Lasting impact

The first US table tennis delegation arrived in China in April 1971, for the icebreaking visit that helped boost the launch of bilateral diplomatic ties.

At that moment, Jan Berris had been in her position at the US consulate in Hong Kong for just two years "as a very junior consular official working on cultural affairs". However, she said she knew that "the event would have repercussions on the US and China as well as the rest of the world".

"But I had no idea that it would have such a huge impact on my own life," said Berris, who is now vice-president of the National Committee on US-China Relations, a nonprofit organization and advisory body founded in 1966 to encourage understanding and cooperation between the two nations.

When she returned to the US the month after the historic visit, two of her former professors at the University of Michigan asked if she would consider working at the committee based in New York.

The committee was then preparing to co-host with the US Table Tennis Association the visit of the Chinese ping-pong team to the US.

"My professors were on the board of the national committee and they felt that my diplomatic experience, brief as it was, would be helpful," Berris said.

She said she was not quite sure that she really wanted to live in a big city as "it was formidable".

"Actually, my undecided state was resolved by another major announcement that was made just a few months later, when President Richard Nixon went on national television and announced that Dr Henry Kissinger had made a secret visit to China," she explained.

One of the results of that visit was the Chinese ping-pong team's visit to the US in April of 1972.

"That helped me make my decision," Berris said. The next day, she asked the US State Department if she could work on the planning for the Chinese team's visit.

What began with a small ping-pong ball — slowly at first, and then in leaps and bounds — grew into a "broad and eventually very deep" network of relations between the two countries in every profession, and every field imaginable that brought all levels in the two societies together, she said.

"Now, a lot of people ask me how I can work in the same job for 55 years. But for me it has been easy, because I love my job," she said.

The first exchanges and the visits of the two ping-pong teams, with the hundreds and thousands of exchanges that followed, "serve to help people from both countries humanize the other" side, she said.