited to visit, media attention focused on the Americans, given the symbolism of their presence, the Americans soon discovered they were considered as exotic as they found their new surroundings.

- As to the interactions between the US players and the average people on the Chinese streets, I think there's just this genuine sense of curiosity from both sides.

Whenever the US team members venture out onto the streets, they will soon attract huge crowd.

Were so eager to talk to them and to talk to find out more about them.

And also I think Connie has once remarked to me that she was just amazed by the sight that everyone on the streets were either walking or riding a bike.

I mean, the US and China were very different back then, but all those differences that served as the spark to ignite the mutual interest.

And also as a reminder of the need to get to know each other.

- What a thrill.

We played it before 18,000 people in that auditorium.

And here in the United States, we'd be lucky at our national competition to get like two or 300 people that'd be watching the match, let alone 18,000 people.

And of course, most of the spectators in the US are family and friends.

You don't get too many outside people like you do for football and baseball and all the major sports.

[soft music] - When we had our matches in Beijing and in Shanghai and in Guangzhou, we played in three cities.

I won three out of four matches.

[soft music] And I knew that I didn't really deserve to win those matches.

[soft music] But what we heard over and over again in China was, "friendship first, competition second."

And that's pretty much what was happening at the table when we played our matches.

[soft music] [train engine and tracks clanging] When I left China, we left the same way as when we came in.

We took a train to the border, walked across the border, got on another train, it was cram packed full.

Every single inch in that train was full of journalists.

- [Narrator] Both then and now, official Chinese media has enthusiastically covered these events.

Offering what in 1971 was an entirely new message.

"Not all Americans were bad and some in fact were good."

- [Reporter] Welcome friends from China.

- [Narrator] A 1972 reciprocal visit by Chinese table tennis players to the United States is often lost in most discussions of ping pong diplomacy.

[uplifting music] This time it was Americans learning that people from what was inevitably called "Red China," weren't the strange creatures they've been led to believe.

- And so a year later, in April of 1972, the Chinese came to the US and my husband and I, Dell, were lucky enough to be able to travel around with them to the different cities that we took them to.

And play these friendship matches.

And of course the "friendship matches" were billed as "friendship first, competition second."

That was really a neat experience to be able to travel with them and get on buses and travel to the different cities.

- [Narrator] Cobo Hall in Detroit, better known for concerts by hometown rock heroes like Bob Seger, was one of the event venues.

- When the Chinese team arrived there, we greeted them as they came off the plane.

And there was a lot of newspaper people there.

This was the beginning of the two weeks where we were treated almost like rock stars, where you had the police escort, you had protection as you went from one venue to the other.

So the reception was pretty strong, except we are a free country and there were a lot of people that didn't like the idea that the Chinese team was here.

- [Narrator] One of the people who saw these "friendship" matches was a high school student from Maryland named Jeff Lehman.

- It was just an amazing experience for me to see players like Cheng Min-Chih, the woman's champion, Li Fu-Jung, men's champion, playing against some of the top American players, a level of ping pong that I had never experienced.

- [Narrator] This was Jeff's first connection to China, but it wouldn't be his last.

The lines of communication forged by the American and Chinese table tennis players led to the landmark visit of American president and longtime anti-communist, Richard Nixon to China.

Culminating in eventual diplomatic relations between the two countries.

It also put into motion other forms of people-to-people diplomacy, which remain crucial today, like the exchange of college and university students between America and China.

[engines humming] In contemporary China, especially its cities, you can find vivid examples of both daily life and timeless traditions.

It is China's people who help define it as a nation.

[crowd chatters] How the Chinese people define themselves and how they see the world.

It underlies a kind of "cultural surprise" beyond anticipated differences like language and cuisine.

- Another thing that was really impressed upon me was the connection that Chinese people and society and indeed the political system have to their own history.

As an American, where I admittedly did not pay the most attention to my American history coursework in middle and high school.

I was really just impressed and awed by my Chinese classmates knowledge of their own past.

All the past dynasties, just all of these trends and literature in art and politics and philosophical thought.

They were able to just rattle them off and seek continuity through them.

- I haven't experienced much culture shock because I am Chinese surprise.

Because I have family in China and I have been here.

But one thing I'll mention was just last week, someone told me after about three seconds of talking with me, that they could tell that I was A, B, C or American born Chinese.

Not because of my accent or anything like that, but because I smile too much or not too much.

But I smiled a lot, which in general, maybe when talking with strangers in China doesn't always happen at first.

