SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA—No longer a mystery, China ceremoniously presents itself to the world Friday, Aug. 8 when the Olympic Games start in Beijing.

And to think that it would have been impossible for the Chinese capital to host the greatest sports show on earth— were it not for a sporting event in 1971 that changed the course of world history.

Is the term ping-pong diplomacy coming back to you now?

It was a table tennis team, not a dialogue of high-powered diplomats that is credited with relaxing old tensions between the United States and China four decades ago, and reestablishing diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Anyway, the Bamboo Curtain began to part on April 6, 1971.

On that day in history, Chinese Premier Chou En-lai, in Japan for the 31st World Tennis Championships, invited the US national table tennis players that competed in Nagoya to an all-expense paid trip to China.

The invitation was accepted and on April 10, 1971, the American team, with 10 journalists in tow—crossed from Hong Kong into Mainland China—becoming the first official American visitors to enter the country in 22 years.

What the world read and saw in the news for eight days—Chinese and American athletes, together for the first time in almost a quarter of a century, having fun playing table tennis—paved the way 10 months later in February 1972 for Richard Nixon’s historic trip to China.

Nixon became the first American president to visit that country, melting what until then were icy, often antagonistic relations between Washington and Beijing.

That presidential sojourn revived a country cut off from the West since 1949—when Mao Zedong declared it the People’s Republic of China—and awakened a sleeping giant that has emerged as an economic superpower today.

Also 37 years later—diplomacy by sports through ping-pong that reopened China’s doors to the rest of the world will culminate this Friday with the opening of the 29th edition of the modern Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.

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It is not nice to fool with Mother Nature, goes a not so Chinese saying.

But China has been tinkering with the weather since the 1950s to bring rain to its northern desert provinces.

On Friday, Chinese meteorologists will try to do the opposite, according to published reports.

They will make sure it does not rain on Beijing’s parade—literally—when 10,708 athletes from 205 countries, including the 15-member Philippine delegation, march for a global television audience.

The dazzling ceremonies will be held at the 91,000-seat Olympic Stadium nicknamed “the bird’s nest.”

The Chinese are experts in “weather modification” but are more adept at creating rain, not preventing it.

Cloud-seeding techniques both in making and preventing a downpour are the same—shooting substances such as silver iodide, salts and dry ice into clouds.

The Chinese, this time, hope that in case a downpour threatens on Friday, they can reduce the size of raindrops to forestall rain over the roofless “Bird’s Nest” to preserve what has been planned and billed as a spectacular opening of the $42-billion Beijing Olympics.