20 December 2021 — Moon of Alabama

The Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai recently gave an interview in which she refuted various lies the New York Times and other media had made about her.

Today the Times responded by creating and publishing more lies about her.

To recap:

In mid November the New York Times had launched a campaign for a boycott of the Olympics in Beijing. As Moon of Alabama reported at that time:

New York Times Invents ‘Sexual Assault’ #MeToo Case To Blame China

There is currently a push for a boycott of the winter Olympics in Beijing. Western media are busy to push for an anti-China angle of the games. Their aim is a political boycott so no one ‘in good standing’ dares to visit them.

On November 2, by timely chance, some well known Chinese sportswoman posted a sad story about the end of her love affair with a once powerful older man on the Chinese social media site Weibo. That post was soon taken down, likely by the woman herself, but that was too late to prevent that the ‘woke’ western media and Olympic boycott campaigners made a hash out of it.

A day after the post was published and unpublished the New York Times mangled the facts to make it into a ‘woke’ anti-China story:

A Chinese Tennis Star Accuses a Former Top Leader of Sexual Assault
Peng Shuai’s accusation against Zhang Gaoli takes the country’s budding #MeToo movement to the top echelons of the Communist Party for the first time.

A diligent reading of the NYT piece revealed that there was zero evidence that a ‘sexual assault’ had happened or that Peng Shuai had ever claimed that there had been one:

Where is the headlined ‘sexual assault’ one might ask. The NYTpiece wont say:

Mr. Zhang retired in 2018, when, according to Ms. Peng’s account, the two resumed a relationship that had begun when he served in Tianjin, which would have been between 2007 and 2012. She said he had first assaulted her after inviting her to play tennis with him and his wife. “I never consented that afternoon, crying all the time,” she wrote, not specifying when exactly the assault occurred.

As it turns out no ‘assault’ had happened. Moreover Peng Shuai never alleged that an ‘assault’ happened. The New York Timesmade that up!

A full English language translation of Peng Shuai’s Weibo post can be found here.

Peng Shuai’s Weibo post said nothing about an ‘assault’ sexual or otherwise against her. Her post was about her long term relation with an older man that had just broken up. She was sad when she wrote her piece. Here is an excerpt:

Romantic attraction is such a complicated thing that explain it clearly. From that day on, I renewed my love for you. Throughout my time with you after that, purely based on our interactions, you were a very good person, and you treated me well. We talking about recent history, as well as ancient eras. You educated me on so many topics, and we had discussions about economics, politics. We never ran out of things to talk about. We played chess, sang, played table tennis, played pool and also played tennis together. We always had endless fun. It was as if our personalities fit perfectly together.

Where please is a ‘sexual assault’ in that?

Two weeks later, at the next stage of its campaign, the New York Times declared that Peng Shuai was ‘missing’.

The women’s professional tennis tour announced Wednesday that it was immediately suspending all tournaments in China, including Hong Kong, in response to the disappearance from public life of the tennis star Peng Shuai after she accused a top Communist Party leader of sexual assault.

With the move, the Women’s Tennis Association became the only major sports organization to push back against China’s increasingly authoritarian government.

However as Moon of Alabama reported Peng Shuai was not missing at all:

Peng Shuai did not disappear from public life. She has sent an email to the WTA which asked to respect her privacy. She has posted pictures of herself and video showed her taking part in a public tennis event and going to dinner in a public restaurant. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has held a 30 minute video conference with her and found her well and happily alive.

Despite that the WTA and especially Steve Simon, its chief executive, have instead gone public with the issue and continue to intrude her privacy.

The IOC in contrast has been discrete and has shown respect for Peng Shuai’s privacy. A short clip of their video call was publishedwith her consent.

And today the IOC announced that it had another video call with Peng Shuai.

A search of the New York Times website finds that the paper since November 2 published 82 news and opinion pieces, editorials and briefings that mention Peng Shuai.

The paper will obviously not let go of the fake story it itself had created.

News today is that Peng Shuai directly refutes the false claims the New York Times and other media had made about her:

Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai has denied saying that a senior Communist Party leader sexually assaulted her despite her November social media post and insisted she is living freely, in her first media interview since her accusations triggered concerns for her safety.

The Lianhe Zaobao Chinese-language newspaper posted a video of Peng in which she said she has been mainly staying at home in Beijing but was free to come and go as she chose.

“First of all, I want to emphasise something that is very important. I have never said nor written anything accusing anyone of sexually assaulting me,” Peng said in the footage apparently filmed on a phone at a sports event in Shanghai on Sunday.

“I would like to emphasise this point very clearly,” she went on.

A video of the seemingly spontaneous 6 minutes long interview can be seen here.

You may wonder what the Times is making of that. Will it continue to lie?

Well, its the New York Times, so of course it will.

