Is North Korean visit martial arts diplomacy?

Kari Huus Reporter • Profile • E-mail

In a visit already drawing comparisons to the "ping pong diplomacy" between the U.S. and China in the 1970s, a team of North Korean masters of the martial art tae kwon do is expected to arrive in Los Angeles on Thursday for an unprecedented 13-day American tour.

In Los Angeles, the 18 North Koreans are expected to be joined by American and South Korean practitioners of the ancient Korean combat art in a three-hour performance. They also will spend the day hobnobbing at the quintessentially American institution, Warner Brothers Studios, before traveling to San Francisco; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Louisville, Ky.; and Atlanta.

All that assumes that the North Koreans actually arrive at Los Angeles International Airport as scheduled, something the organizers of the tour — the Tae Kwon Do Times of Cedar Rapids, Iowa—have discovered should not be taken for granted. A tour by the tae kwon do masters last year was canceled at the eleventh hour when the U.S. refused to issue travel visas for the troupe, presumably because North Korea had just tested a nuclear bomb.

But Brian Heckart, the magazine’s business manager, is optimistic they will make it this time, having received word that the team members are in Beijing and have visas in hand. Still, he cautioned, “It’s never 100 percent until they land in the United States.”

If the shows go on as planned, viewers will have no difficulty appreciating the tae kwon do masters’ gravity-defying leaps and brick-busting kicks. But for North Korea watchers, the political acrobatics going on in the background are every bit as spectacular.

“The U.S. has been allowing North Koreans in — quietly and for different reasons,” Clark Sorenson, a professor of Korean Studies at the University of Washington, said of the visit. “But for the North Koreans to release 18 tae kwon do people is a pretty big deal.”

Shades of 'ping pong diplomacy'
Some observers are comparing the tour to another sports event that became part of diplomatic history 35 years ago. 

The tour has “echoes of the ‘ping pong diplomacy’ with China in the 1970s,” wrote Timothy Savage, deputy director of the Seoul branch of the Nautilus Institute for Stability and Security, in a posting on the Web site North Korea Zone.

Time Life Pictures / Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image The cover of the April 26, 1971, issue of Time magazine features the U.S national ping pong team posing on the Great Wall of China.

The famous U.S.-Chinese table-tennis matches in Beijing in 1971, quietly approved by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, turned out to be a vehicle for the isolated Communist giant to begin opening its doors to the West. It helped pave the way for a secret meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Chinese leader Mao Zedong and the celebrated 1972 visit to China by President Richard Nixon. A decade of cultural exchange followed, along with gradual loosening of trade restrictions, before Washington and Beijing re-established formal diplomatic ties in 1982.

The accuracy of the comparison will only become clear in hindsight. Technically, the United States and ally South Korea remain at war with North Korea. Pyongyang’s military has been arrayed against U.S. and South Korean forces at the 38^th parallel since 1953, when the Korean War ended with an armistice but not a truce. Travel by North Koreans to the United States is banned except on a case-by-case basis.

In the absence of diplomatic ties between Washington and Pyongyang, the only North Korean officials living in the country are representatives to the United Nations. They are rarely allowed to travel outside a 25-mile perimeter surrounding U.N. headquarters in New York.

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