Role in Diplomacy
Unlike the organisations for more popular sports, the ITTF tends to recognise teams from generally unrecognised governing bodies for disputed territory. For example, it currently recognises the Table Tennis Federation of Kosovo even though Kosovo is excluded from most other sports. It recognised the People's Republic of China in 1953 and allowed some basic diplomacy which lead to an opening for U.S. President Richard Nixon, called "Ping Pong Diplomacy", in the early 1970s.
Read more about this topic: International Table Tennis Federation
Famous quotes containing the words role and/or diplomacy:
“Women’s battle for financial equality has barely been joined, much less won. Society still traditionally assigns to woman the role of money-handler rather than money-maker, and our assigned specialty is far more likely to be home economics than financial economics.”
—Paula Nelson (b. 1945)
“The diplomacy of the present administration has sought to respond to the modern idea of commercial intercourse. This policy has been characterized as substituting dollars for bullets.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)