The Chinese government has become extremely effective in controlling what the country’s 1.4 billion people think and talk about.
But influencing the rest of the world is a different matter, as Peng Shuai has aptly demonstrated.
Chinese state media and its journalists have offered one piece of evidence after another to prove the star Chinese tennis player was safe and sound despite her public accusation of sexual assault against a powerful former vice premier.
One Beijing-controlled outlet claimed it obtained an email she wrote in which she denied the accusations.