Drew Pavlou describes himself as a human rights activist, larrikin and adventurer from Australia. Many would also consider him a young troublemaker. But his campaign to draw attention at Wimbledon this week to the disappearance of Chinese former tennis player Peng Shuai is a timely reminder that we move on too fast.
And he deserves credit for that.
Where is Peng Shuai? Why hasn’t the former doubles champion been mentioned by anyone, as they devour Pimm’s, strawberries and cream on the Wimbledon green?
Is she safe? What does this say about our commitment to young women speaking out about sexual abuse, the first public Me Too accusation against a senior Chinese Communist Party official? Or how we see a country that seems hell-bent on hiding it?
In November 2021, Peng Shuai accused China’s former vice-premier Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault. She posted an essay detailing the allegation on a Chinese social media platform. The accusation disappeared in minutes, was quickly removed from search engines, and Peng herself went missing soon after.
Since then, we’ve had subterfuge, photos and videos that carry no verification of her safety, and performances that human rights authorities can only describe as “staged”. Peng reemerged months later to retract her accusation — after contact with Chinese authorities. This attempt to recant has been dismissed by experts across the board.
And yet under balmy blue skies, with the Royals in attendance, the Wimbledon show rolled on.
Drew Pavlou — and I’ll declare I know him, although not well — did what the rest of us should be doing: he demanded an answer.
Pavlou was evicted from the men’s final for protesting against Peng Shuai’s treatment. But just consider how his protest was handled. He was tackled to the ground and dragged out of the stands by security. “Just got thrown down the stairs by Wimbledon security for holding up a sign saying #WhereIsPengShuai,” he told his social media followers. “One of them smashed my head into the wall.”
Pavlou says he tried to make his complaint between games, and silently held the poster up, but once he was crash-tackled, he shouted his demand so people could hear her name and so it would be broadcast.
Good on him. Tell me how that behaviour is worse than those chaining themselves to roads, tunnels and cars in our capital cities, preventing front-line workers and parents from making appointments. Or why the drunk woman who repeatedly heckled during the men’s final wasn’t dealt with in the same way.
We should all feel ashamed that Pavlou, a 23-year-old from Brisbane who ran for the Senate as an anti-communist independent candidate, led this charge, not us.
Why won’t Wimbledon acknowledge Peng’s existence? Why are we content for her disappearance to simply be a story back in November 2021, one that carries no lessons for us today — about China or Me Too accusations against senior officials of that country?
“The Chinese government tried to wipe Peng Shuai from the face of the Earth because she came out and accused a top CCP official of sexual assault,” Pavlou said yesterday.
“And the saddest thing is that they have almost been successful in making everyone forget about her. I just don’t want people to forget.”
This serves as an example of how we just don’t listen enough to our Gen Zs, or the messages they want broadcasted. But it also shows how quickly we are happy to move on from a cause — and perhaps what we think of the accusations of one young woman and the mighty power that has tried to bury them.
As a democratic socialist (and as someone who voted for the Communist Party of Australia several times in the past) myself, I totally condemn the way that the Chinese Government has treated Peng Shuai. This behavior by the (so-called) Communist Government of China (really a full-on nationalist government which runs a capitalist economy) is unforgivable. I know that if I was in China and I dared to speak out in the same way there that I can and do here, on this or other issues, then I would be arrested in a very short time.
Thanks for the article, Madonna. Your piece prompted me to do a bit of checking on this issue. I came across this 60-Minutes (Australia) clip which might provide a bit of extra background. (Message to the appeasers and excuse-makers for the Chinese government, please don’t waste your time, (with me anyway) disparaging this report because it was produced by a commercial television channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwY2_rsGVkI
Of course her allegations were shut down. They were slanderous. Let’s just have a look at the legal situation shall we?
Under Article 246 of the Criminal Law in the PRC, “those openly insulting others, using force or other methods or those fabricating stories to slander others, if the case is serious, are to be sentenced to 3 years or fewer in prison, put under criminal detention or surveillance or deprived of their political rights”.
Allegations of criminal conduct made online are slander (if unproven) and are regularly removed from public forums not only in China but around the world. You need to lodge a formal complaint to Public Security in China rather than a vague post on Weibo.
