Even folks who don’t follow tennis now know who Peng Shuai is, and may be contemplating what her situation means for international relations and democracy.
Peng is a veteran professional tennis player from the Peoples Republic of China, who was briefly ranked No. 1 in doubles in 2014.
November 2, Peng alleged that a former PRC senior vice premier sexually assaulted her three years ago. Within twenty minutes that tweet (on Wenbo) disappeared. So did Peng. Worried friends and tennis officials reached out to her. Nothing. State-controlled media aired unconvincing videos of Peng and said she wanted to spend time with her family and hoped people would respect her privacy.
An International Olympic Committee official says he talked to Peng by video, with a Chinese olympic official. He says she’s fine. Of course, the IOC’s overriding priority is to hold the Winter Olympics in February as smoothly and grandly as possible. In Beijing. Unsurprisingly, the IOC statement omitted Peng’s allegations, which Chinese media euphemize as “the things people talk about.”
A former U.S. president and a former New York governor wish they could so easily disappear harassed women and silence those pesky reporters.
Peng is being “reeducated.” Uighurs and Tibetans get reeducated by the thousands. (Traveling around China long ago, we passed through a remote area experiencing plague. When we reached Lhasa, a young British man sent a story on the plague to the newspaper he worked for. The government came for him. For days, they kept him all day in the police station, until he confessed his error. He had embarrassed China. They couldn’t do to him whatever they’re doing to Peng; and they can’t do to Peng, probably, what they are doing to tens of thousands.
You can’t dissent. You are better off if you are Han, not some lesser ethnicity. Whether from racism or some misguided view of communism, the PRC is destroying the ethnic culture and religions of Tibetans, Uighurs, and others – reeducating them in camps.
We should contemplate Peng’s fate. Out country should reconsider helping the PRC use the Olympics to glorify China. We should ask whether “business as usual” is appropriate. (These are tough issues. If we’d boycotted the 1936 Berlin Olympics, we’d never have seen video of Jesse Owens leaving Aryans in his dust.)
Contemplating Peng reminds us of how different China is from us – and how we’re similar. We too are still battling to outgrow racism and sexism. We laugh at how ludicrous the Chinese government’s lies sound; but you can get away with a lot, if you’ve silenced independent journalism. Here, it’s different; but we just had a president who rarely deigned to make his lies plausible, and who largely got away with absurd falsehoods. On January 6, and since, in state capitols around our nation, our democracy has been under attack.
If you’re a Republican, maybe you sympathize. Some Republicans believe, as firmly as some Chinese officials believe in their Party, that they’re doing the right thing for our country by limiting citizens’ participation in democracy. They’re “patriots.”
But democracy is critical. Ours is endangered. Yes, the electoral college, corruption, gerrymandering, and voter suppression have substantially limited democracy; but what we have matters. Without it, we are China. Or Brazil. We can’t let even “our side” toss it aside for shortterm partisan gain.
We have much to give thanks for; but if we sleep we could quickly lose much.
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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 28 November 2021, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 FM – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will presently be available on demand on KRWG’s site.]
[By the way, Happy Thanksgiving! There’s a lot wrong with some of our most common ideas about this holiday, but gratitude is worth celebrating, and practicing. I know it’s getting trendy these days to point this out, but gratitude is not only a graceful attitude, it’s incredibly healthy, and both personal observation and scientific reports tell me it makes us happier.]
[Peng Shuai may not feel so grateful these days. I wish her freedom. As I suggest in the column, her well-publicized plight is important, but partly because it symbolizes the repression many our suffering. Read first-hand accounts of Uighurs and Tibetans.)
This is not the place for me to say much about my personal insight into all this, from various sources including travels in China and Tibet (and among the Uighurs) many years ago. (My travels, in 1985-88, were much closer in time to the Chinese invasion of Tibet and to the Cultural Revolution than to 2021.) I loved China. From what I saw first hand, and the direct contradictions between what good people who hated the Chinese Government and good people who praised the Chinese Government, I wanted to learn more, and did; and I portrayed some of it in a novel.
Soon
I’ll post on my blog more about that experience, and what I
learned. This morning, every time I start to summarize it I find myself rapidly and passionately writing more than I have time to write or you have time to read this morning.
I will say that I saw, and heard harrowing first-hand tales from folks who’d experienced it, the terrible pain and devastation the Cultural Revolution had caused; and I came to a better understanding of the Chinese invasion of Tibet.
(On one occasion, we traveling through a remote western area experiencing plague. When we reached Lhasa, a young British man sent a story on the plague to the newspaper he worked for. The government came for him. For days, they kept him all day in the police station, until he confessed his error. He had embarrassed China, but he was a wai guo ren. A British citizen. They couldn’t do to him whatever they’re doing to Peng; and they can’t do to Peng, probably, what they are doing to tens of thousands.)
However,
I say all this without forgetting the scale of the problem Mao and
his cohorts faced when they suddenly won their underdog fight against
a
warlord (Chiang Kai-shek) well supported by the U.S. Even
in their treatment of the Tibetans, which I abhor, there was more
good intention mixed in with the self-interested repression than most
realize.]
1985 - Peasant
[Sorry
if I too often mention the hope of preserving our democracy. It is
under attack. The attack is bold, brazen, and dangerous. I worry
about its effects. And as long as folks pursue voter suppression and
anti-democratic policies, while claiming loudly to be “patriots,”
I guess I’ll keep mentioning that they are being misled.]
1985 The Potala 
1985 "Whose Dreams?"
Photo Notes:
Peasant: in beautiful countryside, I guessed he was carrying so proudly a photos of his father and mother, or his grandparents; but this was recently "rehabilitated" former President Li Shao-qi, I think, and the portrait we can't see may have been Ching Ling. His pride in the portrait is clear. His clothing was identical to 80% of the other citizens of China, except that the shirt also came in khaki; it was cheap clothing; but to the extent the government could ensure it, everyone was clothed, and housed, and fed. Unlike more democratic countries where one might see dozens of beggars and then a fat, rich family driving by in a fancy car. Despite horrible mistakes, the Chinese Government was trying.
The Potala: It's a beautiful building in a beautiful land. It was both the seat of government and the palace the Dalai Lamas lived in, until the current Dalai Lhama, now a wonderful old man, fled from the Chinese as a 14-year-old boy, in March 1959. In his bedroom I noticed a drinking cup that was a skull, a reminder of death's imminence. ironically, this view was from near the toilet in the local hotel we stayed in.
"Whose Dreams" expresses more than I can put into words. The bicyclist is Tibetan. The Potala, though still visited by devout pilgrims, is now sort of a tourist attraction for Chinese and foreigners. Across the street from the sacred Potala are photo backdrops such as this one, which expresses a sort of Chinese paradise: sufficient wealth to own a TV, and a great view of the beautiful countryside near Guilin (not far from where I met that peasant) which is famous in China. Tibetans were both resentful of the Chinese and, sometimes, envious of them. They were angry, but impotent. Whether this gentleman was envying the view of Guilin, disgusted by Chinese commercialization of the Dalai Lhama's home, or just taking a break was more than I could ask, since both of us spoke lousy Mandarin.
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