Winter Olympics: Tennis star Peng Shuai is vanishing. Much like China's #MeToo movement
BEIJING – The #MeToo movement flickers in and out of sight in China, much like the tennis star Peng Shuai after she claimed, then controversially retracted, an allegationthat four years ago China's former vice premier Zhang Gaoli forced himself on her in his bedroom while his wife stood guard outside.
Peng resurfaced at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics this week as part of the International Olympic Committee's pledge to meet with her face-to-face after her sexual assault accusations vanished from the Internet in China almost as soon as they appeared in November. She went missing for almost three weeks in November beforeshowing up at a junior tennis event in Beijing, where she appears to be living.
On Feb. 7, Peng had dinner with IOC President Thomas Bach at the Olympic Club in Beijing. The three-time Olympian and former No. 1-ranked tennis doubles player also attended several events, including a mixed curling match between China and Norway. She watched U.S.-born Eileen Gu win a gold for China at the women's freeski Big Air event. She participated in an hour-long interview with a French newspaper during which she restated that the whole affair was based on an "enormous misunderstanding." Peng made similar comments in earlier video and telephone calls with the IOC.
An Olympic question that won't go away: Where is Peng Shuai?
An 'enormous misunderstanding': Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai says sexual assault allegation was 'enormous misunderstanding'
None of this has allayed concerns in the West over her safety and well-being.
Just as Peng's case does not make any news bulletins or headlines in China, experts and victims say the #MeToo movement that fights sexual harassment and assault has been hamstrung by social stigma, legal hurdles, censorship and an increasingly authoritarian approach to free expression that has led to the jailing of some women's rights campaigners. The term #MeToo, like Peng's name, is subject to a recurring blackout on China's restricted Internet with no or few search results returned.
"Chinese (women's rights campaigners) are battling headwinds in a political environment where the ruling Communist Party's control over the Internet, media and independent activism is tighter than it has been in 30 years," said Yaqiu Wang, a China expert at Human Rights Watch, the New York-based humanitarian group.
Where are the other Peng Shuais?
Paste BN spoke to more than a dozen women in China about their experiences of sexual harassment and assault. Almost all said that they were convinced that Peng only withdrew her accusations because of pressure from the Chinese government. They said that, as in many countries, that sexual harassment is a big problem across Chinese society, that they thought Peng was brave for speaking out in the first instance, but were not surprised she had withdrawn her allegations.
The Chinese women Paste BN spoke to said that China's traditional patriarchal society has limited advances for women, though they also saw some signs that things were improving.
"The more powerful a person is, the easier it is for them to shut the mouth of the person below them," said one self-employed woman from Guangzhou, in southern China, who decided not to report her own story of sexual abuse to the police because she did not have confidence that her claims would be investigated or adjudicated properly.
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Like other Chinese women Paste BN spoke to for this story, the woman from Guangzhou's name is being withheld for publication because of the sensitive nature of the subject and fears of Chinese government reprisals.
While China's crackdown on women's rights campaigners is sporadic and unpredictable, some women have been accused of provoking "social instability" and stirring controversy at the behest of meddling overseas forces.
Five Chinese women's rights activists were jailed for almost two months in 2015 after they planned to hold a public protest on the subway. In recent years, dozens of social media accounts on China's Facebook-like Weibo run by women's rights campaigners have been abruptly shut down.
Discussing topics related to "feminism" or "#MeToo," especially in public places or the workplace, is often considered taboo in a country where most positions of power in corporate, political and military life are held by men, and where complaints about societal inequities are often interpreted as attacks on the government, said Altman Peng, an expert on feminism and China's media landscape who teaches at the University of the Arts London, in the United Kingdom.
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"It made me extinct on Weibo, which is terrifying, and I was named by Weibo, saying that I was inciting hatred," Li Maizi, a prominent women's rights campaigner from Beijing, told Australia's national broadcaster last year after her account was censored.
Poor protections for women
According to researchers, the #MeToo hashtag began catching on in China in 2018 – some 12 years after the phrase was first coined by the activist Tarana Burke, and around a year after it hit the mainstream in the U.S. – as women started sharing stories, mostly on Weibo, of enduring serious and everyday indignities and humiliation.
There was a professor at a prominent Beijing university accused of sexually harassing several female doctoral students. There was a former intern who claimed a high-profile TV host working for Chinese state media of repeatedly groping her. More recently, widespread public backlash prompted a large Chinese cosmetics company to pull an ad that featured a woman who was only able to escape her stalker because the firm's make-up removing face-wipes transformed her into someone too ugly to stalk.
Guo Jianmei, a prominent Chinese women's rights lawyer, wrote in a 2011 article for China Daily, an English-language newspaper affiliated with China's Communist Party, that sexual harassment as a legal term only entered China's statute books in 2005.
