While the tennis world obsesses over Emma Raducanu’s coach, the Guadalajara results and groupings in Turin, we have a real crisis. In short strokes. Last week, on Nov. 2, the recently retired WTA veteran Peng Shuai took to Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, to give an account of being sexually assaulted by Zhang Gaoli, a former high-ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party.
The account has since been taken down and comments have been disabled. And no one within China can read about this. Any and all reference to this matter—which has been covered everywhere from the BBC to The New York Times to Al Jazeera—has been scrubbed from Chinese search engines.