Clarity still needed on Peng’s situation
IOC video call did not provide any answers
Last week, the editor of Global Times, a staterun Chinese newspaper, declared online that he didn’t see what all this Peng Shuai fuss was about.
As someone familiar with the Chinese system, Hu Xijin wrote he didn’t think Peng, who at the time hadn’t been heard from in two weeks, had been retaliated against for “the thing that people talked about.”
It was unintentionally comic. Hu was confident that the Chinese tennis star had not been disappeared by the state after accusing a top Communist party official of sexual assault, but not so confident that he would dare mention any of that stuff specifically.
Even that, though, was a step more transparent than what Thomas Bach has offered.
Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, participated in a video call with Peng on Sunday, the first communication she has had outside China since she posted allegations on Chinese social media against Zhang Gaoli in early November that were quickly deleted.
Bach released a statement that said Peng was “safe and well” at her home in Beijing but would “like to have her privacy respected at this time” and that she would prefer to spend time with friends and family. The brief statement said nothing about the accusation of sexual assault, or even “the thing that people talked about.”
It didn’t say whether Peng told Bach that she was able to live and speak freely, whether she was under state supervision, or if she was even aware that, beyond China’s censored media, she has become an international cause of concern.
It didn’t say why Peng spoke to the IOC, which shares a common goal with China in that they both want this story to be forgotten by the time Beijing 2022 rolls around, and has not responded to the entreaties of the Women’s Tennis Association, which took her original social media post seriously, raised its concerns for her whereabouts publicly, and has put its considerable business ties to China at risk while it demands answers.
“She will continue to be involved with tennis, the sport she loves so much,” the IOC statement included in a cheery postscript, as though the world has been concerned not with Peng’s possible disappearance and silencing, but with whether she would still be able to hold youth tennis camps. Oh, she’ll still be involved in tennis? Never mind, then. Nothing to see here.
The IOC has not been a model of transparency for a long time. That the next Olympics are even in Beijing is a testament to an organization that oversaw such pricey bloat in its signature event that the Western world collectively decided to stop playing the game — by the time the selection process for 2022 was finished, the only two bidders left were Beijing, which had just hosted in 2008, and the relatively small Kazakh city of Almaty. The IOC just spent a good part of the last Games telling everyone that the weather was fine in Tokyo even as athletes were fainting due to the sweltering heat.
But even for them, this is a worrying new level of obfuscation. If Bach is going to take part in a public relations exercise that attempts to wave away concerns about Peng without addressing the two central concerns — were her allegations taken seriously and has she been punished in any way for airing them — then his assurances are no more comforting than the purported “everything is fine” statement from Peng that was published by staterun media last week. Indeed, there was Hu Xijin, back at it again on Monday to declare that “for those who truly care about Peng Shuai, her appearances of these days are enough to relieve them or eliminate most of their worries.”
Nothing to see here, et cetera.
It remains possible that there is a less sinister explanation for what has transpired over the past few weeks than what the WTA has quite reasonably feared. Peng’s original post was quite personal and heartfelt, describing not just sexual activity against her will but a consensual relationship with a married senior member of the Politburo that ended in heartbreak. Perhaps she does regret revealing such intimate details of her life.
But there is no way to know whether she is simply seeking privacy now, or has been forced into seclusion, or something worse, until Peng is able to communicate freely with the WTA or some other party that is less obviously interested in keeping China and its ruling party happy. Not the IOC, in other words.
Those who want proof that Peng’s accusations against Zhang are being properly investigated — as would be the standard expected in the West — should realize that such proof is not going to be forthcoming. The Chinese legal system is far from transparent even when Westerners are involved; a process involving a powerful party insider would be utterly opaque to the outside world.
But the least the West should expect is that China is not able to simply offer up alleged proof that Peng is unharmed and unpunished through its own carefully orchestrated channels, and while pretending that her allegations of just a couple of weeks ago never happened. She must be heard from, and in a way that addresses, to use a certain euphemism, the thing that people talked about. That should have been the least that the IOC demanded. Not that we can be terribly surprised that it didn’t.
THE CHINESE LEGAL SYSTEM IS FAR FROM TRANSPARENT.