It’s now less than a year till the Olympics in Beijing, and we’ve just brought out a double issue of Guanxi: The China Letter that focuses on the business aspects of the Games. The Olympics organizers have a regular newsletter now that’s worth reading and we’ll be recommending blogs and other sources of information as the Games get closer. Here’s a recent newsletter.

As a new member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, I was glad to have a chance to do some research into the National Committee’s role in Ping-Pong diplomacy, something I’m not quite old enough to remember and that our young staff had never heard of. For those who don’t know or remember, in 1971, Ping-Pong—the “ping heard round the world”— helped to create the first person-to-person, and then diplomatic, ties between two Cold War enemies: China and the United States. Here’s the article itself, the story of Ping-Pong diplomacy and interviews with people who were involved at the time, from the July-August double issue of Guanxi: The China Letter.