Bi-champion of Grand Slams in women’s doubles tournaments (at Wimbledon-2013 and Roland Garros-2014, both alongside Taiwanese Hsieh Su-wei), Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, 35, published this week a text in which she accused Zhang Gaoli, former deputy prime minister of the country and former top member of the Communist Party of China, of sexual assault.
The report, posted on Chinese social network Weibo, was quickly taken down, and comments on the matter are being censored on Chinese websites.
Peng claimed that he first had sex with Zhang (75, deputy prime minister of dictator Xi Jinping between 2013 and 2018) more than ten years ago, when he was a Communist Party leader in the city of Tianjin. They had no further contact after Zhang left for Beijing, where he took up a post on the Politburo, the party’s executive committee.
But recently, according to the account, Peng was invited to play tennis at the communist leader’s home in Beijing. After being taken to the residence, the tennis player was allegedly coerced into having sex with the politician, but she did not give in to pressure. After a dinner with Zhang and his wife, the communist leader reportedly resumed the harassment, and the sexual assault allegedly occurred.
“I don’t have evidence, and it’s been impossible to leave any evidence… You were always afraid I would bring something like a tape recorder, to record evidence or something… There’s no audio recording, no video recording, just my experience distorted but very real,” Peng wrote, addressing Zhang.
Reports with the hashtag of the MeToo movement already had great repercussions in China, but they had never involved a high leader of the communist dictatorship – so the censorship was much more intense.
According to information from CNN, Peng’s Weibo post was deleted less than half an hour after publication, last Tuesday (2). Although many followers of the tennis player took screenshots of the report, they were also excluded from social networks and private chat groups. Peng’s Weibo account had the comment sections in previous posts blocked.
Also according to CNN, the page of the South Korean soap opera “The Prime Minister and Me” on a Chinese film site was censored after users discussed the case in the review section. Searches on sites with the name of the tennis player were also curtailed.
It was the second case of censorship by a sportsman in China in less than a month. In October, Tencent’s streaming service stopped showing live games or VTs of matches for the Boston Celtics, the major league basketball team, the NBA, in response to pivotal Enes Kanter’s criticism of Xi Jinping and in defense of the freedom of Tibet.
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