As the WTA and ATP Tour seasons draw to a close this week with finals in Mexico and Italy, the tennis spotlight has focused on China with the women’s governing body on Sunday calling on the Chinese government to investigate allegations of sexual assault made by Peng against a former vice premier.
Chinese tennis star vanishes for accusing country’s former vice premier of sexual abuse
Stacey Allaster, the former-CEO of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) who negotiated millions of dollars of rights deals with China, told Reuters on Monday the tennis world has put Peng Shuai’s health and safety ahead of business.
“Our sport is focusing on the health and safety of Peng Shuai, business is secondary,” Allaster, the Chief Executive, Professional Tennis for the United States Tennis Association (USTA) told Reuters on Monday.
China has been the focus of the WTA’s most aggressive expansion over the last decade and hosted nine tournaments in the 2019 season with a total $30.4 million of prize money on offer. The season-ending WTA Finals had a prize purse of $14 million in 2019 when it was played in Shenzhen for the first time.
However, WTA Chief Executive Steve Simon told various U.S. media outlets on Thursday the tour would consider pulling tournaments worth tens of millions of dollars out of China.
“We’re definitely willing to pull our business and deal with all the complications that come with it,” he told CNN in an interview.
“Because this is certainly bigger than the business. Women need to be respected and not censored.
“We have reached out to her on every phone number and email address and other forms of contact,” he said. “There’s so many digital approaches to contact people these days that we have, and to date we still have not been able to get a response.”
When asked about the purported email received from Peng, Simon questioned its veracity.
“Whether she was coerced into writing it, someone wrote it for her, we don’t know,” said Simon. “But at this point I don’t think there’s any validity in it and we won’t be comfortable until we have a chance to speak with her,” he said.
On the other hand, Hu Xijin, the editor of the Global Times, responded to Simon’s comments on Friday on Twitter, saying “don’t use a coercive tone when expressing any concern to China.
“Perhaps you did it out of goodwill. But you should understand China, including understanding how the system you dislike has promoted the actual rights of the 1.4 billion Chinese,” said Hu, whose newspaper is published by the ruling Communist Party’s official People’s Daily
By Friday, the hashtag #WhereIsPengShuai had racked up over 32m mentions on Facebook’s Instagram, as well as Twitter, which is also blocked in China, according to hashtag analysis website BrandMentions.
In contrast, the topic remains heavily censored in China’s tightly controlled cyberspace
What price, if any, tennis might ultimately pay for demanding an investigation of a former-top government official is uncertain
As China prepares to host the Winter Olympics in Beijing in February, there are calls from global rights groups and others for a boycott over its human rights record. On Thursday, US President Joe Biden confirmed he is mulling a diplomatic boycott of the event, according to CNN.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has declined to comment on Peng’s matter, saying “Experience shows that quiet diplomacy offers the best opportunity to find a solution for questions of such nature. This explains why the IOC will not comment any further at this stage.”
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