Before the China haters and Western Hypocrisy Denialists carry on about the “brutality” of the Chinese Government, I suggest that you review the slander laws of a nearby so-called “liberal democracy”, Japan, where there is no defence for public slander and those of Singapore as well.
Under Article 230-1 of the Criminal Code of Japan: “(1) A person who defames another by alleging facts in public shall, regardless of whether such facts are true or false, be punished by imprisonment with or without work for not more than three (3) years or a fine of not more than 500,000 yen.
Under Japanese law, this includes Companies not just individuals. And yes, Journalists have no protection from Defamation in Japan.
In Singapore, defamation is a criminal offence under section 499 of the Penal Code. This means that the police can take action and arrest the perpetrator for defamation if there is sufficient evidence of such transgression.
In addition, defamation is also a wrongful act that can give rise to civil action under the tort of defamation and the Defamation Act.
The point is, different countries have different laws and approaches to “the West” is all and China’s approach is no different to other Asian countries. Australia’s laws stop at our borders.
Yeah, facts sort of are forgotten when a good propaganda story is to be had.
Yes. The typical “never let the facts get in the way of a good story” approach.
In any fair system, allegations of misbehaviour would be tested in court, not “shut down.”
The only trouble is Woopwoop, we are not dealing with a fair system here.
That was the point. Slanderous allegations need to be shut down as they have not been proven in court. No formal complaint has been lodged with Public Security for investigation.
Heavens lex, you have just about got me on the verge of tears and remorse!
I wonder just how far Peng Shuai would have gotten had she taken her accusations to a Chinese Court? (I am sure that you know the answer to that question as well as I do.) Also, why would she make ‘spurious’ claims in the first place? She would know better than any westerner what the consequences of her actions would be.
With your knowledge of the way the Chinese system operates lex, you would well know that it is common for senior Chinese Chinese politicians and business leaders to be having affairs (apparently usually of a mutually consensual nature). Those senior Chinese officials are often a ‘law unto themselves’. Although, as I understand it, apparently there is no shortage of women who are prepared to ‘throw themselves’ at the rich, as well as the powerful in China. And yes lex, I am fully aware that that phenomenon is not unique to China.
In the meantime, until I am persuaded otherwise, (and you post fails the test there), I will support the campaign to clarify the position regarding Peng Shuai.
Finally lex, while I have your attention, may I be so bold as to suggest a couple of good books for you to read in your spare time. Firstly Clive Hamilton’s Silent Invasion – China’s Influence in Australia, and secondly Hidden Hand, jointly written by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg. I am sure that you would find some fascinating detail in them.
You can support whatever you like. It’s complete BS and, quite frankly, none of the Wests business. Remember the “Dubai Princess”? Complete bollocks as it turned out. I have dealt with the media first hand and simply don’t trust them at all.
May I also suggest to you something to read. “The Other Side of the Story” by Nury Vittachi. Just a good example of what is represented in the West versus actual events. I was a witness to some of the actual events and they are accurately portrayed in this book.
For a somewhat different perspective on this, I present https://johnmenadue.com/the-peng-shuai-affair-the-wests-reaction-should-be-laughed-out-of-court/ – complete with quotes from the original social media post.
Reading the ABC article linked by the author makes it pretty clear that how one might interpret the original post is a lot more complex than has been presented in pretty much all the media discussions around it (including on the ABC) – it’s certainly not clear that the only reasonable reading is one of assault and abuse. It’s also not clear to me what Peng Shuai would have to do to convince the media that what she was saying after her alleged disappearance ended was the truth, or that she’s actually safe and healthy – just about every discussion of this in the media comes with big warnings about how she’s probably being coerced into saying whatever the CPC wants. It makes for a very one-sided presentation of what appears to be quite a nuanced situation.
