This chapter reveals the popular origins of the Nixon-Mao summit. It argues that people-to-people diplomacy and nonstate actors made a fundamental contribution to the beginning of Sino-American rapprochement in 1971. Private US organizations – chief among them the National Committee on US-China Relations – helped change American minds about the need for engagement with the People’s Republic of China. Thereafter, people-to-people interactions were the first means by which direct contact between China and the United States resumed—through ping-pong diplomacy but also a raft of other 1971 visits by American scientists, students, and ideologically-motivated travelers. This chapter also analyzes the impression formed of China by some of the first American visitors to the country since the Cultural Revolution. It concludes with the negotiations over the structure of the exchange program that took place between the Chinese government and US state and nonstate actors in 1971 and 1972, including during the Nixon–Mao summit of February 1972.

The visit by the US table tennis team to China in April 1971 famously helped break the ice between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United States. Less well known is the second leg of ping-pong diplomacy, in which the US and Chinese teams faced off again – in the United States. This was nonetheless an historic exchange: The Chinese team was the first official delegation of visitors from the PRC to ever visit the United States. This chapter shows how this successful sporting exchange helped transform Nixon and Mao’s secret diplomacy into a broader rapprochement between Chinese and US societies. It reveals how the success of the ping-pong return leg underpinned the successful effort by the hosts of the table tennis players – the National Committee on US-China Relations – to convince both the US and Chinese governments to recognize their organization and their allies at the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC as the foremost US conduits for managing exchanges with China. The chapter concludes with a connected development: the 1973 creation of a third private US organization to manage Sino-American societal interactions, the National Council for United States-China Trade.