US film producer captures China's path of growth

Your Serve or Mine, his 2025 documentary, was about the history of Ping-Pong Diplomacy in the 1970s that helped lay the groundwork for the normalization of US-China relations. The era demonstrated the power of personal contact between people to build bridges.

In that spirit of cooperation, he believes that the coming summit between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping in Washington, DC is a good step in continuing communication between the world's two largest economies.

"Today some commentators say that the relationship between America and China is bad. Well, I remember when there was no relationship at all. So, in that sense, it's definitely an improvement. I think the key is listening to understand what is being said, because sometimes that goes beyond the words."

He recalls fondly what he dubs the "incredible accident" involving American ping-pong player Glenn Cowan at the 1971 World Table Tennis Championship in Nagoya, Japan.

He missed his team bus and mistakenly boarded the Chinese national team's bus. And even though he didn't speak Chinese and the Chinese athletes didn't speak English, the three-time world champion ping-pong player Zhuang Zedong found a way to communicate with him through an interpreter.

When Cowan got off the bus at the competition, he was seen smiling and shaking hands with Zhuang, who had presented him with a Yellow Mountain silk weaving art piece on April 4, 1971.

"Well, this is news," Einreinhofer remembers people thinking at the time. Journalists took countless photos of the two players and those images were widely circulated worldwide.

After the US accepted an invitation to travel to China and play exhibition matches against the Chinese team, it put in motion the start of the two countries beginning to connect and speak to each other. It was a big step forward, as there were no diplomatic ties and few contacts between the US and China after 1949.

"In the early 1970s, that was an era when, yes, America and China had no relationship, period," he adds. "And in public, there was this profound disagreement about virtually everything. But what the public didn't know, in fact, what many people in the government didn't know, is that the leadership in China and the leadership in the United States really wanted to talk to each other, but they couldn't ind out a way to do it."

US president Richard Nixon's historic trip to China in February 1972 made him the first sitting US president to travel there. Along with Henry Kissinger, then assistant to the president for national security affairs, Nixon met Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai, a major step toward normalization between the two nations.

"Personally, I believe in the importance of people-to-people diplomacy," Einreinhofer said. "They provide a back channel, if you will, for communication, for things you can't necessarily say in front of the cameras, under the bright lights. Ideas you can try out, questions that may be a little forward.

"And as much as I think it is important for our leaders to meet, I would hope that the leaders also have an opportunity to meet some of their fellow countrymen who have been to this other place, who have specialized in this other place, to hear the story they have to tell, because there is wisdom in those stories, and often it helps us look beyond the very real differences that we have," he said.