How is disappearing someone in order to intimidate them into operating "on a short leash" anything other than plain evil?

Potentially you are talking about different things, the action and the organization.

I can read

> but I don’t believe they are that plain evil

so that the writer does not think the ccp is just evil, meaning they are more than just evil. So the writer might think the cpp does evil things probably including:

> disappearing someone in order to intimidate them into operating "on a short leash"

but without making the cpp just or only evil.

By "plain evil" I mean a cartoon-like villains that do things (and laugh) just for the sake of being evil. What CCP are doing is playing a game of chess where they are after some end goal, thinking multiple steps in advance. Killing someone this public will have too much bad consequences later.

> without harming them

Without leaving evidence of harm, maybe, but I wouldn't be so forthright as to claim that there is no harm. Torture tactics have become quite advanced and many leave invisible scars.

They most definitely threaten close and extended family members if they don’t comply. That’s the only reason I can see so many people buckling. It’s one thing if you shame/hurt me, but I’d rather shut up before you take it out on anyone close to me.

Peng Shuai can easily come over for Wimbledon or an Olympics and ask for amnesty and get it. But her family are at the CCPs mercy if she does that.

‘We’ll find everyone in your family, your family’s family, and so on, you will never be in peace’. There’s nothing more effective than that.

When somebody defected from the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, his/her relatives would be punished by being fired from good jobs and forbidden to take new ones; usually they had to do some harder and worse paid work. Unless they were members of the Party; in that case, their position was a bit shaken by a defection in family, but they usually could survive in place.

And yeah, their kids were either banned from studying interesting majors, or at least their education became more complicated.

This even concerned highly qualified people such as surgeons.

That is why we should have treated ccp as Soviet Union.

If CCP is as you described, and Peng Shuai worry about her family, she wouldn't speak in the first place. There was nothing happening for her before she made the post online.

To be clear: "safe" in this context generally implies more than merely "physically unharmed". It's quite clear that Jack Ma was coerced into giving up control of Alibaba. It seems likely that Peng Shuai is being similarly pressured.

Having authorities (for example) scream in your face about their ability to wreck your career and that of all your friends and family is not what most people would consider "safe".

Having come from such a regime, 'safe' can also mean 'forced slave labor', or just like the allegation, other forced actions that I would not call safe.

They run a system that literally breaks up people they consider ideologically impure for parts. Look at what happened to tank man.