So I'm definitely a smiley American.

[Chinese music] - [Narrator] A nationalist uprising in China during the late 1800s, known in the West as the Boxer Rebellion, saw Chinese militias declare war on foreigners and Christians.

Despite being forgotten in America.

Years later it did result in a motion picture called "55 days at Peking."

[horse feet clattering] - We're almost in Peking a capital city of China.

This is an ancient and highly cultured civilization, so don't get the idea you're better than these people just because they can't speak English.

- The film dramatized the siege of the so-called Legation district, in what was then called Peking by boxer troops.

And the rescue of the foreigners trapped there by combined armies of eight different nations, including America.

[marching music] At a time when most Chinese were destitute, the Ching dynasty was forced to pay large monetary reparations to the eight foreign countries who had suffered losses.

But the United States received an overpayment.

And so eventually after back and forth discussion, it was decided to use that overpayment for China to send students to the US to study mainly science and engineering.

It was called solid learning.

As that was a term used by the Chinese officials.

That program lasted from 1909 to about the 1945.

Overall about 1,400 Chinese students were sent over to the US study and many of them became leaders in Chinese science, engineering, educational institutions, and other fields.

So the first class came in 1909, and among I think around 70 students that came to the US in 1909 as a Boxer Fellows, was Mei Yiqi, physicist who went back to China, eventually became president of the Tsinghua University.

Tsinghua University actually was set up with funds from the returned indemnity funds.

[soft music] - [Narrator] Called "Boxer Fellows," a significant number stayed in the United States and made important contributions to American science.

One of them was Nobel Prize winning physicist Chen-Ning Yang, at Stony Brook University in New York.

There was a new university of the State of University of New York system.

So he was the first big shot hire that made Stonybrook really a very well regarded university.

And so he retired around 1998, '99, and then he decided to go to move back to Beijing where he grew up at Tsinghua University.

His father was a professor at Tsinghua University.

So he said his life was like a circle.

So he still is living in Beijing.

He's probably, I think 102 or 103 years old.

- [Narrator] The 1949 victory of the communist forces ended the so-called "Boxer Fellows," studying in America.

In Korea, American and Chinese soldiers fought each other in brutal hand to hand combat.

In Vietnam, America and China fought a "proxy war."

It wasn't until President Jimmy Carter took office that China's then paramount leader , Deng Xiaoping, raised the issue of Chinese students again studying in America.

But Deng wanted assurances from President Carter himself that at least 5,000 students would be allowed to study in the United States.

Frank Press, Carter's science advisor telephoned the president from Beijing.

- Frank Press called Carter in the middle of the night in Washington DC, so Carter was woken up and you know, was frustrated getting a phone call.

He thought it was a national security emergency, but it was a call from Beijing.

When he was informed of the discussion, Carter reported he said "5,000, no problem.

Let them send a 100,000," and slam the phone, you know, as he kinda put it in his memoir.

Of course, eventually within the few years I think, I don't know, 10 or 15 years, the number of the Chinese students come to US did reach about a 100,000.

- [Narrator] America's colleges and universities saw the return of Chinese students, [crowd chatter] but few, if any Americans traveled in the opposite direction to study in China.

[soft music] A 1976 Chinese film celebrated how the cultural revolution transformed college education, with the end of entrance exams and admission standards and the enrollment of peasants, workers and soldiers, whose class status alone made them eligible to attend.

Colleges in and universities in China enrolled students from the ranks of the workers, the farmers, and the soldiers, PLA soldiers.

And they were enrolled based on mostly on their political, you know, reliability and ideological loyalty instead of academic skills.

And so they reversed that in 1977 when they restored the national entrance exam, something like 5 million youth took the exam nationwide vying for something like 250,000 slots.

[woman singing in foreign language] - [Narrator] Jaime FlorCruz, an idealistic university student and political activist in the Philippines, was invited to visit China in the early 1970s.

Then the political situation back home took a terrible violent turn, stranding him in China.

- And so we asked our Chinese hosts if we could extend our three weeks, stay longer.

And they said, "fine," they knew the circumstances and so they just added a few open cities into our itinerary.

Well it turned out to be a longer wait than that.

Because a year later, months later, the president at that time, President Marcos, declared martial law.

More arrests and the prospect of going home as planned dimmed after that.

Another year later my passport expired and so I became a stateless citizen in China.

