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This article explores how table tennis became recognized as the dominant Chinese national sport (and recreational pastime) during a brief period of time between the founding of the People’s Republic of China (hereafter PRC) in 1949 and the early 1960s. The sport gained the PRC leadership’s attention due to the efforts of Ivor Montagu, a British communist and the influential president of the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) whose repeated invitations encouraged PRC officials of the National Sport Commission to allocate more resources to table tennis. Rong Guotuan’s unexpected 1959 victory at the World Table Tennis Championship further convinced the PRC’s sports leadership to champion the game as China’s  national sport  and thereby, strategically sidestep the ‘Two Chinas’ issue. We situate this particular story within the well-established literature on the development of national sports and sporting traditions. Through some selective, comparative analysis between the development of table tennis as the preferred national sport in China with baseball as the established American national pastime we maintain that while these two national trajectories were quite different, they both involved a myriad of  connected  personal histories and unintended consequences which only make sense within a global sport history.

Without a Red Leader’s Fan: A Connected History of the Emergence of Table Tennis as China’s National Sport