In Beijing, Peng Shuai, the Chinese tennis player, gave an interview with the French sports newspaper L’Equipe while a Chinese Olympic official stood nearby. When asked about her sexual assault allegations against a former high-ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party, Shuai said that international concerns about her safety and whereabouts had been “an enormous misunderstanding.”
Shuai also had a face-to-face meeting with the president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, which no doubt is supposed to alleviate international concern for the tennis star. When asked whether or not the IOC believes Peng’s speech is being controlled, the IOC spokesman told the press conference that while they were pursuing “personal and quiet diplomacy,” “It’s [not] for us to be able to judge, in one way, just as it’s not for you to judge either.”
With statements such as these, the CCP’s strategy appears to be working — sow enough ambiguity, confusion, and doubt and eventually, the questions stop altogether.