Today, Explained - What happened to Peng Shuai

Episode Date: December 2, 2021

A tennis star accused a former top Chinese official of sexual assault. Then she vanished. Now her case is changing sports in China. Today's show was produced by Will Reid with help from Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Paul Mounsey, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Up until a few weeks ago, you had to be a tennis fan to know who Peng Shuai was. But then she said something the Chinese government didn't like. And then her name rang out until this week when Peng Shuai transcended tennis.

She changed how international sports reckon with authoritarianism in China. On the show today, we're going to figure out how that happened, starting with Peng's story. John Wertheim from Sports Illustrated is here to tell it. Peng Shuai was or is, there seems to be some discussion about whether she is retired or is merely taking a break. She's a tennis player in her mid-30s. Peng is a Chinese tennis champion who was once ranked world number one in doubles.

She is not a star, she's not Serena Williams, is a Chinese tennis champion who was once ranked world number one in doubles. She is not a star. She's not Serena Williams, but she's a credible player that casual fans have probably heard of. Xue, who was dumped out of the early stages of the ladies' singles,

appears to be thriving on the doubles circuit. Along with Li Na, we're the first of this wave of Chinese players. This morning, the world wants to know, where is Peng Shuai, the tennis star not seen or heard from in public for weeks since accusing a former senior Communist Party official of sexual

assault. In November, she had a very long post detailing what, you know, by Western standards would be a MeToo allegation against a high-ranking member of the CCP. Zhang Gali, who is 75, a high-ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party, and former vice premier. This was a long, it was about 1,600 word account. It had these literary metaphors. You talked to me about how the universe was so big and how the earth was only a grain of sand in the universe. We humans were less than even a grain of sand. You said a lot of other things too, all to try to ease my mind and make me forget. And it had names and dates and people. You retired and you contacted me through Dr. Liu at the Tanjin Tennis Center. You asked me to play tennis with you at the Kang Ming building in

Beijing. That morning after we played, you and your wife Kang Jia took me to your home. This was not someone hacked my Twitter and I walk this back and repudiate what was sent. I mean, this was a very long, heartfelt account. Very important to this story is whom she's accusing in the letter. Tell us about whom she's accusing. Peng Shuai is accusing a now former high-ranking member of the CCP. I mean, by some counts, it was the third most powerful man in China. He is twice her age.

He is married. By this account, it was a long-running affair that sort of turned into something non-consensual. But by any definition, this would be a real scandal. And within half an hour, it was scrubbed and disappeared from the internet. That was November 2nd. No one has seen her since. The editor of a state-run tabloid suggests Pong will make an appearance soon, though not even state media seems to have direct contact with her. What's the response to the post, even though it was on the internet for merely, whatever, 30 minutes?

You know, I think this is one of these strides in effects where the post made a bit of news. But I think what really intensified all this was the response. The fact that this was suddenly censored and scrubbed and the fact that you could not, if you put Peng Shuai's name into the Chinese equivalent of Google, nothing came up. And the fact that no one knew where she was. I mean, she really hadn't surfaced for weeks after this explosive allegation, nobody had heard from her. So I think the allegations, sort of the initial post was a bit of a ripple. But I think the real fallout came when people saw the response of China. At what point does this turn from like a thing that happened in China to a thing that the tennis world and maybe, you know, the world at large starts to notice? I would say between 10 and 14

days after this initial allegation, there was this, you know, it sort of started like so many things do. It started on social media and it turned into a hashtag inevitably. High-profile players voiced their support amid fears she went missing. Naomi Osaka tweeted, censorship is never okay at any cost. I hope Peng Shuai and her family are safe and okay. And essentially the women's tennis took a very hard-line stance. And to me, as someone who's covered a number of sports, this was strikingly at odds with what has happened when other sports and other businesses

have taken issue with Chinese policy. Women's Tennis Association essentially said, this is not okay. Please furnish us proof that this player is okay. And we demand a full and fair investigation into these claims. The chairman and CEO of the organization, Steve Simon, released a statement today saying in part, quote, the WTA and the rest of the world need independent and verifiable proof that she is safe. I have repeatedly tried to reach her via numerous forms of communication to no avail.

You know, this is not a big institution with a huge corporate PR department. I mean, I think this is just a business leader saying, hey, not right, and firing off this letter. And it really sort of ignited this firestorm. How does China respond to this outcry? China, as you might expect, sort of had this fairly forceful response. There was this very strange note that was issued through Chinese state media. In the body of an email Peng allegedly sent to the Women's Tennis Association.

