“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

            ––  Milan Kundera

Welcome to the first installment of what will be a series of occasional posts about the unfree and silenced Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai. Despite the rhetorical pleas of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and its CEO and Chair, Steve Simon, that Peng Shuai must not be forgotten, that is exactly what’s happening. These posts are my attempt to keep Peng Shuai’s name and story alive during a time when other issues in the tennis world–– and beyond–– compete for attention, and money, in the end, always seems to have the last word.

On April 13, the WTA announced it would resume tournaments in China in September 2023, claiming that they had been “in touch with people close to Peng and are assured she is living safely with her family in Beijing.” The WTA statement makes no mention of her sexual assault allegations against a high ranking Chinese Communist Party official, former vice premier Zhang Gaoli, which led to her disappearance. The men’s ATP Tour has remained consistently untroubled by the silencing and disappearance of Peng, attributing suspension of play in China only to Covid-19 and the Chinese government’s control measures. The men’s tour will also resume play in China this fall. 

A few days ago, the ATP Tour released a video titled “Players Thrilled for Return to China!” –– a 5-minute lovefest that would make propagandists for the CCP Party-state proud. The ATP is doing exactly what the CCP urges everyone to do: “tell China’s story well.” Unsurprisingly, there’s no mention of Peng Shuai, only praise for China and the enormity of everything China offers ––the exuberance of the crowds, the size of the players’ gym, the magnitude of the hotel buffet in Shanghai, and the amount of gifts from adoring fans (Djokovic explained the necessity of preparing an extra suitcase to bring home all the gifts he receives). Asked to say a few words in Chinese, Australian tennis player Alex de Minaur outshines the other tennis players in the video (who stick to “Ni hao” and “Xie xie”) by proclaiming, in Chinese, his love for China, “Wo ai ni, China.” No American tennis players appear in the video. 

Whose idea was this video, exactly? What if it had been a male tennis player who went missing in China? Would the ATP still have released such a video? The men’s tour should keep in mind that anything is possible in Xi Jinping’s China. China’s Foreign Minister, Qin Gang 秦刚, was last seen publicly on June 25.  Qin, a top government official whose job it is to engage with the world, suddenly went missing without explanation. Not surprisingly, #WhereIsQinGang has joined #WhereIsPengShuai as a popular hashtag on Twitter. 

Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin argues that Qin Gang’s fate is, in fact, not a big deal (in terms of Chinese politics)–– Xi “can always elevate another one of his yes men.” What does matter, according to Rogin, “is that Xi doesn’t seem to feel compelled to explain to the world what’s going on. The CCP’s growing secrecy adds more risk to dealing with China on every level.” 

“Every level” would include international tennis events held in China, which are particularly fraught because of the ongoing persecution of Peng Shuai, the destruction of rights and freedoms in Hong Kong, the lack of freedom of expression that everyone in China is subjected to, and the inevitable tensions that will surface among players, the tours, and Chinese officialdom in connection with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, not to mention the grim state of US-China relations. The US State Department currently has a Level 3 Travel Advisory in place for mainland China, a warning that citizens should “reconsider travel to Mainland China due to the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, including in relation to exit bans, and the risk of wrongful detentions.”

The WTA’s April 13 press release stated that it had “received assurances that WTA players and staff operating in China will be safe and protected while in the country.” It went on to proclaim that the WTA “takes this commitment seriously and will hold all parties responsible.” Who provided these “assurances” to the WTA? Why should they be believed? And how does the WTA plan to hold “all parties responsible” should anything happen to another WTA player or staff member?  One can only wonder.

As for Peng, it should come as little solace that WTA has been “assured” by “people close to Peng” (again, who are these people?) that “she is living safely with her family in Beijing.” Peng is a 37-year-old former professional tennis player with sufficient resources from a successful tennis career, who under normal circumstances would very likely not be living with her parents. We’ve heard this line before, of course. On November 21, 2021, the IOC reported that its president, Thomas Bach, held a video call with Peng Shuai (neither the video nor audio were ever released), in which Peng Shuai was reported as saying, according to the IOC, “that she is safe and well, living at her home in Beijing, but would like to have her privacy respected at this time.” This comes straight from the CCP’s disappearance playbook, honed in 1995: when a six-year-old boy the Dalai Lama identified as the reincarnated Panchen Lama promptly disappeared, the Chinese government said, “the boy and his family were living normal lives and did not want anyone to bother them.”

The WTA has said that “Peng cannot be forgotten through this process” of renewed engagement in China and that “it is essential that women’s voices must be heard when speaking out.” The WTA stated unequivocally that it would “continue to advocate for Peng and the advancement of women around the world.” 

But we’re still waiting to hear Peng’s voice, and the WTA’s.

                                                                                               Andréa Worden  7/23/2023

Note: For additional background on Peng Shuai, her #MeToo story, her disappearance and the CCP’s attempts at a cover-up, see, e.g., China Change, “What Awaits Peng Shuai,” (12/1/2021), China Digital Times, “Peng Shuai Interview Leaves Much Answered,” (12/21/2021), my podcasts with Patrick McEnroe for his “Holding Court” pod, and other posts on this site.