Chinese Tennis Player Denies Sexual Abuse Claim, Raising More Questions
Peng Shuai said in an interview with a Singaporean newspaper that she had been misunderstood. She also said, “I’ve been very free all along.”

Peng Shuai, the Chinese tennis star whose account of sexual coercion by a former Communist Party leader ignited weeks of tensions and galvanized calls for boycotts of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, has reversed her assertion that she had been sexually assaulted by the official.

Peng Shuai has of course not “reversed” anything. She had never claimed to have been ‘sexually assaulted’ in the first place. It is only the Times that had made that claim and who is unwilling to ‘reverse’ that.

Ms. Peng made the comments in an interview that was published on Sunday by a Singaporean newspaper. But the retractionappeared unlikely to extinguish concerns about her well-being and suspicions that she had been the target of well-honed pressure techniques and a propaganda campaign by Chinese officials.

There was no “retraction”. The claim had never been made by her. However with that sentence the Times announces that will continue its campaign by keeping its sorry fake ‘news’ tale up.

The controversy erupted last month when Ms. Peng wrote in a post on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, that she had maintained a yearslong, on-and-off relationship with Zhang Gaoli, now 75, a retired Chinese vice premier. She said that in an encounter with him about three years ago, she had “never consented” and that she was “crying all the time.”

That is false. The quotes are fake. Peng Shuai did not write that she was “crying all the time”. She just describes how her former lover wanted to restart the affair with her after a few years pause. As I described her tale while quoting the relevant parts of her post:

[H]e had not forgotten Peng Shuai and as soon as he retired he again contacted her:

About three years ago, Zhang Gaoli vice president, you retired. You asked Dr. Liu at the Tianjin Tennis Centre to contact me, and asked me with play tennis with you at Kang Ming Hotel in Beijing. After we finished playing tennis, you and your wife Kang Jie brought me to your home. Then you took me into your room. Like what happened ten years ago in Tianjin, you wanted to have sex with me.

She did not want to have sex that afternoon and she nowhere claims that they had sex that afternoon. He asked for sex. She said no. Nothing happened. She stayed for dinner:

That afternoon I didn’t agree, and I kept crying. I had dinner with you and auntie Kang Jie together. You said the universe is very very big. The earth is merely a speck of sand in the universe, and us human beings are smaller than even a speck of sand. You said a lot more than that, and the purpose was basically to persuade me to drop my guard. After dinner, I was still not willing to have sex. You said you hated me. You said in those seven years, you never forgot about me, and you will treat me well etc… I was terrified and anxious. Taking into consideration the affection I had for you seven years ago, I agreed… yes, we had sex.

She agreed, they had sex, and a lot of affection for each other …

The Times lies when it claims that Peng Shuai wrote she “never consented”. The Times lies when it claims Peng Shuai wrote that “she was crying all the time”. It was what happened on “that afternoon”. The same day, after dinner, Peng Shuai was in a good mood, had again fallen in love, explicitly “agreed” and had sex with her lover.

After that their happy life continued for more than three years with consent and without crying.

The Times also keeps up its second big lie that Peng Shuai went “missing” even as she only had refuted the claims made about her and only had asked for privacy:

She then abruptly dropped from public view, and global concern for her whereabouts grew. In a written statement later, she appeared to seek to pull back the accusation, and the Women’s Tennis Association and other professional players rallied to her side, saying they believed that her statement had been written under official duress.

Peng Shuai “did not seek to pull back the accusation”. She had never made any. The Times had made it up.

In the fact free disinformation campaign spread by the New York Times one lie begets the other. Every time one of its lies is revealed as such the Times ignores the evidence and adds new lies to continue its disinformation spree. It even misquotes her original posting out of context.

After falsely claiming that Peng Shuai had “reversed” accusations she had never made and “retracted” a story she never had told, after the insertion of false quotes into the story and after repeating the false claim that Peng Shuai went “missing” the Times for a moment reverts to the facts:

In the interview with Lianhe Zaobao, a Chinese-language Singaporean newspaper, Ms. Peng, 35, said, “First, I want to stress a very important point — I never said or wrote that anyone sexually assaulted me.”

“There may have been misunderstandings by everyone,” she said of her initial post on Weibo.

Ms. Peng also denied that she had been under house arrest or that she had been forced to make any statements against her will.

“Why would someone keep watch over me?” she said. “I’ve been very free all along.”

After quoting Peng Shuai’s spontaneous statement, which debunks everything the Times had claimed about her, the paper goes on to put doubt on her very clear explanation:

Her denial drew skepticism from human rights advocates, who have said that Chinese officials appear to have corralled her into rehearsed video appearances.

Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said on Twitter that Ms. Peng’s latest statement was “only deepening concerns about the pressure to which the Chinese government is subjecting her.”

Kenneth Roth is of course a a proven liar so it is only appropriate that the lying New York Times is quoting him.

Do New York Times writers ever wonder why no one trusts whatever their paper claims?