According To Chairman Mao

On a recent afternoon at Chu Yun Kuan, 40 miles outside of Peking, an 18-year-old from Englewood, Colo. unlimbered his tennis racket and began swatting balls against the Great Wall of China. The bounces were pretty erratic and the watching Chinese tourists were obviously amused, but no more so than John Benson. "Maybe I'm the first to use the Great Wall of China as a bang-board," he said, grinning. "Did Marco Polo ever do that?"

Certainly Benson, runner-up in the U.S. Junior championships last summer, and his teammates—pros Stan Smith, Tom Gorman, Valerie Ziegenfuss and Mona Guerrant and collegians Anne Smith, Larry Gottfried and Sherry Acker—were the first Americans in decades to play tennis against the Chinese. Before Chairman Mao established the People's Republic in 1949—and even before Kenny Rosewall's first tournament victory—the U.S. Davis Cup team of Don Budge, Bitsy Grant and Gene Mako beat China in the first round at Mexico City in 1935. However, China hasn't competed in the Davis Cup since 1946, and the only Chinese player of note, Kho Sin Kie, who won the British Hard Court titles in 1938-39, died in 1947. With Kho's death, and Mao's rise, the game seemed to have perished on the mainland, although a couple of Chinese did show up for a cup of tea at Wimbledon in 1959.

The American tennis contingent that arrived in China in October had read about the Great Wall, the Ming tombs ("This graveyard would make a terrific underground tennis club," said Gorman, appraising the crypts) and delicacies such as shark fins, duck brains and sea slugs, which sent them literally sprinting for a McDonald's in Hong Kong the day the tour concluded. What they didn't expect to find in China were relatively high-caliber tennis players—especially women. None of the Americans was prepared for Ch'en Chuan, 19, a nimble six-foot accountant who appeared to be as powerful as Margaret Court, or quick and pretty Yu Li-chi'ao, another 19-year-old who works in an electromagnet factory and won sets from each of the American women except Guerrant.

Yu, who holds the national women's title, athough she's been at the game only four years, is not even a household name in Wu Ch'ang, where her parents live. Everybody knows how good the Chinese are at Ping-Pong, but tennis is about as prevalent in the People's Republic as the Sayings of Mao are in Orange County. All told, China has a few hundred courts (perhaps more than 50 of them in the hotbed, Shanghai) and possibly 10,000 players. Considering the game's ancestry as a diversion for rich folks, it is perhaps more remarkable that tennis survived the Revolution and the Cultural Revolution. In pre-Mao days, hundreds of courts, most of them at private residences and clubs, dotted Shanghai alone, where tennis was enjoyed by affluent Chinese and foreigners.

Now the courts are public, of course. The playing fee is 15� a court for four hours. Nevertheless, tennis remains expensive by Chinese standards. In a country where $30 is a common monthly wage, a racket costs $8, and balls—surprisingly, good old colonial white—are $3.50 a can. No problem in selecting equipment: there's only one racket available, the wooden domestically manufactured Aeroplane, patterned after the Dunlop Fort, and one brand of balls, also Aeroplane, which "sometimes go into a tailspin and crash-land," says Gorman.

Apparently three men, all government officials, have been instrumental in nursing the game along, and reviving it after the Cultural Revolution, when the national championships were not held: Mu Tso-yun, 64, an assistant basketball coach at Springfield (Mass.) College before World War II and head of the Chinese Tennis Federation since 1953; Mei Fu-chi, director of tennis in Shanghai; and Chu Cheng-hua, the national coach. Mu, who initiated the invitation for the U.S. team, says, "We have plans to build more courts and encourage more tennis, especially among the young, and we invited the Americans to come so we could learn from them." Jan Carol Berris of New York, a leader of the tour that was overseen by the National Committee for U.S. China Relations, says, "We were astounded when the Chinese asked us for a tennis delegation. But we've learned that this is one of the signs of a general loosening up. Tennis had been considered bourgeois by some in power."

Mei and Chu, a couple of portly 49-year-olds who were permitted to enter Wimbledon 18 years ago, were the best male players produced by the People's Republic. As coaches, they are responsible for the startlingly good crop of present-day Chinese players.

Good, of course, is relative. "There are some prospects here," says Dick Gould, the Stanford coach in charge of the U.S. men's team. "Particularly those two girls Yu and Cheng, who could play college tennis at the upper level in the States. I thought it might be a little embarrassing when I heard we'd be playing against their national teams, that we might have to pull our punches.

"The tour consisted of seven engagements composed of two-set matches in Shanghai, Peking and Canton. They kept it interesting, and our kids had to hustle. Their top men, Hsu Mei-lin and Wang Fu-chang, aren't as impressive as the two women, because they're both over 30 and won't improve much. But the players we saw volleyed and moved very well and liked to attack. I like that." Coach Chu does, too. reporting, "Chairman Mao said, 'Attack is the best defense.' "

"What I'm not sure about is how competitive they are," Gould says. "We keep hearing them say, 'Yu-i-Ti-i, Pi-sai Ti-erh'—friendship first, competition second—and they seem to genuinely mean it. I'm not putting that down. It's great—but tennis is a very competitive game if you're going to move up."