Chinese tennis athlete accuses former top Communist Party official of sexual assault

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Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai at the Australian Open tennis championship in Melbourne in 2020. In a social media post on Tuesday, she described her alleged assault ten years ago at the hands of one of the country’s most powerful Communist Party officials, Zhang Gaoli.

Bai Xue/Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images

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Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli attends the sixth plenary meeting of the National People’s Congress in 2013.

Feng Li/Getty Images

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Goats and Soda
Court Ruling Deals A Blow To China’s Faltering #MeToo Movement

Tianjin racked up huge amounts of debt to do so, and many of the buildings remain empty, but Zhang was professionally rewarded for the project, moving on in 2012 to become the country’s vice premier — and until 2017, a member of the Communist Party’s powerful ruling body, the Politburo Standing Committee.

Peng was also ascending professionally as China’s top doubles tennis player. In 2013, she won Wimbledon’s doubles championship with her partner, Taiwan’s Hsieh Su-wei. The two women then won the doubles French Open the following year.

Peng says Zhang did not contact her for several years after the initial assault. But in 2018, the year Zhang retired from the government, Peng claims he got back in touch with her and the two began a tumultuous but consensual romantic relationship which ended when he cut off all contact.

China’s faltering #MeToo movement has toppled journalists, academics and workers for non-governmental organizations, but it had not touched China’s ruling Communist Party until now. The movement has floundered in part because of the high legal burden of proof required in courts to prove sexual assault and because of the political pressure brought to bear on accusers.

Peng’s case will almost certainly not be heard in court or even publicly acknowledged..

«I know that for someone of your stature, Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, you have said that you are not afraid,» Peng wrote in her post. «But even if it is like throwing an egg against rock, or if I am like a moth drawn to the flame, inviting self-destruction, I will tell the truth about you.»