A Long Way to Go: Guarding Female Students in the Chinese Academy

The #MeToo movement, which went viral when the hashtag was adopted by the United States entertainment industry, has produced a butterfly effect across the globe. The Chinese academy, which seems far away from the American entertainment industry, has nevertheless felt its force. On New Year's Day in 2018, Luo Xixi, who was living in the United States, publically accused her ex-supervisor Chen Xiaowu of attempted rape. She posted an open letter using her real name on Weibo, one of the most popular social media platforms in China. Luo's courageous move inspired a number of Chinese female students as well as their friends to come forward and name perpetrators. But apart from these courageous women, numerous victims have remained silent; having lived in the shadows for a long time, they have neither the emotional support nor solid evidence to come forth publically. Given these revelations, we must ask: How are we to protect and empower our students, both undergraduates and postgraduates, who seem to be in a disadvantageous position?

First, it would be beneficial if we could help students disavow the idea that professors must be naturally and unexceptionally virtuous. An old Chinese proverb states that "he who teaches me for one day is my father for life," and it has long been an important part of Chinese culture to honor teachers. Such a tradition dates back to at least as early as the third century BCE; Lü's Commentaries of History, one of the important early Chinese classics, states that "the teacher was respected as the father" and asks students to "go along with the teacher in what he likes to see and hear, do not go against the teacher's intentions."¹ The comparison of teachers with fathers, who possessed great authority and power in the early patriarchal society, strongly implies the primary power that Chinese teachers assume over pupils both psychologically and practically.

Second, we could help female victims realize that it is the perpetrators rather than the victims that should feel shameful. The idea that chastity matters most for women has existed in Chinese thought for centuries. The Chinese philosopher Cheng Yi (1033-1107), a prominent figure in the Cheng–Zhu school or the Rationalistic School, which became dominant in the Song Dynasty, first addressed the importance of chastity: "e si shi ji xiao, shi jie shi ji da" (death by starvation is preferable to one's loss of chastity).² He contends that both men and women who have lost their partners should try to remain chaste and not remarry too soon. In the Ming Dynasty, however, a deviation from the original intention was promoted by the ruler—a man could remarry, but a woman had to remain chaste and never remarry—and the idea that a woman's chastity mattered more than a man's, whether she was single, married, or widowed, circulated widely during Ming and Qing China and would last until modern China. Despite women's improved situation in recent decades, today many Chinese young women still believe that sexual harassment and assault, if disclosed to the public, will undoubtedly bring disgrace and shame not only to themselves but also to their families because they have been violated and are no longer "chaste." They think that exposure will especially affect those who are single, inevitably limiting the prospect of finding a proper husband.

Regular seminars and workshops, therefore, should be arranged for staff and students, discussing subjects such as the nature of the professor-student relationship; the necessity of restricting the power of professors over students; the experiences of shame, helplessness, and fear of consequences; and unfriendly public opinions towards women. It would help to have emotional and legal support systems in place to encourage those who have been or are being sexually violated to expose the perpetrators because it is likely they will continue to victimize others. We may also help students realize that professors' academic brilliance does not necessarily imply anything about their moral character. Moreover, as it seems to be a worldwide phenomenon in the academy that male professors...