- [Narrator] In 1977, Peking University admitted the first post cultural revolution students, [soft music] among them was Jaime FlorCruz.

- Peking university, I think got the best of the best, the cream of the crop of that year.

Many of my cohorts, my schoolmates were very brilliant brains, but also very passionate students.

Why, because they saw China go through the cultural revolution.

They knew what was wrong, and they knew that China needed to change.

And they were very passionate, very thirsty for knowledge of what they can gain.

So that China can be changed, can be reformed.

So this was a dictionary, a political dictionary that I borrowed from my Chinese friend who was a professional translator.

So he lent it to me and because this was not available in the bookstores, he lent it to me and I copied by hand entries.

This is one of the notebooks on which I copied it.

I didn't really finish, maybe I finished a third of it and then when I handed it back to him, he said, "You can keep it."

- [Narrator] Jaime FlorCruz eventually became the Beijing Bureau chief for CNN, interviewing top Chinese officials like the then mayor of Shanghai and the future Secretary General of the Communist Party of China, Jiang Zemin.

Not until the early 2000s, when Deng Xiaoping's policies dubbed "Reform and Opening," had fundamentally changed the country did American students and American universities begin to view study in China as a viable option.

One was Rutgers University.

- My name is Isaac Gottlieb.

[upbeat music] I'm with Rutgers University since 1999, and I'm teaching in China for the last seven years.

Rutgers has an executive MBA program in Shanghai.

The program in Shanghai started in the year 2000.

The reason we chose Shanghai is because Shanghai has a large number of multinational companies, global companies and many expatriates coming to Shanghai.

And this is an opportunity for Rutgers to have an executive MBA program here.

[upbeat music] - [Narrator] New York University, partnering with East China Normal University, had ambitious plans for a Shanghai campus.

The course of study went beyond the standard academic curriculum, to encompass what might be termed "international immersion."

An architect of that approach was amateur table tennis player, Jeffrey Lehman.

- So we have a total of 2,000 undergraduates.

But always half are from China, half are from the rest of the world.

And the reason we are so insistent on that ratio is it enables to assign every one of our students a roommate who has a passport that's different from their own.

Every Chinese student has a roommate from a country outside China.

Every non-Chinese student has a roommate from China.

Among our non-Chinese students, usually 50 to 60% of them are Americans.

[upbeat music] - [Narrator] Students make their way to class on scooters and bicycles at Tsinghua University in Beijing, one of China's most respected schools.

It is the site of a remarkable educational experiment, conceived and put into motion by one person.

[upbeat music] - Steve Schwarzman decided way back about 15 years ago that China was important and that every leader, every future leader, really every person, but every future leader should understand China.

And the purpose of the program based on that very simple idea is to identify the future leaders from all over the world, from different disciplines, different backgrounds, bring them to China.

So whatever they did in their lives, they would have China as part of their education and as he likes to say, China, this day and time is core curriculum.

- [Narrator] Bringing together the best and the brightest from around the world, every year 200 students are selected from a pool of over 5,000 applicants to participate in a totally free master's degree program in which they study live and travel throughout China.

[soft music] They're known as Schwarzman Scholars.

- We've developed a process over the last 10 years.

It's a very rigorous process.

We interview students from all over the world in three or four different regions.

And we identify the students by going to universities, recruiting at universities, recruiting at young professional organizations.

We have recommenders of students.

We really identify future leaders in a variety of ways.

And then we have a rigorous process, an interview process that starts with readers all over the world who read the applications.

We have over 5,000 applications last year, and we then have an interview process where we actually have panels made up of leaders from different countries, different disciplines who interview these, a small number of the applicants, and then select a class of somewhere between 150 and 200 every year.

- In module three of my third term, I get to take a class called Leadership and Diplomacy and Security taught by the former US ambassador to Afghanistan.

I'm also taking a class called Leading in State-owned Enterprises, which is led by a former chairman of one of the largest state owned enterprises in China.

And so I feel like those are opportunities that just would not be possible if I wasn't here at a program like Schwarzman Scholars.

So I'm really excited about that.

- Everyone at Schwarzman Scholars gets a degree in a master's in global affairs.

In undergrad I focused on public policy with a concentration in international development and minored in French and African studies.

So I think those are kind of the areas of study In general, it's about it getting a better understanding of the world with a degree here it's really about understanding China better through perhaps not only a western lens.

And in general I would say that I'm most interested in the intersection of the performing arts and activism.

- [Narrator] For most American students.

