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Japanese, Chinese table tennis veterans revisit past in Beijing+(Japan Economic Newswire Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)BEIJING, April 2_(Kyodo) _ Japanese and Chinese table tennis veterans from the 1956 world championships played exhibition matches in Beijing on Sunday to mark the 50th anniversary of the competition held in Tokyo. In a recording for a television program, Japan's Keisuke Tsunoda and China's Wang Chuanyao -- both now in their 70s -- played against each other and reflected on their meeting half a century ago. "In 1956, the Chinese team was not very strong and did not do very well," Tsunoda said. "But I remember being surprised later because the Chinese team quickly improved, doing very well the next year." The 1956 championships were the first international table tennis event China took part in after the 1949 Communist revolution. Chinese players now dominate the sport at international competitions. Qiu Zhonghui, China's first female world table tennis champion, noted the changes since the 1956 competition, saying that while a flight from Beijing to Tokyo now takes less than four hours, at that time the Chinese team had to make a stopover in Hong Kong for a trip that took about eight hours. A group of more than 30 Japanese, including former players and members of Japan's table tennis association, is visiting Beijing for a three-day event that will also include a meeting with State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan. The event comes at a time when ordinary diplomatic relations between Japan and China are at their lowest ebb since their normalization in 1972, mainly due to Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to the war-linked Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. China has bitterly complained about Koizumi's shrine visits, saying they show Japan does not truly repent its wartime atrocities. U.S. table tennis players from the "ping pong diplomacy" era are also visiting China from late March to mark the 35th anniversary of an event that helped thaw relations between China and the United States, according to Chinese media. Seven of the original players in the U.S. team are on a 10-day stay in Chinese cities that also features exhibition matches and discussions. The 1971 visit by the U.S. team, the first by an "official" group of Americans to China after the Communist revolution, paved the way for diplomacy and helped realize a visit to China by then U.S. President Richard Nixon the following year. |