The allegation of sexual assault is not true, she wrote. I'm not missing, nor am I unsafe. Essentially saying, please leave me alone, everything is fine, and I walk back what I said. And it was strange in a vacuum. It also was strange. I came across an email somebody had sent me 15 years ago when Peng Shui was just starting her career. And it basically said, this is a promising player, but she's challenging Chinese authority. And she doesn't want to share her prize money with the state. And she doesn't like being told who her coach is. She wants to have agency to hire her own coach. So there's a history here of independence, what you might even say is activism, of challenging authority. So the idea that this player, who even 15 years ago was known for challenging authority, who launches this 1,600-word manifesto, would then walk it back and essentially say, leave me alone.

I think that strained credulity and women's tennis return served and basically said, not good enough. We don't think she wrote this letter. Please furnish us with this player. Please conduct this investigation we've demanded. And if not, we're prepared to take our business elsewhere. What comes after this letter? I mean, how are people eventually satisfied that she might be OK? So Peng Shui

has surfaced in a series of videos. Honestly, they seem a bit reminiscent of hostage videos. You know, my captors have been good to me. My captors have treated me well. They're clearly staged. They're clearly members of the Chinese Communist Party alongside her. She allegedly had a phone conversation through Zoom with Thomas Bach of the IOC. Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai is seen smiling ear to ear in this image from a video call with the International Olympic Committee. The IOC says Peng told them she's safe and well and asked for her privacy. And this is not the way somebody would normally say everything's cool here, nothing to see. These seem very stagecrafted, these seem very managed. People that know Peng Shui well

say that this is not the kind of diction, this is not the kind of thing she would ordinarily say. There's a video where someone keeps repeating the date, right? As if, like, to verify that this is a video that's coming out, you know, the day of. The date is continually stressed and repeated,

except the one time they got the date wrong and they had to re-tape it. I mean, the whole thing is very strange. I mean, again, if you were trying to tell the world, hey, hey, I'm cool, nothing to see here, let's move on, this is not how you would ordinarily do it. So there have been this very strange series of videos. A number of players have tried to get in touch with Peng Shui.

They've told me that they've been unsuccessful. The Women's Tennis Association has not had direct contact with Peng Shui. They have numbers for her. They have all sorts of ways they've tried to get in touch with her. They have not had direct contact. And you have these videos with, you know, yes, she appears to be alive, crassly, but I'm not sure we know a lot more than that

because these are all very strange videos. And if the goal here is to convey this message of everything's cool here, I'm not sure that is a bit effective. This is a player. She's played against all the greats, and she's played all the biggest tournaments. This was sort of a rank and file member of the tour. And I think that's part of it, too, that this was a colleague to a lot of these top players. You know, Serena

Williams was on the other side of the net. Naomi Osaka knows who this player is. And I think that social justice has been something they haven't been afraid to address. It would be very strange if they suddenly went silent, given the treatment of one of their colleagues, and to their credit, they have not. They have been very forceful as well. The Women's Tennis Association pulls its tournaments out of China in a minute on Today Explained. Today Explained. Thank you. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. I am Tom Goldman. I'm a sports correspondent for National Public Radio.

Beautiful. And Tom, the Women's Tennis Association, the WTA, made big news just yesterday when they said they will be suspending their tournaments in China over this Peng Shai situation. Huge deal? Huge deal, Sean. You know, the WTA through its CEO, Steve Simon, had been threatening to do this for several weeks because it was concerned about the safety of Peng Shuai. And it wanted to make sure that her sexual assault allegation against a high-ranking Chinese government official got heard and got investigated. There's too many times in our world today when we get into issues like this that we let business, politics, money dictate what's right and what's wrong. And Steve Simon decided yesterday he hadn't heard enough. And so he, in fact, acted on his threat and pulled WTA events, tournaments out of China and Hong Kong for the foreseeable future.

We'd like to continue our business in the region. We've had a lot of success and we have a lot of friends and good partners in the region. But as we've also said before, this is about the principles we stand for and the principles of women associated with sexual assault, which trumps everything else. And for people who don't really care much about tennis specifically, why is this a big deal? It's a big deal because what appears to be happening is the WTA is taking a principled stand over a money stand, which most, if not all, sports organizations have done in the past when confronted with a controversy in the People's Republic of China. The WTA stands to lose a lot of money. Women's tennis has boomed in recent years. On average, the WTA puts on about 10 women's tennis events, including the WTA finals, the end of the season big tournament in China. And I reached out to

the WTA to get a firm dollar sense on what they could lose. I never heard back from them. They had a busy day yesterday. But what we have seen reported consistently is that they could stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. They, of course, can relocate tournaments to other parts of the world, but they're still going to take a hit. Let's talk a bit more about the money. How important is the Chinese market to international sports? Hugely important. And market to international sports? Hugely important.