Studying in China was a carefully considered decision, [footsteps] but for others it was something of a gamble.

- I wanted to come to China just to really be able to better understand the political institutions, all of the institutions that work in governance that relate to public sector, private sector.

And I felt like being here would be the best way to really get a true understanding of the nature of the environment.

- I was a bit worried that perhaps I couldn't relate to the Chinese scholars here or maybe Chinese people and whatnot.

But I kind of realized for one, at least with the scholars, I can speak my favorite language, which is Chinglish.

So mostly Chinese but also a bit of English.

But beyond that I am Chinese.

Like I am part of the diaspora and I have very different lived experience as the people who grew up here.

But there is a shared common sense of kind of culture and heritage and that's how true and my mom and my family has exposed me to that really well.

So I actually have found myself a lot more connected to, you know, in many ways the motherland than I kind of thought coming in as someone who was born and raised, lived my entire life in the United States.

- Just based on high school education, I think I had some sense that China was the big topic, would be the big topic in the 21st century.

I was applying to college and NYU had this part in their application that said, you know, "We'd like to send your application to Shanghai.

We're starting this new campus at NYU Shanghai."

And I said, "What the heck?"

And I think that was actually the reaction of a lot of people in my year at least a lot of Americans was "What the heck," I think was like the thing they thought right before making the decision.

- Living in Beijing has not been too much of a challenge outside of the weather.

But I was based in Chicago previous to this, so I'm a bit used to it being cold and cloudy.

I will say the campus environment here is a bit different than what I was used to in my undergrad.

The first time I wanted to invite a friend to visit the Schwarzman College, I had to apply first for access to Tsinghua and then for access to Schwarzman scholars, whereas I'm just used to people walking directly into any building on a campus in the United States.

[soft music] - [Narrator] While the campus and classrooms are the primary locations for studies, exploring China and its people is an equally important part of the curriculum.

[soft music] - They also have in China the back of the currency, which you don't see that much these days anymore 'cause everything's digital.

Every back of the currency had an image of somewhere in China.

So we would do our best to sort of like do that alignment of like okay, "This bill has Guilin on it."

And so when we were in Guilin on our little raft down the Yangtze river, like holding it up and trying to be like, "This is it."

- I traveled extensively in China.

I think I've been to more Chinese provinces than US states actually, which is a fun trivia fact me.

I was actually in China this August.

I was shocked that still to this day Google maps is blocked.

Your only option is Baidu maps and Baidu Maps is in Chinese and so if you don't speak Chinese it really is very difficult to be a tourist in China.

[soft music] - [Narrator] Traveling to America allows Chinese students to explore the reality of America and its culture along with their formal classwork.

- I also heard about like, "Oh it's not safe in America.

You can't pull your phone out when you're on the street you will get robbed."

And then like, "You can't walk around at night.

It's just not happening and there are a lot of gunshots happening and all that."

Personally I've not been too many places in America, but at least in Burbank Los Angeles.

I don't feel that I think it's okay to be here and I can scroll my phone around the street.

That's fine.

At least from my experience.

- [Narrator] Nothing better typifies the American imagination then its movies.

And nowhere captures that vibe better than Hollywood.

[upbeat music] It draws filmmaking students from around the world.

- When I first got here it was such a culture shock 'cause even though, you know, I watched so many movies, I've read about America but like coming here actually like in person, I think it was very refreshing because I didn't realize that how open [soft music] like people are here, which is like in a good way.

In my culture everything is like it's not that straightforward.

So here you know the fact that people are more like straightforward and like it's more I guess easygoing I would say and like very just very passionate too.

Like here, especially in Los Angeles, people are so passionate, which I love.

- The problem for study will be my language, I guess.

[upbeat music] When I first got here, I'm not that confident with my English for some reason and then it's low key hard to me to write an essay like academic essay especially in a different language.

But once I starting writing it and getting used to it, I'm fine right now.

- [Narrator] Still people from different backgrounds inevitably view and do things differently.

- I did feel that I had a lot of cultural adaptation to do just to the environment and atmosphere of living in a big city.

I grew up in a very small town, only a few thousand people and living in such a large city as Shanghai, almost 30 million people, a megalopolis, one of the biggest cities in the world was such a huge shift for me.

I worked mostly in the journalism and media industry when I was in Shanghai I did a lot of internships there in different Chinese outlets, most of which were state owned because that's just what media is in China, not by my personal choice to go there or not.

