纽约时报中文网 - 英文原版-英What a Professors Firing Shows About Sexual Harassment in China

In the video, the Chinese graduate student stared straight into the camera as she spoke. She wore a mask, but in a bold move, made clear who she was by holding up her identification card. Then she issued an explosive accusation: A prominent professor at a top Chinese university had been sexually harassing her for two years.

Shortly after the woman posted the video on her Chinese social media pages on Sunday, it drew millions of views and set off an online outcry against the professor she named, Wang Guiyuan, then the vice-dean and Communist Party head of Renmin University’s School of Liberal Arts in Beijing.

The next day, Renmin University fired Mr. Wang, saying that officials had investigated the student’s allegations and found that they were true.

The swift response by the university reflected the growing pressure that Chinese academic institutions have come under to curb sexual harassment on campus. In recent years, several schools have been accused of not doing enough to protect their students from tutors and professors who preyed on them.

At the same time, in denouncing the professor, the university and commentaries in state media that followed studiously avoided describing his conduct as sexual harassment. Instead, they depicted it as a moral failing, using language that feminist activists and scholars say points to a strategy of deflection that turns the attention away from victims.

“If they have to avoid saying ‘sexual harassment,’ it’s very hard to imagine that they take sexual violence seriously,” said Feng Yuan, an academic and the founder of an anti-domestic violence help line in Beijing.

In her video, the graduate student, who identified herself as Wang Di, said that Mr. Wang, her doctoral supervisor, had demanded in 2022 to have sex with her, then abused her physically and verbally after she refused.

“Because I rejected him, he retaliated over the past two years, threatening that I would not graduate,” she said in the hourlong video. She included audio clips of what she described as recordings of his attempts to force himself on her. She also said she had text messages that backed up her claims.

Renmin University responded by saying it had verified the student’s allegations and dismissed the professor, whom it identified only by his last name, Wang. In a statement, the school said the professor had “seriously breached the party discipline, school rules and the professional ethics of teachers.”

Mr. Wang, the professor, did not reply to an email seeking comment. Ms. Wang, the student, also did not respond to a request for comment.

The university also said he had been expelled by the Communist Party, and the local police department said it was investigating the situation. An online commentary about the case in the People’s Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece, hailed the quick action, saying: “Black sheep cannot remain in the herd and the reputation of top schools cannot be destroyed.”

Feminist activists said that school administrators were often more concerned about protecting the reputation of the school than the rights of the victim. Schools in China have long encouraged students to keep quiet about such allegations. In this case, the activists said, administrators may have had little choice but to take action, given the evidence that the student had collected and the widespread scrutiny on the school.

The Chinese authorities have tried to avoid addressing the harm that had been done to the victim, said Lu Pin, a prominent Chinese feminist activist. “It is not a question of rights, it is not a question of safety, but a problem of violating morality and the politics of the party-state,” she said. This was to avoid being seen as encouraging students to seek legal redress, she said.

The avoidance of the term “sexual harassment” has been a feature in past cases as well. In 2023, Southwest University in Chongqing fired a professor after a doctoral student said he had pressured her into having sex with him. In the university’s announcement, it described the teacher as having had an “improper sexual relationship” with a student, a term that scholars like Ms. Feng say is problematic because it implicates the victim as well.

Even though sexual harassment by university teachers of students is officially described as a breach of professional ethics, the tendency within academia was to downplay the issue, said Lao Dongyan, a law professor from Tsinghua University, in a post on Weibo.

Yet “the environment around me seems to collectively assume it a trivial matter, or even an inevitable love affair for the men,” she wrote in the post, which has been liked nine million times.

That Ms. Wang had to resort to going public with her complaint at the cost of her privacy reflected how weak reporting mechanisms on campus can be, Ms. Lu said.

After the university’s response, Ms. Wang posted a statement online saying she was satisfied by the school’s response and appreciative of its concern for her well-being. Her original video was no longer available, though it was not immediately clear who took it down.