Two teams of table tennis players from opposite sides of the world cracked the icy relations between China and the United States in 1971 when they played a series of exhibition matches in Beijing. While the nine American players were in the capital city of China, they met with Chinese students and workers, attended social events and visited the Great Wall and Summer Palace. This ping-pong diplomacy helped to pave the way for the then President Richard Nixon's historic trip to China the following year--the first ever for a U.S. president--and the beginning of rapprochement between the two Cold War adversaries.

Thirty-five years later, another American president recognized the significance of sport diplomacy and started the country's first public diplomacy envoy program. The Bush administration named two famous athletes as its initial representatives: world figure skating champion Michelle Kwan and former baseball player Cal Ripken, Jr.

Two months after Ripken's appointment last August, he landed in Beijing, his first stop as sport ambassador. During his 10-day trip he held baseball skills clinics at schools in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. At Beijing's Xidan Elementary School, he tossed small sponge balls at schoolchildren who whopped them with plastic bats. Despite the language barrier, they played for two hours, Ripken said at an American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) event the next day. One boy hit a line drive into Ripken's chest and ran to a makeshift first base, as Ripken pelted him with sponge balls. Not traditional baseball by any means, but diplomatically speaking, Ripken had hit a home run.

"Sport in general has the ability to communicate to all people similar to what music does," Ripken told reporters at the AmCham event. "It kind of goes across all lines, and I think baseball can resonate with people who use [it] to have fun and open up dialogues."

Polishing the U.S. image

Sending superstar athletes abroad is part of the Bush administration's larger effort to polish the country's tarnished image and reverse the international animosity that has grown toward it during the Iraq War. But this time it's baseball and skating instead of table tennis.

While Bush's foreign policy has focused primarily on the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan, it is turning some attention back to China and other Asian countries. Washington sees Beijing as a force to be reckoned with, given the country's economic might, its military strength, its tight diplomatic ties with other Asian nations and its huge trade surplus with the United States.

With this in mind, the American public diplomacy envoy program "is a soft sell to open up more dialogue and in turn more market ties" between the United States and China, said Nancy Snow, a visiting professor who specializes in public diplomacy at Tsinghua University's School of Journalism and Communication. "The United States would also like to see China support U.S. security goals in the Asia-Pacific region."

The approach of the 2008 Beijing Games--which the Chinese regard as the mother of all sports diplomacy coups-also has prompted the United States to pay extra attention to its relations with China.

"If anything, China has been neglected in public diplomacy activities, but now with the Olympics looming, we'll see a shift toward improving ties between our countries," Snow wrote in an e-mail.

In January, Kwan spent 10 days in Beijing, Guangzhou and Hong Kong. In the capital, she visited a school for migrant children. At Beijing Sports University, she handed out medals to athletes on Special Olympics Sports Day. Kwan read to students at an elementary school in Guangzhou. In Hong Kong, she met with members of the city's Girl Guides Association to talk about leadership, goal-setting, cultural and family values and different international experiences.

Steven Lewis, Director of the Asian studies program at Rice University in Houston, Texas, believes that personal envoys are more effective than traditional means of "soft power" such as broadcasts and news and information materials. "They not only embody national values and norms, but also … they are capable of interacting and engaging in interpersonal dialogue," he wrote in an e-mail.

The U.S. State Department created the envoy program in 2006 to get prominent Americans from business, sports, academia, non-government organizations, and community and religious groups involved in the country's public diplomacy efforts.

Alongside the program, the U.S. Government has held sports-related events for young people in the Middle East where negative public opinion of the United States is very high. It sent a wrestling team to Iran last year and hosted women's soccer coaches from Afghanistan and baseball players and coaches from Venezuela.

With China, the Bush administration has had a woo-and-spurn relationship. On the one hand, it continues to uphold the one-China policy, relies on the country's cheap imports and disapproves calls to boycott the 2008 Beijing Olympics. On the other hand, it has criticized China for its involvement in Sudan and the safety of Made-in-China products sold in the United States. The United States angered China in October when it gave a Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award given by American lawmakers, to the Dalai Lama.

One-sided efforts

Snow pointed out that sport diplomacy exchanges between the United States and China died down after a disgraced Nixon left office. Afterwards, Jimmy Carter's foreign policy program centered on human rights, prompting him to call for the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan the previous year. The Soviets reciprocated by boycotting the 1984 Los Angeles Games. None of the presidents who followed Carter had a government-sponsored sports diplomacy program until George W. Bush, Snow said.

So far, such efforts between the United States and China have been one-sided. Lewis said he has seen no evidence of government-sponsored Chinese sports diplomacy in the United States.

In general, China's public diplomatic efforts focus on promoting peaceful development and Chinese language and culture abroad. In late 2004, for example, the government started opening Confucius Institutes around the world to teach Mandarin and enhance the understanding of Chinese culture.

In recent years, China has used sports diplomacy to court countries closer to home. Relations between China and Japan, for example, chilled after former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi made several visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors World War II war criminals. The two countries relied on ping-pong diplomacy to break the ice in April 2006, when a group of Japanese table tennis pros reunited with their Chinese rivals in Beijing to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1956 world table tennis championship in Tokyo. Chinese State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan, who met the group, said he hoped that that sport exchanges between the two countries would put the countries' relations back on track, according to a People's Daily report at the time.

"The sport exchanges have made delightful outcomes and played a positive role in promoting mutual understanding and friendship between the two peoples since the normalization of bilateral relations," Tang said.

Liu Yongtao, an associate professor specializing in international relations and American foreign policy at Shanghai-based Fudan University, said, "Both China and the United States as major powers now face the challenges of how to improve their image-making respectively in the world. Sports as an instrument in cultural form may help to do it positively."

On a larger scale, China is preoccupied with the 2008 Beijing Games next August, a sport diplomacy event of global proportions. With it, Chinese sports diplomacy missions conducted farther from home could gain more ground.

"China may correspond actively to U.S. ‘sport diplomacy' and may work out its own one [if] Beijing is to make the 2008 Olympic Games a platform for the world to know China as well as China to know the world," Liu said in an e-mail.

With a new administration coming into office after the 2008 U.S. presidential election, it's anyone's guess what will happen to Washington's public envoy program.

"If there are some signs next year that this program has helped to soften America's image, you might very well see the program continue and receive even more support," Snow said.