And seeing my coworkers kind of navigate very deftly a system that seemed so byzantine to me.

They just had like such a feeling for, how to talk about something in a way that would get past, how to express an issue in a way that it could be expressed.

And that really impressed me.

[emotional music] - [Narrator] The arrival of COVID in 2019 changed everything.

Non-resident foreigners were required to leave China.

It would be many months before they could return, if they returned at all.

Airline service to and from China was dramatically curtailed.

The United States eventually allowed foreigners to again enter the country provided they received American approved COVID vaccines, none of which were available in China.

[soft music] But the time student exchanges began again, the world was a different place.

- Well it is certainly true that over the past few years the number of American college students who have come to study in China has plummeted.

If you go back 10 years, there were 15,000 American students studying in China as college students.

Last year the number was more like 850.

Now of those 850 Americans studying in China, about 60% were studying at NYU Shanghai.

- President Xi Jinping of China has proposed a large scale student exchange program inviting about 50,000 US students to go to study in China.

As a historian, this does bring up comparisons with earlier programs like the Boxer Fellows program in the early 20th century.

So I see both similarities and differences.

The differences stands out at this point in the sense that for one this scale is much larger than that Boxer fellows, you know there were about 1,400 but now we're talking about 50,000.

And of course the geopolitical situation is different as well.

- [Narrator] Today, America and China are experiencing what has been characterized as a "disengagement."

Trade friction of course remains a significant irritant.

China's assertion of sovereignty over vast areas of the South China Sea has set the stage for possible military confrontation.

Given the worsening of US-China relations is people-to-people diplomacy, superfluous, irrelevant.

- I definitely don't see the merit of that argument.

I think that if tensions are increasing, I think the best way to diffuse that is by having these personal relationships and connection.

I think that although American student interest in China may be declining, I also think that there are lots of students who want to be here.

- This program is created for the moment we're in right now.

And I think the core mission of this program is the belief in constructive engagement between China and the US and China and the world.

And so here we are in this moment, where I think this program is actually delivering on that mission, which is that we're in a very fraught moment in this world and these scholars that are the future leaders of the world all over the world in their specific areas of expertise are learning how to engage with China.

- I think there definitely is a disengagement happening between the US and China, but I think that makes it more important than ever to come here and to engage.

Previously for work I was an investor, investors try to be contrarian, that's how you make money.

I saw everybody deciding China was uninvestible and decided it might make sense to bet on China's continued relevance globally, you know there's a billion and a half people here.

GDP per capita is still only 13 K, there's a lot of upside.

I think that this place is not going anywhere anytime soon.

It's gonna continue to be important and so I saw opportunity that I wanted to explore.

- One of the things that makes I think life in China for foreigners increasingly difficult is that there's sort of a social negative feedback loop.

Once some of the foreigners leave, others leave, the social networks begin to collapse, and they become, I think very few of those nodes left to sustain a community.

- [Narrator] On one subject, there is definite agreement.

Putting yourself in a new different environment almost inevitably leads to personal growth.

- I know that on social media videos that show what regular life is like in China has a lot of engagement.

I think people are curious and I think that we need to have more people come to China and show, you know, life is different here but there's also so many similarities.

I filmed a video of myself just going to brunch here and using the different apps that you need to get around and a difference is that you need an app to scan a QR code or need to scan the QR code to order your menu.

The experience is remarkably similar to me going to get brunch in New York City or back home in Charlotte.

So I think that people need to see that, although there's a lot of differences, there also are a lot of similarities.

- It's one of those places where I think "living is learning" and I think like these sorts of visits to the Great Wall or to Shanghai or to the terracotta soldiers are brilliant.

But there are no substitute for life, life experience, for the experience of having your neighbors invite you over for one of the holidays, for being on one of the trains.

- There was one incident that I remember from my first year, some person, group, organization, I don't know who had just made a little event to help foreign students learn about how to travel around China.

And they were going to give guides to three places.

So the little poster said, "Come learn how to travel in China, learn how to travel to Yunnan, Chengdu and Taiwan."

[soft music] And of course when I saw the poster I was like, "Oh cute, someone is, you know, trying to teach us how to go around."

But then someone had crossed out the Taiwan word and written "Taiwan is not a part of China."

And that was kind of a moment of, "Whoa," for me.

Just even a small issue, someone clearly trying to do something sweet for their foreign classmates, not really thinking of anything had suddenly touched upon this live wire of a geopolitical issue.