And not just international sports. You hear it all over business. You know, it's like, look at this huge market. And so it's very important. And you have seen over the years sports leagues getting more and more invested in China. I remember covering the Beijing Olympics back in 2008 and being struck by how enormous the Nike store was. Kobe Bryant was the big star then in China. The NBA had really started getting involved in China during the Yao Ming years when Yao Ming was the all-star center for the Houston Rockets and Houston became China's team. And that's, I think, when the NBA really started making a huge impact on the country.

And so by 2008, I think it was pretty well firmly entrenched there. And it has grown since as the NBA has continued to grow. And how have, you know, free speech issues, human rights issues factored into the NBA's growth in China? Well, it's been a problem. We go back to 2019. More protests in Hong Kong today. and tonight the conflict between demonstrators and police is impacting Houston. Daryl Morey was the general manager of the Houston Rockets, China's team, remember. And Daryl Morey tweeted in 2019 a tweet in support of protesters in Hong Kong who were protesting China policies.

The Rockets GM tweeted a picture that read, Fight for freedom. stand with Hong Kong. And got the Houston Rockets and the NBA in big, big trouble. The NBA kind of did a dance at first. It kind of came out a little bit sounding like it was throwing Daryl Morey under the bus. But then they backtracked with Commissioner Adam Silver. And he said, no, we never said that we were going to acquiesce totally to profits.

The long-held values of the NBA are to support freedom of expression, and certainly freedom of expression by members of the NBA community. And in this case, Daryl Morey, as the general manager of the Houston Rockets, enjoys that right as one of our employees. The NBA ended up losing hundreds of millions of dollars in Chinese business when Chinese broadcasters refused to air NBA games, certainly Houston Rockets games. So it took a while to right the ship after that happened. Didn't LeBron James factor into this story at some point too? LeBron did.

He initially came out criticizing Daryl Morey. I don't want to get into a feud with Daryl Morey, but I believe he wasn't educated on the situation at hand. And he spoke. And LeBron James was criticized for that. So it became this kind of tumbling political story where everyone was criticizing everyone else. But yeah, LeBron did have a say. It got pretty sticky because LeBron has been an active spokesperson for Black Lives Matter in the United States,

but seemed to not be terribly concerned with human rights in China. Is that fair? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that's fair to say. Yeah. Have other sports leagues run into these kinds of issues in China, or is it just basketball and now tennis? Well, interestingly, you know, again in 2019, which was a wild year for running afoul of the Chinese government, the Premier League in English soccer had an issue with its great team, Arsenal. Once again, a prominent figure from the Western sporting world has become at the centre of a political dispute involving China.

When its great player, Mesut Ozil, came out with strong words in favour of the minority U Uighur population in China. Here, he claims that China has been burning copies of the Quran and closing down mosques in the far western province of Xinjiang. He also alleges that the ethnic Uighur Muslims there, well, he says they are warriors resisting persecution from China. And strong words against China's treatment of the Uyghur minority, which the U.S. government has labeled as genocide with forced sterilizations and imprisonments and family

separation. Ozil, again, tweeted the power of a tweet and ran into real trouble. And Arsenal moved quickly to distance itself, saying those are Ozil's words, not ours. So again, we saw a league kind of falling over itself, trying to, you know, on the one hand, not totally throw its player or its representative under the bus, but being very cognizant of the important relationship, largely business relationship, with China. And that brings us back to this WTA decision yesterday, which feels like the furthest any sports organization has gone to stand up against China.

Yeah, Sean, absolutely. It is because it's, you know, it talked the talk. Now it is walking the walk. There are a number of organizations, sports organizations, who are coming out and saying, hey, we support you, we think what you're doing is great, but no one else is removing their business from China and taking the economic hit because of that. So at this point, the WTA stands alone. Now, we should add that it stands alone as in not even men's tennis is going this far in China, right? It's just women's tennis. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, men's tennis players, principally Novak Djokovic.

