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ChinaNov 27th 2021 edition

Chaguan
What Peng Shuai reveals about one-party rule

When a tennis star accuses a grandee of assault, China has no answer

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Nov 24th 2021

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IT IS HARD to see a good ending to the story of Peng Shuai, a Chinese
tennis champion who on November 2nd accused a former Communist Party
grandee more than twice her age of subjecting her to a coercive
sexual relationship. In theory, the party deplores all immorality in
office. When it suits the regime, propaganda outlets denounce purged
officials for keeping mistresses as well as taking bribes. But
China's rulers care still more about asserting their authority, and
their exclusive right to decide which rotten corners of their system
to expose and which to keep hidden.

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Ms Peng, who is 35, was doomed from the moment she posted her
late-night essay. In it she accuses a former member of the party's
most powerful body, the Politburo Standing Committee, of imposing
unwanted sex on her during an on-off decade-long affair. It is not
the writing of an anti-party dissident. It is personal, even
anguished in tone. It is filled with appeals to her alleged abuser,
Zhang Gaoli, a former deputy prime minister in his mid-70s, as well
as to her 588,000 followers on Weibo, a social-media platform. She
notes that she left her family as a young child to enter intense
sports training, and calls herself "extremely deprived of love". She
also describes herself as a "very bad woman" but insists that she
never took money from Mr Zhang. Nor did she try to collect evidence
of their liaison, she adds, though she recalls his paranoia about
secret recording devices.

Only a small minority of Chinese saw her essay, which was deleted
within half an hour. Then censors moved to suppress discussion of it.
Within the Great Firewall of censorship, online searches for Ms Peng
or Mr Zhang pull up old news stories, with their comments functions
disabled. It is difficult to estimate how many Chinese know of her
allegations. It is clear that a large number do not.

The fate of Ms Peng could yet become grimmer. Other women have been
punished harshly for challenging much less powerful men. When #MeToo
campaigns emerged in China in 2018, feminist groups at universities
were closed down and activists detained. True, some academics accused
of gross abuses were fired. Sexual harassment was added to the
country's civil code. But to preserve the party's grip on power,
several women who went public with complaints were also crushed. When
Zhou Xiaoxuan, a former intern at China Central Television, the main
state network, accused a star presenter of groping her, police in
Beijing initially urged her to drop the complaints for the sake of
society, and for that of her parents' jobs in the public sector. In
September Ms Zhou lost her suit against the presenter.

Sporting fame has given Ms Peng's case a double existence: censorship
at home and intense attention overseas. After the Women's Tennis
Association (WTA), her sport's America-based governing body, said it
had tried and failed for days to reach her by telephone, text or web
message, champions including Serena Williams, Naomi Osaka and Novak
Djokovic expressed worry about her safety, as did several
governments. In Beijing, the embassies of France and the European
Union, among others, aired concerns.

In a bid to kill the story overseas, Chinese media outlets took to
platforms such as Twitter, which are blocked inside China. This has
not gone well. International alarm was fuelled, not soothed, by an
English-language tweet on November 18th from CGTN, China's
international television network. It claimed to show an email in
which Ms Peng disowned her claims of sexual assault and said she was
not missing, but "resting at home". The editor of Global Times, a
party tabloid that is a favoured outlet for exclusives from
state-security services, tweeted in English that foreign media should
stop speculating that Ms Peng is in danger for accusing Mr Zhang of,
as he coyly put it, "the thing that people talked about". His tabloid
then tweeted what looked like staged videos of Ms Peng having dinner
at a restaurant with her coach and meeting children at a tennis
event.

Double fault

Ms Peng's case is revealing. Protected by a monopoly at home, Chinese
propagandists struggle in foreign markets which enjoy competition in
ideas. They have become reliant on stoking nationalism among the
Chinese public and blaming all ills on hostile foreign forces. This
time, because Ms Peng cannot be spoken of at home, jingoistic
reinforcements are not available. The strain showed on November 20th
when a commentator for CGTN accused foreigners of racism for
demanding evidence of Ms Peng's safety. "Funny how some in the West
feel people in China should be at their beck and call. Just another
form of white male entitlement and privilege?" the commentator
tweeted--a charge that might puzzle supporters like Ms Williams and Ms
Osaka.

China remains skilled at using market power to browbeat foreigners.
On November 21st Ms Peng spoke by video to officials at the
International Olympic Committee (IOC). Olympic bosses said that the
tennis player seemed well, while failing to address the reason why
she might not be well, namely her assault allegations against a
former Chinese leader. With the Winter Olympics opening in Beijing in
February, the IOC and corporate sponsors have multi-billion-dollar
reasons to help China make the Peng Shuai story go away. Therein lies
a bleak lesson. The WTA has been brave in challenging China, given
that it has organised lucrative tournaments there. But as a women's
sports association, it depends on retaining the confidence of women
players. Sometimes there are incentives larger than China's market.

The silencing of Ms Peng does not just expose the ruthless,
self-serving nature of one-party rule. It shows how reliance on China
saps the ability of outsiders to stand up for individual rights.
There is no evidence that Ms Peng wrote her essay for foreign eyes.
But thanks to Chinese censorship, foreigners have ended up as her
only witnesses. The world will draw lessons about the true nature of
the party from her fate. #

Read more from Chaguan, our columnist on China:
Talks between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden do not herald a thaw (Nov 20th
2021)
China will stick to a zero-covid policy, for now (Nov 13th 2021)
The confidence of China's Communist Party is striking (Oct 23rd 2021)

This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under
the headline "The silencing of a tennis star"

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