The Women’s Tennis Association will return to China this autumn despite concluding that it could not confirm the safety of star player Peng Shuai, who alleged in 2021 that a former high-ranking Chinese Communist party official had sexually assaulted her.

Peng’s swiftly deleted allegation on social media set off China’s biggest scandal of the #MeToo era. The WTA withdrew its competitions from China and Hong Kong from December 2021, asking for a full, independent investigation into the player’s claims and assurances that Peng is “free, safe, and not subject to censorship”.

Peng has rarely been seen in public since, aside from a handful of co-ordinated appearances in China, including the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

The tour said on Thursday that “the situation has shown no sign of changing. We have concluded we will never fully secure those goals and it will be our players and tournaments who ultimately will be paying an extraordinary price for their sacrifices.”

The WTA added: “We have been in touch with people close to Peng and are assured she is living safely with her family in Beijing.”

At the time the tour pulled out of China, WTA chair Steve Simon said “if powerful people can suppress the voices of women and sweep allegations of sexual assault under the rug, then the basis on which the WTA was founded — equality for women — would suffer an immense setback”.

Peng has since walked back the claims from her initial post on Weibo, telling Singapore’s Lianhe Zaobao newspaper and France’s L’Équipe that no one had sexually assaulted her. The French sport daily, which met Peng in Beijing along with a Chinese Olympic Committee official, said its questions to Peng had been vetted.

Before the uproar around Peng, China had been one of the WTA’s most important growth markets, with roughly a fifth of its global tournaments contested in the country. In 2018, the WTA signed a 10-year contract to host its marquee WTA Finals in Shenzhen.

The tour has worked to find commercial support elsewhere. The WTA last month received a $150mn investment from CVC Capital Partners, giving the private equity group a 20 per cent stake in a new commercial venture between the two entities.

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