Tennis star abused by former Chinese Vice-Premier, but Beijing puts the computer gag
Absolute power, in a system in which the web and social media are the main information tool, can erase even the most shameful of scandals involving the political summit, and this fact is having plastic representation in China.
Former double tennis number one and leading Chinese sports star, Peng Shuai, accused former Chinese vice premier Zhang Gaoli of abusing her a few years ago, all in a Weibo post that appeared on the official verified account. of the tennis player. A harsh accusation that, however, remained visible online for only an hour, before being canceled. Zhang Gaoli was a member of the Politburo Central Committee until his retirement in 2018 and right-hand man of Prime Minister Li Keqiang.
Peng did not respond, or could not respond, to requests to comment on his post. Furthermore, in the post itself he stated that he could not show objective evidence of the violence suffered. However, his name has skyrocketed among those cited in research in China, even after the cancellation of the complaint post. Weibo and Tencent, which runs WeChat, did not respond to requests for comment.
Sexual harassment and assault was rarely addressed in public in China for years until some sort of #MeToo movement began in 2018, when a university student from Beijing publicly accused her professor of sexual harassment. The request for greater protection of women then spread to every level.
The hashtag containing the name of Peng Shuai skyrocketed last Tuesday, with over 20 million views, only to collapse when a nice passage of censorship deleted all related posts on the Weibo site. In the end, it takes very little to silence the accusations on the web: just delete them all.
At the beginning of Wednesday, searches for Peng's name on Weibo yielded no results and discussions on the subject were stalled. Users of WeChat and QQ, another chat app, were prevented from sending screenshots to each other. End of ethical problems …
All this should make us think: in a world where everything is social, a simple click is enough to silence everything. Any scandal, any abuse, any violence disappear because that is what power wants. First of all, we must safeguard our own freedom of communication, without which we are blind and dumb.
Now who knows if the various Cirinnà and Boldrini and Argento will attack Beijing head-on …
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The article Tennis star abused by former Chinese Vice-Premier, but Beijing puts the computer gag comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/star-del-tennis-abusata-da-ex-vice-premier-cinese-ma-pechino-mette-il-bavaglio-informatico/ on Thu, 04 Nov 2021 08:17:24 +0000.