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Sunday lunch at Beijing Yibin Guesthouse is noisy and busy, with prospects queuing for the restaurant’s signature dishes – fiery Sichuan noodles and pig’s elbow.
It is a common spot, and the one chosen to disclose Peng Shuai’s whereabouts to the world.
After three weeks of asking “the place is Peng Shuai?” – that is China’s try at a solution.
Movies launched by state media confirmed Peng on the guesthouse. Bizarrely, she and her company point out the date out loud – 5 occasions within the brief clip.
That is not normally what mates on a Saturday evening out do – extra the kind of factor you’d anticipate from a proof of life video.
On Sunday, when Sky Information visits, workers affirm Peng was there. “Sure. She has been right here for meal. Sure, it is our restaurant,” a waitress tells us.
Did she see her personally?
“No, I did not. Yesterday I used to be busy with my work right here. I did not see her. However she had a meal in our restaurant.”
State media adopted up the restaurant video with footage of Peng at a junior tennis event the subsequent morning on the Nationwide Tennis Centre, within the 2008 Olympics zone.
After we slip into the stadium within the early afternoon, there isn’t any signal of her.
A workers member spots us within the stands and escorts us out. However he says she was certainly there: “Sure, I noticed her. However you possibly can’t be right here, sorry.”
It is essentially the most we have seen of Peng Shuai since she accused Zhang Gaoli, a really senior Communist politician, of pressuring her into intercourse.
However none of this was printed by Peng. Chinese language state media, not her, is offering the updates.
And her Weibo account, on which she first printed the allegations, remains to be blocked.
That has left many unconvinced, together with the Ladies’s Tennis Affiliation (WTA), which has been unflinching in demanding extra info from the Chinese language authorities.
After the restaurant video emerged, Steve Simon, the CEO of the WTA, wrote: “Whereas it’s constructive to see her, it stays unclear if she is free and capable of make choices and take actions on her personal, with out coercion or exterior interference. This video alone is inadequate.
“As I’ve said from the start, I stay involved about Peng Shuai’s well being and security and that the allegation of sexual assault is being censored and swept beneath the rug.”
The query “the place is Peng Shuai” has been a shorthand – a rallying cry from the tennis world.
Her look is welcome.
However the greater, trickier questions – about her allegations, about her whereabouts since she made them, about her freedom now – haven’t been answered but.
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