In a detailed social media post on Nov. 2, Peng Shuai, a 20-year fixture on the Women’s Tennis Association tour and former top-ranked doubles player, leveled an accusation of sexual assault against a man with whom she had a decadelong affair. Within 30 minutes, the post was gone, and Peng hasn’t made a public statement since.
Peng’s post was on the Chinese social media site Weibo, and the man she accused of assaulting her in 2018 is Zhang Gaoli, a former vice premier who served on the Chinese Communist Party’s seven-member Politburo Standing Committee from 2012 to 2017.
In her post, Peng acknowledged she had “no evidence” of the relationship with the married Zhang, who had gone to great lengths to conceal their goings-on. In a nation known for keeping matters close to the vest, whether with regular sports doping scandals or the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, the cover-up moved quickly. First, there was no evidence of the relationship, then there was no trace of the deleted post or Peng’s recently reactivated social media account, and finally, there were no signs of Peng or even a way to search for her name on the country’s internet. All was well, though — a Chinese government spokesperson remarked on Nov. 3 that Peng’s situation did not constitute a “diplomatic question” worthy of interrogation by other nations, and the Chinese Tennis Association told the WTA that the tennis player, much like the similarly low-profile Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma, is “safe and not under any physical threat.”
Peng’s situation, locked down quickly and offering little chance for reporters in other countries to investigate the truth of her claims, recalls China’s draconian COVID-19 response, with entire city blocks and even cities shut off from the rest of the country, and is the rule rather than the exception. When I interviewed former Chinese Olympian and current Lindenwood University weightlifting coach Ma Jianping in 2018, Ma explained that the success of the Chinese system is that all aspects of training for international sports are centralized and uniform, from the words used to denote specific movements in weightlifting to the standards used in the visual inspection of children with athletic potential. When I asked Ma to address the accusations of Chinese doctor Xue Yinxian, who claimed in 2012 that thousands of Chinese athletes were doped with performance-enhancing drugs during the 1980s and 1990s, he declined to comment, merely repeating that “everything” in the Chinese training system was uniform.
Chen Zhanghao, a doctor for the Chinese Olympic teams at the Los Angeles, Seoul, and Barcelona Olympics who corroborated Xue’s claims, noted that he handled hormone testing and blood doping for Chinese athletes. Both Chen and Xue stated that the athletes had little understanding of what they were being injected with — primarily steroids, given that they were far cheaper and more effective than growth hormones. The East German doping program, which received far more coverage than China’s similar efforts during an overlapping time frame, showed that women, in particular, experienced the greatest short-term benefits from low doses of an inexpensive steroid such as Turinabol, leading to unparalleled dominance in swimming and track and field events, as well as the most significant side effects, such as virilization, delayed puberty and menstruation, and even gender dysphoria so significant that one prominent thrower transitioned from female to male later in life.
The extent of Chinese doping, particularly of female athletes, became clear during the early 1990s, when China’s women’s swimming program, similar to East Germany’s before it, began filling the top ranks at an unprecedented rate before doping allegations and the resulting positive drug tests led to the country being excluded from various pan-Asian competitions in the mid-1990s and a disappointing performance at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. There, on the heels of the People’s Daily publishing an “anti-doping policy” in 1995, the team mustered a single swimming gold from a squad that, based on prior rankings, seemed certain to win at least a half-dozen. Later, at the “must-win” Beijing Olympics in 2008, three gold medal-winning weightlifters, Chen Xiexia, Liu Chunhong, and Cao Lei, were stripped of their medals due to failed drug tests, and gymnast He Kexin, who won a gold medal on the uneven bars and helped China win a team gold, may have been ineligible to compete based on quickly scrubbed Chinese state news stories that reported she was only 14.
As explained by Thomas Hunt in his book Drug Games, a powerful country such as China, unlike the smaller and now-defunct German Democratic Republic, represents a major player on the world scene and gets the same “kid gloves” treatment from the nongovernmental International Olympic Committee that a similar private association such as the NCAA affords major college athletic programs.
None of this bodes well for Peng, whose solid tennis career and accompanying public life may have reached a metaphorical dead end. Whatever heinous outrages compelled her to denounce a powerful man like Zhang will likely be lost to history. Behind the walls of China’s Forbidden City, viruses may leak out, but state secrets almost never do.
Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and co-host of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website: www.oliverbateman.com.
