What a Professor’s 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.