public life for morning a month after she accused a top communist party leader of sexual assault. an e-mail purportedly from peng was released by chinese state media several weeks later claiming everything is fine. state media then distributed images of peng attending a youth tournament in beijing on november 20th. neither the images nor e-mail could be independently verified. concern over peng s safety has been building and this week reached a breaking point. on wednesday the women s tennis association announced a suspension of all tournaments in china. the communist party s response to peng s accusations seem to have back fired spectacularly. and the fascinating piece in the new york times suggests they could even be fueling a feminist movement in that authoritarian country. joining me now is the author of the op-ed. thanks so much for coming on the show tonight. in your piece you write, quote, the upper echelons of the chinese communist party have been largely impenetrable to scan
for almost half an hour. so i think several million people at least saw it. and then she is accusing one of the most powerful men in china of sexual assault and we never hear about these senior leaders in the commune party ever. we don t know anything about them. those two, the two people involved alone make this a bombshell. yes. you have the reaction now internationally to this bombshell as you rightly put it. wta was applauded for their strong move in boycotting china. other organizations and figures have been far less courageous when it comes to confronting the ccp. the billionaire investor reportedly has billions invested in china. when confronted about the country s human rights abuses on cnbc this past week he said this. as a top down country what they re doing is it is that kind of like strict parent. they behave like a strict
principled opposition to beijing and the fact that the wta is going to pull out all of its tennis tournaments. i mean it stands to lose millions of dollars. unfortunately, that is unusual. but it does add a lot of pressure on beijing and i would also add the fact that there are quite a few famous athletes not just tennis stars who have tweeted with the #whereispengshuai demanding the chinese government produce evidence where she is. one last quick question on that. everyone has been drawn to this famous tennis player understandably but you have china accused of committing crimes against humanity and possibly genocide even against the uighur population, millions of uighurs reportedly missing and a journalist had an interesting tweet this week in which he said, wait, you ll boycott china over one missing tennis star but not 3 million missing uighur muslims. i wonder what your reaction is to that the way in which we as
parent. for that, he was rightly criticized by none other than mitt romney who said his famed ignorance was a sad moral lapse. you have disney afraid of confronting china. they have an episode of the simpsons i believe that refers to the tiananmen square massacre now reportedly missing from disney s streaming service in hong kong. what do you make of the impact of the american investors and corporations seemingly bowing down to china at a major moment like this? so this is very typical. for many years now major corporations have all silenced themselves, they are extremely reluctant to say anything remotely critical of beijing. that, sadly, is typical, which is what makes the stance of the women s tennis association really extraordinary in its