This article really doesn’t help, either. It makes no attempt to address any of the complexity raised in the ABC piece that the author considered relevant enough to link to herself – instead of critically examining the case, it simply repeated the more sensationalist claims about Peng Shuai’s treatment, using them to frame the author’s claim that the world is just choosing to forget about her because it’s inconvenient or uncomfortable. And to help with that it picks the case of a self-described anti-communist campaigner who’s basically rehashing lines that are now more than six months old and fail to address /any/ of the stuff that happened since the original story broke – “Where is Peng Shuai?” lost a lot of its relevance when she both showed up in public /and/ spoke to various tennis officials. The fact that she’s not playing in western tournaments might be a valid question, but that’s not the question implied by that slogan – the slogan is very tightly coupled to the early claims that she was “disappeared”.
And the article isn’t helped by trying to frame this as some kind of generational thing, either. Sure, this guy’s one of those “Gen Z” kids, but he ran for the senate on an anti-communist platform – he might be about the same age as someone like Grace Tame, but his priorities are . . . well, let’s just say they’re a bit out of whack with the majority of his age group. I have no idea what Grace Tame thinks about Peng Shuai’s case, but I’m pretty sure whatever her thoughts are they wouldn’t be driven by anti-communist sentiments.
Thanks for that link himi. I read the Peals and Irritations article by Greg Clark. It is interesting. It highlights the complexity of the case. I will be watching future developments with interest.
Peng Shuai confirmed in February in an interview with some French magazine that she had. retired from tennis. She had played mostly in China since around 2017 from what I can see.
Thanks for that – I’d missed it in amongst the noise, though I have to admit after reading that article by Gregory Clark I didn’t really have the stomach to keep chasing the story in the western media . . .
The coverage of this is pretty much par for the course regarding China, though – there’s precious little critical engagement with sources, and far too much time spent discounting any information coming from a Chinese perspective. Everyone’s thinking seems to be framed around China (and particularly the Chinese government) being illegitimate somehow – nothing they say can be trusted, any time anyone says something bad about them it must be true, and everything they say has to be interpreted in the worst possible light.
As an example, I was reading another article talking about changes in China’s official stance about LGBT+ matters, and it talked about official documents referring to “girly-men”. Now, I don’t know much about Chinese official language use, but it seems like a serious stretch to choose /that/ particular reading for an official document . . . the article, though, didn’t even pause to question the translation, it just threw it out there and moved on. As a reader I have no idea if the translation was reasonable, in which case the article was saying something important, or unreasonable, in which case it was largely rubbish. At least the ABC went to the trouble of asking Chinese academics to provide a more nuanced view of Peng Shuai’s post – it confirmed my suspicion that the choices made by the translator have a lot of impact on the English reading, and particularly things like the tone or emotional nuance.
This isn’t helped when basically every single “expert” presented in the media is saying the same kind of things, whether they’re from the left or the right – it’s either egregious groupthink on the part of the media, or somehow the Chinese government really /is/ running the country like some kind of evil cult, and the Chinese immigrants I work with that seem like perfectly sane, sensible, friendly and rational people are some kind of sleeper agents out to do . . . something. It’s enough to do your head in, it really is.
Agree. Nuance is quite often overlooked. This is an interesting article, on a different subject, but reveals its importance.
https://johnmenadue.com/when-words-matter-reviewing-the-wong-wang-meeting/
Yes, that’s /exactly/ what we should be seeing in any serious article discussing China (or any other non-English speaking country, to be honest), particularly when referencing official documents. Critically addressing the source material! Something I thought they taught journalists on day one . . .
Just popping in to agree with Lex and Himi. I am astounded with some of the readers who have no concept of nuance. Even withing groups and areas in Aus there are nuances. How can people who live here not know this.
Then the added dimension of a different country is far more complex. Ignorance of nuance is part of the foundation for racism.
I cannot repeat the thoughts I have when I read some of the rubbish.
The tantrums of tennis stars are ignored, but the lone, mostly silent protester is ejected the moment he’s noticed.
Leave the poor woman alone. She doesn’t need this China hater bothering her.
Liked his claim while doing some anti-China activist activity at QU that he was not linked to the IPA (when nobody asked or said anything), then turns up on IPA media i.e. ‘Young IPA Podcast’ standing up for Hong Kong….; just saying.
Where is Peng Shuai? Ask Mike Pompeo. I’m sure he’d be delighted to tell you :-).
Mr “We lied, we cheated, we stole”?
He’s a clout chasing ghoul. We most definitely should not be giving him any attention whatsoever.