China Trots Out Peng Shuai to Cheerlead U.S. Defector

Chinese tennis player and three-time Olympic competitor Peng Shuai, who disappeared for weeks after accusing a high-ranking Communist official of raping her and has lately been recanting her allegations under the watchful eye of regime operatives, was parked in the stands on Tuesday to cheer American defector Eileen Gu as she won a gold medal for Beijing.

The sports world reeled in shock when Peng was snatched from public view in November, immediately after she wrote a social media post accusing former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of raping her ten years ago. Her post was deleted by Communist censors shortly after she wrote it.

Peng remained incommunicado despite increasingly insistent demands from human rights activists, star tennis players, and the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) to speak with her.

When the Chinese government finally decided to let her reappear, her first contact was with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which has several times vouched for her safety and well-being, even though she clearly remains under state control. This created a conflict between the IOC and WTA, which canceled tennis events in China and said it remained unsatisfied that Peng was acting of her own free will.

Under close supervision by state operatives clumsy enough to get themselves photographed in the mirror behind her, Peng gave a bizarre interview to a French newspaper on Monday in which she denied accusing Zhang of assaulting her, and said all impressions to the contrary were a “misunderstanding.” The French journalist who conducted the interview denounced it as “propaganda from the Chinese Olympic Committee.”

Peng was conspicuously seated in the sparsely-populated stadium Tuesday, wearing an Olympic cap and a coat emblazoned with the Chinese Communist flag, when California-born defector Eileen Gu won a gold medal in the Big Air skiing competition, giving Beijing its third gold medal of the Winter Games. 

“I just met her, she was here sitting in the stadium,” IOC President Thomas Bach told Reuters. “She was among the athletes, and I had the opportunity to meet with a number of athletes from Switzerland and from Germany and the U.S.”

“She was sitting there and we had the opportunity to talk and now she has to go to the quarantine, she told me, she will leave now the closed loop,” Bach added. The “closed loop” is the system created by the Chinese government to separate Olympic venues from the rest of Beijing.

Gu said she was honored to have Peng in the audience when she won her gold medal.

“It’s a big honor when athletes from different sports, you know, especially if more widely known sports like tennis come paying attention to smaller sports like free skiing, I think it gives us an amazing platform to hopefully spread our small sport to the rest of the world,” Gu said.

“I’m really grateful that she’s happy and healthy and out there doing her things again,” Gu said of Peng.

Newsweek noted that Gu did not appear to directly interact with Peng at the stadium.

Incidentally, while Gu has been coy about whether she renounced her American citizenship to compete on Team China, Newsweek pointed out that the People’s Republic of China does not recognize dual citizenship, and after Gu won her gold medal, the Chinese Communist Party published a statement calling her a “Beijing athlete” who “won honor for the country.”