Chinese tennis star Peng says the former deputy prime minister forced him into sex

BEIJING, Nov 3 (Reuters) – Former world number one tennis doubles player Peng Shuai, one of China’s biggest sports stars, has publicly accused the former Chinese prime minister of forcing him into sex on social media later released several years ago. deleted.

Late Tuesday, according to a screenshot of his verified Weibo account, Peng said Zhang Gaoli, who became a member of the Politburo Standing Committee – China’s top decision-making body – forced him into sex and later had an on-off consensus. .

The post was deleted about half an hour after its release, although searches for Peng’s name on China’s tightly controlled Internet increased after the release, and screenshots were shared among private WeChat groups and through iMessage.

China’s Internet is heavily censored, and the privacy of top executives is a particularly sensitive issue.

Peng, who said in the message that he was unable to provide evidence to support his allegations, did not respond to a request for comment sent to his Weibo account. The sports marketing agency APG, which states on its website that it represents him, did not respond to the request for comment.

China’s State Council Information Office did not respond immediately to requests for comments, including Zhang’s requests for comments. When Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, was asked at a regular daily press conference about Weibo Post, he said he was unaware of the matter and that “this is not related to foreign affairs.”

Weibo and Tencent, which operates WeChat, did not respond to requests for comments.

Sexual harassment and assault were rarely presented in public in China for years, until the # MeToo movement began in 2018, when a Beijing university student publicly accused his professor of sexual harassment. It spread to NGOs, the media and other industries.

Weibo’s time-scaling feature showed that the hashtag of Peng Shuo’s name, which is hardly mentioned at all before Tuesday, has garnered more than 20 million views since his release. Discussions about the hashtag intensified around the time of Peng’s release, but later collapsed when related posts were removed.

By early Wednesday, searches for Peng’s name in Weibo yielded no results and discussions on the subject were blocked. Users of WeChat and QQ, another chat app, were prevented from sending screenshots to each other.

Although Peng’s Weibo account remained available while previous messages were visible, comment and resubmit features were disabled.

Zhang, now 75, was the Deputy Prime Minister from 2013 to 2018 and was also the Party Secretary in Shandong Province. He served on the Politburo Standing Committee from 2012 to 2017.

Peng was number one in the world in doubles in 2014, the first Chinese player to achieve the best ranking after winning the doubles championship at Wimbledon in 2013 and the French Open in 2014.

Beijing Newsroom reports; Edited by Neil Fullick

Our standards: Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.