Four years after the WTA Tour pulled its flagship tournament out of China and boycotted holding events there for 18 months, the biggest women’s team tennis competition is moving to the country for the next three years.
The Billie Jean King Cup Finals will take place in Shenzhen from 2025, with the International Tennis Federation holding discussions with the WTA Tour over changing its usual November slot in the tennis calendar in order to attract more of the best players to compete. Under the current schedule, the best women’s players would play a string of tournaments in China, Japan and Hong Kong, travel to Saudi Arabia for the WTA Tour Finals and then back to China to represent their countries.
“We’re excited to be there,” ITF president David Haggerty said in an interview Thursday. Shenzhen hosted the WTA Tour Finals from 2019 until November 2021, when tennis player Peng Shuai accused a high-ranking Chinese government official of sexually assaulting her on Weibo, a social media network. When asked whether Peng’s wellbeing was a consideration in moving the BJK Cup Finals to Shenzhen, Haggerty said that he had spoken with Peng, who has been largely absent from public life since 2021, “a couple of times.”
Haggerty did not specify when those conversations occurred, but said that they had convinced him of her safety and wellbeing. China, the home country of Olympic gold medalist and top-5 WTA Tour player Zheng Qinwen — and some 20 million tennis players — is an attractive destination for one of the ITF’s signature events, Haggerty said.
“This event reflects the incredible progress of tennis in China and highlights how women’s sports continue to thrive here,” Zheng said in a press release announcing the move.
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In November 2021, Peng described an alleged assault by Zhang Gaoli, a former vice premier in the Chinese government.
“I was so scared that afternoon,” she wrote. “I never gave consent, crying the entire time.”
She also described having an on-and-off relationship with Zhang, in posts that were quickly deleted. Peng then disappeared from public life, and within weeks, then-WTA chairman Steve Simon called for an investigation into her welfare. When that did not occur, Simon announced the suspension of all WTA events in China, including the 10-year, $140million (£113.5m) deal for the Tour Finals.
The events occurred about two months before the start of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, where Peng appeared briefly, but always accompanied by Chinese officials. She did not speak. After no movement from China, the WTA ended the boycott in spring 2023, and Shuai described the situation as a “misunderstanding” in a controlled interview with French newspaper L’Equipe.
In response, China pulled the WTA Tour Finals contract. The organization signed a three-year deal to host the event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in spring 2024, and two years after the end of the boycott, Shenzhen will now host women’s tennis again.
Ilana Kloss, the wife and business partner of Billie Jean King, whose company has a marketing partnership with the ITF, traveled to China earlier this month and supported the decision. King, who also supported the WTA’s moving the Tour Finals to Saudi Arabia, has long taken the position that engagement with countries that don’t share the same human rights values as Western nations is a way to bring about change.
“Billie is thrilled,” Kloss said in an interview. “She’s never been to China.”
Eight nations will participate in the Billie Jean King Cup Finals and compete for prize money that reached $9.6 million last year, equal to the men’s event, the Davis Cup.
China, as the host nation, and Italy, as the defending champion, qualify automatically. Other nations will in qualifying competitions in early April.
(Fred Lee / Getty Images)
