I’ve been thinking about Peng Shuai today, December 10, Human Rights Day. This year the date marks the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly; the 2023 theme is “Freedom, Equality and Justice for All.”  Many of the rights enshrined in the UDHR–– which “everyone is entitled to as a human being”–– are relevant to Peng Shuai’s enforced silence and unfreedom. For example: 

Article 1: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” 

Article 2: “ Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind….  Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs….”

In other words, all people in China, including Peng Shuai, are “entitled to all the rights and freedoms” enshrined in the UDHR. 

Article 3: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”  

Peng Shuai is not free, and exists at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Article 7: “All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.”

Peng has no recourse to the Chinese legal system for her current arbitrary detention or for her sexual assault allegations against Zhang Gaoli. It’s extremely unlikely that Peng will ever have access to a lawyer.

Article 8: “Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.” 

An effective remedy is not available to Peng because the judiciary is CCP-controlled and not independent. 

Article 9: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

As I discussed in an earlier post, Peng Shuai is being subjected to arbitrary detention/ enforced disappearance. 

Article 13: 

1. “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.

2. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”

The Chinese government has deprived Peng the right to freedom of movement and residence within China; the WTA has indirectly acknowledged as much, stating in April 2023,“we have been in touch with people close to Peng and are assured she is living safely with her family in Beijing.” 

Peng is also being deprived of her right to leave China. It seems that the only possible way she’ll ever be able to leave China is with a CCP-approved escort and host. The trip to Lausanne proposed by IOC president Thomas Bach in early 2022, in fact, never materialized. 

Article 19: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

Peng Shuai has been silenced. Her social media accounts were taken down shortly after she posted sexual assault allegations against Zhang Gaoli on Weibo on November 2, 2021. The only public speech Peng has made since then has been CCP-directed or approved; other individuals have purported to speak for her, but their interests lie with the CCP (e.g.,Yao Ming, IOC president Thomas Bach, International Tennis Federation president David Haggerty).  We haven’t heard Peng’s uncensored, unscripted voice since her short-lived Weibo post. 

Article 20.1  “Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.”

Peng Shuai is not free to associate or communicate with her WTA friends and colleagues, or the global community of tennis professionals and her fans, for example.

Article 23.1 “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.”   

The circumstances around Peng’s announcement that she was retiring from professional tennis suggest that she was likely forced to retire. 

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The Chinese government, with an assist from the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), has ensured that tennis star Peng Shuai will continue to be deprived of her freedom and many of the rights she is entitled to under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The WTA resumed its tournaments in China in September without a single public mention of Peng Shuai. Although the WTA claimed in April 2023 that Peng “cannot be forgotten through this process” of resuming play in China, she has, in fact, been erased. The fact that Peng was not even trotted out by the government for propaganda purposes, as she was during the Beijing Winter Olympics in February 2022, is indicative of her erasure. There’s no longer anything to cover-up.

With no one talking about Peng Shuai (except some media stories noting that her sexual assault allegations against a high-ranking CCP official and subsequent disappearance was the primary reason WTA pulled out of China), and as the hashtag campaign #WhereIsPengShuai lost steam, Chinese officials apparently decided there was no need to say or do anything regarding Peng Shuai’s situation while the WTA held its tournaments in China this fall. Even those articles that mentioned her allegations promptly added that she later retracted them, without discussing the problematic context of her “retraction.” The president of the Chinese Basketball Association and CCP propagandist, Yao Ming, provided a finishing touch to the 2023 edition of the Peng Shuai story––surprisingly, during a basketball diplomacy trip to New York in late October. Reuters reported that “Yao, a longtime friend of [Peng Shuai], said he had met with Peng over dinner about two months ago and that she was doing well.”

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            “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” 

–– George Orwell, 1984