Documentary revisits ping-pong days of 1971

‘‘THE UNDERLYING MESSAGE OF THE FILM IS THAT, IN FACT, EVEN IF WE ARE COMING FROM VERY DIFFERENT CULTURES AND VERY DIFFERENT PLACES, THERE ARE SOME SIMILARITIES.”

   - BILL EINREINHOFER, FILM PRODUCER

23 Jun 2025

TIME International

BY MINLU ZHANG

In 1971 the American table tennis player Glenn Cowan boarded the wrong bus during the world championships in Nagoya, Japan. He missed the U.S. team’s bus and got on the next one, only to find himself on the Chinese team’s bus.

On the bus a Chinese player, Zhuang Zedong, saw the unfamiliar American, stepped forward and introduced himself.

“They didn’t speak each other’s languages, but somehow they were able to communicate because they tried,” the film producer Bill Einreinhofer said. “And their picture was taken and traveled around the world. They started a dialogue between America and China that continues today.”

Einreinhofer, a three-time Emmy Award winning producer, documented the period in his new film Your Serve or Mine. The encounter led to what became known as pingpong diplomacy.

The group of nine U.S. table tennis players embarked on a milestone journey to China, helping break the ice between Beijing and Washington and laying the groundwork for the eventual establishment of diplomatic relations.

Ping-pong diplomacy “was the starting point for a back-channel way that two countries with profound differences could find some way to communicate, some way to talk outside of the glare of the media,” Einreinhofer said.

The documentary streamed on the Public Broadcasting Service in the U.S. in May, and the New York Film Academy hosted a premiere for the film on April 30.

“The underlying message of the film is that, in fact, even if we are coming from very different cultures and very different places, there are some similarities,” Einreinhofer said.

Ping-pong diplomacy unfolded around the time that Einreinhofer was in high school, and he could remember little about it. So Einreinhofer started researching and realized “how profound that moment in history was.”

“I discovered how powerful it can be when college and university students from China and the U.S. visit each other’s countries. They can play a really important role in helping both sides better understand one another and in creating a line of communication.”

The documentary also tells the stories of presentday people-to-people exchanges between China and the U.S.

Roxanne Roman, one of the characters in the documentary, who was a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2018 and is a graduate of NYU Shanghai, said: “It is really great to see that there’s still a lot of effort and desire in working on people-to-people relations. I think it really resonated with some of the messaging, still trying to find ways to talk, to relate and to be interested in different cultures and in each other.”

The documentary “highlights the power of people-to-people connections, the kind that continue today through exchanges of students, educators and professionals across all fields,” said Joy Zhu, executive vice-president for the China region at the New York Film Academy.