I did hear about it a week ago, and shocking, you know, that she's missing. I mean... Have come out and spoken about the situation with Peng Shuai and spoken very forcefully and said, you know, we don't like what's going on, and we do support the WTA, but yeah, men's tennis has not done what the women's tennis tour has. Why was it so important for the head of WTA, Steve Simon, to come out and take this forceful stance? Steve Simon has said in statements, not just the statement where he announced the suspension of tournaments, but earlier statements as well, his organization represents women. And they are looking at the case of Peng Shuai as a Me Too moment in China, a very important Me Too moment. And matter of fact, Steve Simon in an interview with the New York Times Wednesday said something like, we can't walk away from sexual assault.

We are not going to do that. So it's very important not just for the alleged case of Peng Shuai, it's important for all the members of the WTA. And the WTA stands for women athletes, it stands for women. That's the message it wants to get out. And that's why Steve Simon says it's taking such a forceful stance in this incident. And he's taking this forceful stance mere weeks before the 2022 Winter Olympics are set to get underway in Beijing. What kind of impact might this situation with women's tennis and Peng Shui have on the upcoming games? This is all speculation. But, you know, you are hearing from activists and China critics that they hope this kind of steamrolls into something big. You know, the activist critics have long been going after China and its human rights record. ability to really get a message across and maybe, just maybe, create enough momentum that it might

force the Chinese government to budge on important issues related to human rights. So there is hope that the WTA stance will be emulated by other sports organizations, by business organizations, by Olympic sponsors, by Olympic athletes even. That's a big hope. You know, what we've seen in the past that China is not always willing to give in to Western opinion. And certainly China's state-run media and editorial said about the WTA, it said the WTA had put on an exaggerated show with its action, you know, to pull its tournaments out. It said it's bringing politics into women's tennis, it's opening a Pandora's box, and it is a betrayer of the Olympic spirit. So, you know,

that sounds to me and sounds to anyone reading that, that China may not be too open to listening to the concerns about Peng Shuai or too open to listening about really the bigger concerns that a lot of people have about human rights violations. And as we heard earlier, the International Olympic Committee has also sort of been the middleman in this story. It's President Thomas Bach had a video call with Peng Shuai a few weeks ago, and then yesterday the IOC had another call with her, and it put out another vanilla statement saying she's fine. How are people responding to the IOC's involvement here? They really got a lot of people mad in the way they were involved. And a lot of people

were saying, well, this is just the IOC again, rolling over and kind of kowtowing to its moneyed host, the country that will host its Olympics, and that's going to pour billions of dollars into IOC coffers. Which to be fair to the IOC, the IOC takes a lot of the money it makes for Olympics and distributes it to National Olympic Committees around the globe. I just had to get that blurb in there so the IOC won't say Tom Goldman is being really unfair to us. But the fact is, the IOC has a history of, you know, always saying we're not a political organization, but then kind of behind the scenes playing politics when it has to. The severe critics are taking us back to 1936, in fact, and pointing to the way the IOC basically allowed Adolf Hitler to use the Berlin Olympics as a great

propaganda tool. People are seeing similarities between that and how China is being set up for these 2022 Olympics as a propaganda tool when there are a lot of bad things that are happening within that country. So I guess it remains to be seen if the IOC can recover its credibility, especially in the case of Peng Shuai. But it feels like her initial MeToo call-out of this high-ranking Chinese government official has forced all sorts of reckonings in international sports and even politics, be it in China, in the IOC, in international sports leagues, women's tennis, and even beyond. Do you think she had any idea that she might set off this sequence of events with this, you know, initial letter posted to social media?

You know, in her initial social media post, which was quickly taken down, she had some language that basically spoke to, you know, this is not something you do in China without paying consequences. There are a lot of people who think now that she is paying the consequences with what China appears to be doing with her. Even if I'm an egg throwing myself at a rock, even if I'm a moth flying at a flame courting my own destruction, I will still speak the truth of us. With your IQ, I know you'll find ways to deny this or to turn this on me. You'll play with the world without consequence. When the time comes, after all you've done in this lifetime, will you be able to face your mother with peace of mind? Look how sanctimonious we all are.

Tom Goldman reports on sports for National Public Radio. Earlier in the show, you heard from John Wertheim. He's the executive editor of Sports Illustrated. Our show today was produced by Will Reid. He had some help from Halima

Shah. It was edited by Matthew Collette and engineered by Paul Mounsey. Facts were checked by Laura Bullard. The rest of the Today Explained team includes Afim Shapiro, Victoria Chamberlain, Hadi Mawagdi, and Miles Bryan.

Amina Alsadi is our supervising producer. Liz Kelly-Nelson is the veep of Vox Audio. Jillian Weinberger is her deputy. We use music by Breakmaster, Cylinder, and sometimes Noam Hassenfeld. I'm Sean Ramos-Firum. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.