Has Peng Shuai Suffered Sexual Abuse? She herself speaks again of a misunderstanding.
Photo: AFP / Fred Dufour
The new statements by the Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai are strongly reminiscent of a scene from the slapstick classic »The Naked Gun«. In it, a crowd of onlookers watched a burning family house, whose tiled roof blew up in dozens of explosions. But Police Inspector Frank Drebin, played by Leslie Nielsen, just stands in front of the mob, waves, and calls dead serious: “Please go on, there’s nothing to see here!”
This is exactly the message the Chinese athlete is now trying to convey. In an interview with the French newspaper »L’Equipe«, she spoke to an independent western medium for the first time since the beginning of the cause. But her statements are more than strange: Peng Shuai says she has never made allegations against a member of the Politburo for sexual abuse. This is a “misunderstanding”. Even more: she deleted her censored post herself, and she has by no means disappeared. “Why this concern?” asks the 35-year-old.
The answer lies in what happened: In December, the athlete reported in detail on an affair with Zhang Gaoli, the country’s former deputy prime minister, in a post on the online platform Weibo. “You played with me and when you didn’t want me anymore you threw me away,” Peng wrote. The text gave a deep insight into a world in which an older, high-ranking political cadres are manipulating a young athlete and keeping her as a mistress. However, only one sentence in the text is relevant under criminal law, which some media took to mean an allegation of rape. In fact, critics complain, these media have ignored linguistic nuances: whether Peng Shuai’s statements mean that she was “pushed” or “forced” into sex is disputed even among native speakers.
The fact is, however: Peng Shuai could not be contacted for weeks after her post, not even for the WTA players’ association. After the scandal, the state media staged an easily understandable propaganda campaign that ranged from screenshots and fake e-mails to a very staged “spontaneous interview” with Peng Shuai.
The new interview in “L’Equipe” has basically not changed anything about the state of knowledge in the affair. In any case, the French sports daily doubts the validity of Peng Shuai’s interview statements: The reporter had to submit the questions in advance. In addition, Peng Shuai was accompanied by a Chinese official: Wang Kan, Chief of Staff of China’s National Olympic Committee, who also “translated” Peng Shuai’s answers. A look at YouTube shows that the Chinese speaks fluent English.
It is an inglorious tradition in Beijing’s security apparatus to extract confessions from undesirable people and broadcast them on state television. One example is the Swedish human rights activist Peter Dahlin, who had to read a guilty plea in front of the camera after 23 days in prison. Dahlin himself sees the Peng Shuai case as a farce, as he cynically commented on Twitter: “Of course, Peng Shuai speaks completely acquitted – as freely as I did when I apologized for hurting the ‘feelings of the Chinese people’.”
But strictly speaking, the facts – despite the questionable details – do not allow the conclusion that the Chinese tennis player is making her statements under duress. It is also a fact that Peng Shuai is considered a patriot who has repeatedly expressed pride in the government of the People’s Republic in her posts on Weibo in the past. It is therefore quite conceivable that she would now like to avert the damage she has done to her home country’s image.
But all of this is pure speculation. In short, the case can be summed up: We simply do not know. Accordingly, IOC boss Thomas Bach, who also met Peng Shuai on Saturday, should hold back with his interpretations of the case. After all, the German world sports leader has lost all credibility in recent years when it comes to dealing critically with the Chinese state. And last year, after a controlled video call with Peng Shuai, Bach may have prematurely judged that everything was supposed to be fine.
Did the 68-year-old deliberately allow himself to be used as a helper by the Chinese propaganda apparatus? At least he should have known better that certainties are difficult in such cases.
