One night a couple weeks ago, world-class tennis champion Pung Shui sat around a table full of food and wine at a restaurant in Beijing.

Pung listens intently to her tennis coach nodding and smiling. A couple people are sitting beside her, seemingly friends.

But this was not an ordinary video shared by Pung or her friends.

The video was shared on Twitter by the editor of a Chinese state-run newspaper.

It was part of a seemingly staged leak by the Chinese government to show Pung out and about for the first time in more than two weeks after the world began to ask where is Pung Shui?

We're going concerned about a tennis star who has not been seen or heard from after...

We want to turn out to the deepening mystery of a Chinese tennis star who hasn't been seen since publicly accusing a top Chinese official of sexual assault.

On November 2nd, on the platform Weibo, Pung had posted a detailed account of the alleged sexual assault.

Pung Shui posted about this actually rather long account of what happened between her and the Chinese former vice premier, standing committee member Zhang Gao Li.

That's Xiao Cheng. He's the editor-in-chief of China Digital Times, a California-based publication that monitors media and censorship inside China.

Minutes after Pung published her accusation, it was taken down by the Chinese government, as was any mention of her post.

The word premier, the word tennis, the word Zhang Gao Li, or even a movie star close to that name, everything disappeared.

Xiao says even for a government that's known for its strict censorship, this was swift and thorough.

That level of the censorship only happens when some explosive news, not only the content itself, but the public opinion around it was boiling, that cannot be suppressed enough by simply just deleting the post.

Then on the day she published her accusation, Pung suddenly vanished from the public eye. Xiao says other public figures have criticized the Chinese Communist Party and then disappeared, but Pung's case has attracted more attention.

This is different. Pung Shui is living in China. She is not only a sports star celebrity, but what she actually accused.

The Chinese Communist Party official Zhang Gao Li. No one had ever directly and publicly accused a high-ranking Communist Party official in China of sexual assault.

Never a victim could expose those people directly. So Pung Shui in that sense is really, really brave.

A couple weeks later, state-run media published videos and images of Pung like the ones of her at that Beijing restaurant, but many don't believe that Pung is acting independently.

People with women's tennis association, they received emails allegedly from Pung Shui saying she was safe.

I would characterize them as orchestrated at this point in time.

That's Steve Simon, head of the WTA, speaking to CNN. And here's where the case takes another unusual turn.

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