On Nov. 2, Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai (彭帥) posted a message on Chinese microblogging site Weibo accusing former Chinese vice premier Zhang Gaoli (張高麗) of sexual abuse. A public allegation of sexual misconduct against a member of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) inner quorum is unprecedented in China. Surprisingly, Peng’s message was not immediately removed by China’s ruthlessly efficient censorship machine, leaving some to speculate that Peng might have been used by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to purge Zhang, who is believed to be a member of a rival political faction headed by former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民).
If Peng was manipulated by the Xi faction, then she was unceremoniously dumped once she was no longer of use. Peng’s online presence has been comprehensively scrubbed from Internet sites inside China. “Unpersoned” and shoved down the memory hole, it was an unambiguous message to others who might be considering making similar allegations against high-ranking party members. More than 20 days after the allegation was made, Peng has not been seen in public — save for an unconvincing “proof of life” video filmed at a restaurant and a stage-managed appearance at a Beijing tennis competition — and is believed to be under house arrest.
It is a depressingly familiar state of affairs in today’s totalitarian China, which makes the international reaction to Peng’s case so incongruous.
The tennis world has erupted in paroxysms of outrage over Peng’s disappearance, with high-profile players and governing bodies clutching their pearls in horror and calling for her release.
Whether their expressed shock is synthetic or genuine cannot be known for sure. What cannot be denied is that prior to Peng’s disappearance, players and sporting bodies seemed perfectly happy to engage with the lucrative Chinese market, despite a well-documented genocide in Xinjiang, ongoing persecution of Tibetans and Mongolians, and the destruction of Hong Kong’s autonomy.
One would have to be living under a rock not to notice the relentless purges of Chinese celebrities, actors, intellectuals and lawyers in the past few years. The absurd situation is reminiscent of the mock indignation expressed by Captain Louis Renault in the film Casablanca: I’m shocked, shocked, to find that human rights abuses are going on here.
With a member of their club removed by the Xi regime, world tennis could not stay silent and was left with a predicament: Keep quiet and try to ride out the #MeToo media storm in the West, or make a racket and risk upsetting the Chinese gravy train.
The Peng case has also thrown into relief worrying signs of Chinese elite capture within the sporting world’s governing bodies. On Monday, World Athletics president and International Olympic Committee (IOC) member Sebastian Coe airily brushed aside calls for a boycott of next year’s Beijing Winter Olympics as a “meaningless gesture” and suggested that politicians and diplomats could ask “tough questions” while attending the Games. Surely nobody could be this naive about the Xi regime in 2021?
IOC president Thomas Bach has been criticized by human rights groups after holding a video call with Peng on Sunday and releasing a statement that she is “safe and well.” Why did Bach think it was a good idea to assist Beijing in producing a second propaganda video? Was it naivety, or was Bach scratching Beijing’s back to protect lucrative deals linked to the Olympic Games? For sporting elites, the show must go on, whatever the human cost.
Selective concern and moral equivocation are, of course, not limited to the sporting world, with big business just as culpable in its continued courting of Chinese dirty money. Nevertheless, participation at the Beijing Winter Olympics should provide an acid test as to the sincerity of democratic nations and their liberal values.
Weeks into the craze, nobody quite knows what to make of the OpenClaw mania sweeping China, marked by viral photos of retirees lining up for installation events and users gathering in red claw hats. The queues and cosplay inspired by the “raising a lobster” trend make for irresistible China clickbait. However, the West is fixating on the least important part of the story. As a consumer craze, OpenClaw — the AI agent designed to do tasks on a user’s behalf — would likely burn out. Without some developer background, it is too glitchy and technically awkward for true mainstream adoption,
On Monday, a group of bipartisan US senators arrived in Taiwan to support the nation’s special defense bill to counter Chinese threats. At the same time, Beijing announced that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had invited Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) to visit China, a move to make the KMT a pawn in its proxy warfare against Taiwan and the US. Since her inauguration as KMT chair last year, Cheng, widely seen as a pro-China figure, has made no secret of her desire to interact with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and meet with Xi, naming it a
A delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) officials led by Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) is to travel to China tomorrow for a six-day visit to Jiangsu, Shanghai and Beijing, which might end with a meeting between Cheng and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). The trip was announced by Xinhua news agency on Monday last week, which cited China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) Director Song Tao (宋濤) as saying that Cheng has repeatedly expressed willingness to visit China, and that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee and Xi have extended an invitation. Although some people have been speculating about a potential Xi-Cheng
No state has ever formally recognized the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) as a legal entity. The reason is not a lack of legitimacy — the CTA is a functioning exile government with democratic elections and institutions — but the iron grip of realpolitik. To recognize the CTA would be to challenge the People’s Republic of China’s territorial claims, a step no government has been willing to take given Beijing’s economic leverage and geopolitical weight. Under international law, recognition of governments-in-exile has precedent — from the Polish government during World War II to Kuwait’s exile government in 1990 — but such recognition
RSS