Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations

In 1971, Americans made two historic visits to China that would transform relations between the two countries. One was by US official Henry Kissinger; the other, earlier, visit was by the US table tennis team. Historians have pored over the transcripts of Kissinger's negotiations with Chinese leaders. However, they have overlooked how, alongside these diplomatic talks, a rich program of travel and exchange had begun with ping-pong diplomacy. Pete Millwood’s book Improbable Diplomats reveals how a diverse cast of Chinese and Americans – athletes and physicists, performing artists and seismologists – played a critical, but to date overlooked, role in remaking US-China relations. Based on new sources from more than a dozen archives in China and the United States, he argues that the significance of cultural and scientific exchanges went beyond reacquainting the Chinese and American people after two decades of minimal contact; exchanges also powerfully influenced Sino-American diplomatic relations and helped transform post-Mao China.

About the Speaker
Pete Millwood is Lecturer in East Asian history at the University of Melbourne. His first book Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2022), was recently released in paperback. He received his PhD from Oxford, has taught at Tsinghua and the London School of Economics, and held fellowships at Peking University, the Library of Congress, and HKU’s Society of Fellows. He was recently awarded a 2025 ARC DECRA fellowship for his second book project.

The ANU China Seminar Series is supported by the Australian Centre on China in the World at ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.