Commemorative Ping-Pong Paddle
China 2007
This inscribed ping-pong paddle was given to former Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger by Chinese table tennis champion Zhuang Zedong in the fall of 2007. It was Zhuang’s chance encounter with a member of the U.S. table tennis team in 1971 that led to the “ping-pong diplomacy” with China of the early 1970s. Kissinger, who at that time was President Nixon's National Security Advisor, traveled to Beijing twice in 1971 to discuss the conditions under which the U.S. and China would consider normalizing diplomatic relations.
