Two Nanchang Uni deans fired over sexual assault allegations

Two deans at Nanchang University in Jiangxi province have been dismissed from their posts following accusations that one of the professors tried to cover-up his colleague’s serial sexual abuse of female students.

On Tuesday, a Weibo user called @喝咖啡的猫11 (@Hekafeidemao11) published a post which told the story of a graduate student given the pseudonym Xiaorou (小柔) who had allegedly been sexually molested and abused by Zhou Bin (周斌), deputy dean of the university’s Academy of Chinese Classics. It’s not clear what @Hekafeidemao11’s relationship is to Xiaorou or to the school itself. The account was created back in 2013, but its first post was made on Tuesday.

According to the post, Zhou had started a special “study group” aimed at luring in good-looking female students with promises of rides in his car, good food, and private tutoring. He would then ask the women who joined his group for small favors, such as ordering take-out for him, waking him up from afternoon naps, and giving him massages. At the same time, he would boast of his own morality while also regaling the women with stories from his romantic past.

@Hekafeidemao11 writes that Xiaorou joined this “study group” and one afternoon in 2016, Zhou confessed his love for her, forced her to kiss him, and even pulled out his penis and began playing with it in front of her.

Xiaorou was allegedly forced to endure similar sexual assaults for the next seven months after Zhou threatened that he could stop her from graduating if she did not keep quiet. After graduation, she tried to commit suicide multiple times before receiving psychological counseling.

Thanks to the counseling, she finally found the courage to go public about what had happened to her, according to @Hekafeidemao11, reporting the abuse to Zhou’s superior, Cheng Shuijin (程水金), the academy’s dean.

However, rather than offer to help Xiaorou, Cheng instead told her that it would be best if she pretended like nothing had happened, warning her that she shouldn’t do anything that would hurt the school’s reputation, nor her own.

When Xiaorou insisted that she at least needed an apology, Cheng told her that an apology wouldn’t really change anything. These conversations occurred over WeChat and were exposed on @Hekafeidemao11’s post.

The following day @Hekafeidemao11 published an account from a second female student, at the university, given the pseudonym Xiaolin (小林), who claimed that Zhou had invited her over to his dorm room to pick up some books, only to try to kiss her and unbutton her shirt. Xiaolin said that she was able to escape his clutches and demanded to be taken back to campus. She said that Zhou told her that he had been longing for her for so long and was helpless to restrain his desire.

For his part, Zhou has denied accusations of sexual abuse in an interview with the Beijing News, claiming that he never sexually assaulted or seduced Xiaorou, instead asserting that it was she who had first confessed her love for him, despite his protests that she should not do so.

On Wednesday, Nanchang University published a short notice on its official Weibo account, saying that both Zhou and Cheng had been removed from their posts following a preliminary investigation. An alleged victim of Zhou’s has reportedly come forward to the police (at this time, it’s not clear if the victim is Xiaolin), and further investigations are underway.

While the United States may be currently undergoing some long-overdue reckoning when it comes to sexual harassment and abuse, that same movement has unfortunately not spread to China.

In October, in the wake of sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein, China Daily even went so far as to publish an editorial claiming that sexual harassment is only a problem in the West because “Chinese traditional values and conservative attitudes tend to safeguard women against inappropriate behavior from members of the opposite gender.”

Could this incident be the start of #MeToo in China?

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