The controversy surrounding Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai’s accusations of sexual assault against a former top politician continues to cast a shadow of the Beijing Winter Olympic Games in the runup to their official kickoff on Friday.
Within China, however, her case has drawn little attention amid the crushing force of official censorship. Yet it points also to the barriers Chinese women face when raising such claims, both in the courts and within a male-dominated social and political culture that regards any dissent as a threat to the tightly-controlled, Communist Party-dominated system.
