Last week, Chinese professional tennis player, Peng Shuai, posted online about her relationship with a high-ranking Chinese official. Shuai says the relationship ended with a sexual assault. That post was taken down minutes after it went live. You couldn’t search the name ‘Peng Shuai’ due to China’s strict censorship. You couldn’t even search the word ‘tennis’. Full lockdown mode to keep this info in-house.
Here’s a little more detail:
Peng, 35, wrote that Zhang Gaoli, a former vice premier and member of the ruling Communist Party’s all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee, had forced her to have sex despite repeated refusals following a round of tennis three years ago. She said Zhang’s wife guarded the door during the incident.
This all went down on November 2nd. 15 days later and no one has seen Shuai. However, there was an email from her account today not only stating that she’s fine but also retracting her claim that she was sexually assaulted.
I am not the guy who believes any and all Chinese government propaganda that they are some overlords who control every aspect of their citizens’ lives. Fortunately, I live in a country where you can accuse presidents of sexual assault and everyone puts more energy into discrediting the victims than they do in discovering whether or not those events actually occurred.
So yea, Peng Shuai definitely did not go missing and then 15 days later was like ‘lol nevermind. my bad. lol’. That’s not how this works. She is a 35-year old adult woman. She did not make a mistake when she called out her attacker. That girl gone.
Tennis is such a strange unsafe sport for women. Whether it’s people not respecting your need to protect your mental health or inappropriate racist rhetoric towards them or the Chinese government kidnaps you or you get fucking STABBED ON THE COURT.
There is no country for women tennis players.
