THE young man looked strange. In fact, as he climbed by mistake onto the Chinese table-tennis team's bus at the world championships in Japan, in April 1971, he was one of the oddest creatures Zhuang Zedong had ever seen. His pinkish Western skin was framed by brown hair that curled to his shoulders. His goofy grin seemed fixed, naively and nervously, to his face. And when he turned round - for there were no seats, and he was standing facing a bus of crop-haired, staring Chinese - the letters on the back of his training suit read, large as life, "USA." The imperialist enemy, thought Mr Zhuang at once. Never to be spoken to, approached or touched. So he had been taught from the age of nine, when his doctor-father had first tried to build up his frail legs by making him do sports. Imperialist lackeys should be defeated savagely but deftly, as he himself despatched opponents with a blizzard of attacking forehand shots all over the table. No one would be better than himself, world champion in 1961, 1963 and 1965, feared equally for his kung-fu-punching backhand, to inflict such a thrashing. Chairman Mao, as ever, had said it best: imagine the ping-pong ball as the head of your capitalist opponent, and each shot a point for the motherland. He was all the less inclined to approach this American stranger because his own political situation was delicate. In 1966, during the Cultural Revolution, when he was 26 and a star - when the struggling, marching Chinese people stopped work and gathered round the radio to listen to his matches - table tennis was suddenly banned as bourgeois. He and the rest of the national team were denounced for wanting to win too much and for accumulating capitalist trinkets, like his Swiss watch. For a while he had become a counter-revolutionary, joining Liu Shaoqi's anti-Mao "black gang," but then he had made a public apology and had been allowed, gradually, to start training again. His coach and two team-mates, who refused to apologise, had been declared traitors and had hanged themselves. Mr Zhuang was more flexible. The essence of his playing style was a penhold grip on the bat, index finger and thumb circling the handle, to give the wrist maximum movement and to return any shot at dazzling speed, no matter how acutely angled. He thought it shrewder - though he was sorry for it later - swiftly to acknowledge where the centre of power lay in revolutionary China, and to adjust to what Mao wanted. Sitting on the bus, he was already well on the way to organising mass-denunciation meetings, hobnobbing with Mao's wife, becoming sports minister and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Building the new China was now his principal goal, and his table tennis was useful because it inspired the masses to know that their country, barred from almost every world sport, could win at something. On the other hand, the awkward American on the bus was just a player like himself. Quite a good one, too: Glenn Cowan, from Santa Monica, though Mr Zhuang was not sure of the name at the time. Not least, he was a human being. Fumbling among the Mao badges in his bag, he found a silk scarf printed with a picture of the Yellow Mountain of Huangshan and presented it to the American with some words, through an interpreter, about friendship. Cowan, having found nothing but a comb (for those luxuriant locks) to give him in return, handed him the next day a typically Californian T-shirt with a peace emblem and the words "Let it Be." So started ping-pong diplomacy. Mao saw the photos of the two of them, grinning broadly, getting off the bus together, and immediately invited the American team to China. During that visit America lifted its 20-year trade embargo, and in February 1972 Richard Nixon visited China, the first American president to do so in Communist times. To please Mao, who thought he was so good at it, Mr Zhuang continued to play the sportsman-diplomat, telling puzzled Westerners that victory and defeat were much the same, since life and death always went together. Most important, everyone kept smiling. Both leaders credited ping-pong for the change, with Mao declaring that a tiny ball had moved the great ball of the Earth. Up, down and round The turning of the Earth, though, also brought disgrace after Mao's death in 1976 to those, like Mr Zhuang, who had cosied up to him. Stripped of his official posts, he was made to sweep streets and spent nine years in confinement. This "self-examination" did not include table tennis, from which he was banned again. Instead, he took up calligraphy and reading until, in 1985, he was allowed back to Beijing to teach his sport to children. It had all been very up and down, he reflected. But then China, too, had been up and down, and had come through triumphantly with thrusting new cities and soaring prosperity, taking on the world and even hosting the Olympics. Yes, he had played his part in that rise, though he was only a ping-pong player whose main skill was to keep the ball on the table. He was still glad he had trusted Mao rather than his friends; and also glad that he had been bold enough, in 1971, to talk to that long-haired fellow on the bus.