- In orientation, I tell all of our new students, "You should be spending two hours every day seriously engaging with a classmate from another country."

I warn them that's not gonna be easy because when you are engaging with someone from another country, especially if you're not speaking in your own first language, you'll be frustrated.

And so it's easier just to go back and be with people who have a much more shared common base.

But I say, "If you give into that temptation, you'll miss out on a key opportunity here."

- [Narrator] Which raises an intriguing question.

Does study in another country change you?

- I'll not say change, but I learned more about myself.

Like I realized that I can take care of myself really well and then I can manage my time.

Like even though like my family's not here, my mom is not behind my back pushing me to do all the things.

Be like, "Hey, it's time for homework.

You need to do this then that," I can do it like myself.

I can plan my time really well.

I'm not missing any homework, I am doing okay with my grade.

So I think that's good.

I guess.

- You know, even though we can see, we can read about different countries or different cultures online or in the newspaper, it's always different when you're there in person because you really get to feel how it's like living here, how it feels like to be I guess local.

And also it helps me understand that the local culture, like how it can change me in a better way.

[emotional music] - [Narrator] Unfortunately like much in America and China's shared history, the story of "ping pong diplomacy," has largely been forgotten.

- Growing up, I don't think I recall a lot about "ping pong diplomacy," but I do remember my school in eighth grade we mentioned a little bit about "ping pong diplomacy," when we were talking about American history and especially during the Cold War when China and the US the relations were really bad, but it was because of ping pong that brought them together and have closer relations.

- [Narrator] In 2024, Amy Wang represented the United States at the Paris Olympics, as a member of the American table tennis team.

- Yes, I think when I tell other people that I play table tennis, they're usually like, "Oh, is that just ping pong?"

Or even sometimes like "Beer pong?"

But over time they, once they like play the sport against me, I think they realize the complexity of the sport and how hard it can be.

And it's not just some basement sport that you play with your friends or family.

And it is a very competitive sport that requires a lot of training and physical fitness and yeah, I think it's just like other sports, it requires a lot of time and dedication to become a good player.

[emotional music] - [Narrator] In the early 1970s, nine young American table tennis players helped break down the barriers separating two countries.

- Being in China was just like being in another planet.

Everything was so different.

It smelled different, it looked different.

I'm still in touch with the people that went to China with us in 1971.

There's only four of us still alive in this world.

Tim Bogan, who's 94, we email almost every day.

And the three women who are on the team, Connie Sweeris, Olga Soltesz and myself are still alive and kicking and it's always a pleasure to stay in touch with them and we've shared some really amazing times together.

- There are also digital links across the miles and the years.

- I think there is a few lessons that can be learned from the '71 "ping pong diplomacy," is that whenever you have exchanges like that, those exchanges break down barriers and they open up the doors for communication.

- Sometimes you need conditions for these people to people exchanges to take place.

And you have these conditions in 1971, in the early 1970s, there's a major policy change at that time.

The mutual decision by the US and China to open to each other created the condition necessary for these people-to-people exchanges to take place.

- We take young people with wildly different views of the world, but a curiosity about the world and have to learn how to interact with each other in meaningful and productive and kind and empathetic ways.

That's actually incredibly difficult.

And the whole four years was a huge learning experience I think for the community as a whole to navigate through these political and just emotional issues that came up.

Seeing the contrasts made me really appreciate America's commitment to a robust civil society, probably more than it ever would've if I had just attended university in the US and that's something that I have genuine affection and appreciation for and feel protective of and want to advocate for.

- [Narrator] Relations between the Philippines and China seem even more challenging than those of the United States and the PRC.

[gentle surf] They center on territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

So it might surprise some that the Philippines ambassador to China remains a strong proponent of people-to-people diplomacy.

Peking University graduate, Jaime FlorCruz is now the Philippine ambassador to China.

- We're going through difficulties, We are going through difficult moments or chapters in our relationships, but it's even more important that we keep that people-to-people relations.

That's our, that's my own advocacy as well.

Here I'm trying to, you know, we are very, very welcoming of any Philippine groups coming to China.

I tell them about what's going on and then I find out that most of the time they tell me that it's the China that they see is not quite the China that they expected.

In the same way that when I first visited China 53 years ago, it was not the China that I expected.

- [Narrator] American and Chinese students seemed destined to play a continuing role in US-China relations.

Through them the two countries can talk to each other, not at each other.

Because if you're going to have a conversation, both sides need to be in the same room.

[soft music]