When Peng Shuai, a Chinese tennis star, posted on Chinese social media, on November 2nd, about her relationship with Zhang Gaoli: Corporate Social Responsibility Assignment, DCU, Ireland

When Peng Shuai, a Chinese tennis star, posted on Chinese social media, on November 2nd, about her relationship with Zhang Gaoli, a former vice-premier of China and a member of the Politburo, she did not hide her despair or her
foreboding. Peng’s voice was raw and unsparing, even of herself. She alleged that Gaoli had raped her at his home, and described the painful complexity of the relationship that, she said, followed that encounter. She wrote that they had had a similar relationship years before. She had no proof, she wrote, “just the real experiences of twisted, ruined me.”

Over the years, other high-ranking Chinese officials have been accused of misconduct, but only in Party purges. Peng, who had reached world No. 1 as a doubles player and had won two Grand Slam doubles championships, had been hailed as a hero—the country’s “golden flower,” as one state-sponsored newspaper put it. She was taking an unprecedented risk, and it seemed she knew what might come of it. “Even if I’m an egg-throwing myself at a rock, even if I’m a moth flying at a flame, courting my own destruction,” she wrote, “I will still speak the truth of us.”

The post was up for about ten minutes before the state’s well-oiled machinery of censorship kicked into gear and took it down. Comments on Peng’s account were locked. Screenshots of her sixteen-hundred-word post, which were spreading, were scrubbed. Her name disappeared from Internet searches. Emojis and words related to the case did, too. For a while, even the word “tennis” was blocked. Behind the state’s erasure of Peng’s presence on the Chinese, the Internet was another urgent and troubling question: What would happen to her?