Tag: Sexual Harassment

China’s Silence on Peng Shuai Shows Limits of Beijing’s Propaganda

Chin@Strategy

When the Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai accused a former top leader of sexual assault earlier this month, the authorities turned to a tried-and-true strategy. At home, the country’s censors scrubbed away any mention of the allegations. Abroad, a few state-affiliated journalists focused narrowly on trying to quash concerns about Ms. Peng’s safety. Beijing seems to be relying on a two-pronged approach of maintaining the silence and waiting for the world to move on. The approach suggests that the country’s sprawling propaganda apparatus has limited options for shifting the narrative…

Why Peng Shuai Frustrates China’s Propaganda Machine

Chin@Strategy

The Chinese government has become extremely effective in controlling what the country’s 1.4 billion people think and talk about. But influencing the rest of the world is a different matter, as Peng Shuai has aptly demonstrated. Chinese state media and its journalists have offered one piece of evidence after another to prove the star Chinese tennis player was safe and sound despite her public accusation of sexual assault against a powerful former vice premier. One Beijing-controlled outlet claimed it obtained an email she wrote in which she denied the accusations.…

How Peng Shuai Went From ‘Chinese Princess’ to Silenced #MeToo Accuser

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When Peng Shuai was a young tennis player in China’s national sports system, she battled officials for control over her own professional career — and she won. When she took on one of China’s most powerful men three weeks ago, accusing him of sexual assault, she found her voice silenced, erased from China’s heavily controlled cyberspace and smiling in awkward public appearances most likely intended to defuse what has become an international scandal. At 35, Ms. Peng is one of her country’s most recognized athletes, a doubles champion at Wimbledon…

Women’s Tennis Challenges China’s Narrative Over Missing Player

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The top official overseeing women’s tennis on Wednesday directly challenged the narrative presented by Chinese state media that a highly ranked professional player had walked back allegations of sexual assault against a top Communist Party official, saying he feared for her well-being. China Global Television Network, an English-language broadcaster controlled by the Chinese government, on Wednesday distributed an email that it said had been written by Peng Shuai, the highly ranked player. Ms. Peng has not been seen in public since Nov. 2, when she posted the accusation on social…

Tennis star accuses Chinese ruling party official of #MeToo abuse

Chin@Strategy

The Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai has apparently accused a former vice-premier of sexual assault, engulfing the highest echelons of Beijing’s ruling Communist party in a #MeToo scandal for the first time. Authorities scrambled to stop the allegations from spreading, with online censors even appearing to block the word “tennis”. In a now-deleted post on one of her social media accounts, Peng, 35, said she and Zhang Gaoli, 75, had an on-off extramarital “relationship” over several years, which she said he tried to keep secret. Peng said Zhang had stopped…

China #MeToo Figure Vows to Appeal After Losing Landmark Case

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A former television intern who became a prominent voice in China’s #MeToo movement against sexual assault and harassment has vowed to fight on after a court in Beijing ruled that she had not produced sufficient evidence in her harassment case against a star presenter. The former intern, Zhou Xiaoxuan, told supporters and journalists outside the Haidian District court in Beijing that she would appeal after judges ruled against her claim late Tuesday night. Ms. Zhou asserted in 2018 that Zhu Jun had assaulted her in a dressing room four years…

Alibaba Manager Not Charged in China’s Latest #MeToo Moment

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The police in China released a former Alibaba manager who had been accused of rape by a co-worker after prosecutors declined to charge him, deepening debate about an episode that has shaken the Chinese technology industry and prompted a reckoning for the fledgling #MeToo movement in the country. In a statement issued late Monday, the authorities in the eastern Chinese city of Jinan said that the behavior of the manager — referred to by his surname, Wang — did not constitute a crime and that his arrest had not been…

Alibaba Faces Reckoning Over Harassment

Chin@Strategy

At an employee dinner, women were told to rank the attractiveness of the men at the table. During a team-building exercise, a woman was pressured to straddle her male co-worker in front of colleagues. Top executives traded lewd comments about male virility at company events and online. The e-commerce giant Alibaba, one of China’s most globalized internet companies, has often celebrated the number of women in its senior ranks. In 2018, the company’s billionaire co-founder, Jack Ma, told a conference in Geneva that one secret to Alibaba’s success was that…