On November 2, 2021, she sent her fateful message, in which she claimed to have had a lengthy on-off affair with former vice-premier Zhang Gaoli. It was described at the time as the most serious \u201cMe Too\u201d issue to have emerged from China, as it was the first to involve a high-ranking Chinese Communist Party official.<\/p>\n
While the 1,600-word post had certain ambiguities, it seemed to suggest that Peng had first become intimate with Gaoli in Tianjin 10 years earlier, and then went on to say that \u2013 after several visits to his gated apartment complex in Beijing \u2013 their most recent sexual encounter had been coercive.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat afternoon, I was very afraid,\u201d she wrote. \u201cI didn\u2019t expect it to be like this. I didn\u2019t agree to have sex with you and kept crying that afternoon.\u201d Later in the post, she added that \u201cYou played with me, and dumped me when you were done with me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Peng\u2019s \u2018controlled\u2019 appearances and a China boycott<\/p>\n
The post was only visible for around 20 minutes before it was taken down. Soon after that, Peng herself dropped out of contact with the outside world, prompting Steve Simon, the WTA chief executive, to demand a \u201cfull, fair and transparent investigation\u201d and to call for China to \u201cend censorship against Peng\u201d. While Peng\u2019s very existence was airbrushed from the Chinese internet<\/a>, the Weibo network banned the word \u201cwangqiu\u201d, which means tennis.<\/p>\n About a week later, videos and photographs of Peng began to emerge via controlled sources such as the China Open\u2019s Weibo account. She was shown at her home, at a restaurant, and signing oversized tennis balls for children at Beijing\u2019s National Tennis Centre. Yet the apparent controlled nature of the content failed to satisfy anyone beyond Chinese loyalists, and the hashtag #WhereIsPengShuai proliferated on social media, with support from leading players including the \u201cbig four\u201d of the men\u2019s game: Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray.<\/p>\n Behind the scenes, Simon had reached a momentous decision: he would cancel the 10 events staged in China, including the lucrative WTA Finals in Shenzhen, unless a full investigation was carried out, and Peng was allowed to communicate directly with Simon and his team.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On November 2, 2021, she sent her fateful message, in which she claimed to have had a lengthy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":822463,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[891,269804,217,101,5438,118,56,54,55,6546],"class_list":["post-822462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-china","tag-peng-shuai","tag-sport","tag-sports","tag-standard","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=822462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822462\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/822463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=822462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=822462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=822462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}