But the legislation, known as Law on the Protection of Rights and Interests of Women, is vague, hard to enforce and comes with huge risks for complainants who can be sued for defamation if their case fails, critics say. Since late last year, China's top legislature has been examining ways to strengthen the law, for example by making it illegal for companies to reserve posts for men and banning any form of subjugation of women, whether physical or verbal. For now, protections and safeguards for women remain relatively fledgling.
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"Our country still lacks a clear standard to even determine what is sexual harassment," said one woman who didn't want the city where she lives to be identified. The women said that most of her female friends and acquaintances have experienced sexual harassment and abuse to varying degrees.
"I think some local authorities are trying to do better, but my impression is also the police don't care too much and try to smooth things over and keep everyone quiet," she said.
The woman said that she initially gleaned some information about Peng's case from Weibo, but that any links she clicks on these days, when she can find them, are inactive – in keeping with the country's almost total blackout of public discussion of the tennis star's case in China. Any reporting on Peng available to view on China's heavily monitored and censored Internet is limited to her promotional public appearances. Her original allegations, and the subsequent retraction, are never mentioned.
This has made for an awkward situation inside Beijing's COVID-secure, unrestricted-Internet Olympic bubble as reporters from the West have repeatedly sought during the Games to raise Peng's case in daily media briefings that feature IOC officials, as well as senior Chinese representatives from the country's Olympics committee.
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Questions that have been posed to Chinese officials about Peng during these briefings have typically either been ignored or evaded, or the subject is quickly changed by reporters from Chinese state media, who have tended to ask questions about the Games' appeal to Chinese consumers and the nation's growing appetite for winter sports.
"It's a very delicate situation," IOC spokesmen Mark Adams said in a Feb. 6 briefing.
In fact, the IOC, too, has appeared to equivocate when discussing Peng.
In the briefing on Feb. 6., Adams said the dinner meeting in Beijing between Bach and Peng would take place "within a few days." However, the very next day the IOC released a statement saying it had already happened. When reporters later sought clarifications not just over the timing of the meeting, but about the substance of what was exchanged between Bach and Peng over dinner, Adams said neither issue was something the IOC as a sporting organization could be reasonably expected to address.
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"Our job is to carry out personal, quiet diplomacy," he said.
In her interview with the French newspaper L'Equipe, Peng again denied having accused Zhang of sexual assault and also of disappearing for three weeks.
"My wish is that the meaning of this post no longer be skewed,” she said, while also announcing her retirement from international tennis.
However, L'Equipe's interview has raised yet more questions.
It was highly controlled. Questions were submitted in advance. A Chinese Olympic committee official sitting in on the interview translated Peng’s comments from Chinese.
"We really do not know what happened behind the scene. But it is indeed hard to believe that she is able to speak completely freely," said Peng, the U.K.-based China expert at the University of the Arts London.
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Down but not out
In 2021, China ranked 107 out of 156 in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap report, a broad barometer of gender-based economic and social inequalities.
The U.S. was No. 30.
While the WEF's report does not explicitly address the issue of sexual harassment it is possible to view it as a general window on a nation's approach to women's rights.
Over the last two years, China has slipped down two places on the gauge. Since 2013, when President Xi Jinping came to power, it has plummeted 38 spots lower.
Still, Yaqiu, the U.S.-based China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that victims of sexual harassment and assault in China "continue to speak up online and take cases to court, demonstrating extraordinary determination and resilience."
She said that the #MeToo movement in China has retained a large grassroots base.
"The most helpful thing that we can do at the moment is "girls help girls," said one women who is part of a WeChat group – China's version of WhatsApp – where participants share stories and advice about how to deal with harassers.
"We need to expose these people and use the power of public opinion," she said.
Other women who spoke to Paste BN thought that China's pervasive surveillance culture was helpful in keeping potential harassers in check; that more and more women were developing strategies to keep themselves safe; that Chinese men themselves were starting to understand the implications of actions that had for so long gone unexamined; and that a constant influx of stories, TV shows, movies and digital content from the West was leading to greater awareness and modified behavior.
It may not be entirely coincidental that Chinese women are among the most successful and celebrated athletes in China right now. Weibo found its servers temporarily overloaded after 18-year-old Gu's Beijing Olympics gold-medal triumph. The Chinese women's national soccer team clinched the Asian Cup on Feb. 7, a stark contrast to the men's team who have only ever qualified for the tournament once and never even scored a goal. (The women's victory sparked a call on social media for the gender-pay gap between men and women Chinese soccer players to be reviewed.)
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Yet, like many places around the world, #MeToo in China has also led to a size-able backlash from men, with increased online vitriol aimed at Chinese women.
"The Internet blames you for the way you dress, or you'll see comments like 'flies don't bite seamless eggs,' said one woman who spoke to Paste BN about why she decided not to share her harassment story online. The woman used a Chinese expression similar to there's no smoke without fire, or you only have yourself to blame.
"I was scared I would be judged. I didn't want the spotlight or controversy," she said. "I preferred to keep quiet."