Ministry takes aim at sexual harassment

Universities encouraged to take action after spate of recent high-profile cases

The Ministry of Education and local education authorities will guide universities to set up special organizations and mechanisms to fight sexual harassment after several recent high-profile cases involving university professors tarnished the reputation of higher education in China, the ministry said.

Responding to a proposal made this year by a National People's Congress deputy, the ministry said the cases showed universities lack an effective mechanism to prevent and deal with sexual harassment by professors.

The response, published on the ministry's website recently, did not specify how such organizations and mechanisms would work.

During the annual sessions of the NPC, the country's top legislature, and the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in March, NPC deputy Xu Jingeng, head of People's Daily's Shandong province bureau, proposed that education authorities should issue a specific guideline to prevent sexual harassment at universities.

Universities should set up organizations to receive and deal with reports of sexual harassment. They should also establish a reporting channel capable of receiving complaints by mail, email and phone, and specify the procedures and deadlines for investigations, Xu said in his proposal.

Any incident should be reported to the police within 24 hours, he said, and universities should also provide training to all professors and students on combating sexual harassment and discrimination.

Chen Xiaowu, a professor at Beijing's Beihang University, was fired in January last year after a former female student accused him on social media of sexual harassment.

The Ministry of Education stripped Chen of his Changjiang Scholars award, the highest academic honor for individuals in China.

In another case, North China Electric Power University in Beijing removed Dai Songyuan, dean of its school of renewable energy, from his post in March after he was accused of sexually harassing a professor and students at the school.

According to a survey conducted in 2017 by the Guangzhou Gender and Sexuality Education Center, more than 69 percent of Chinese university students had experienced some form of sexual harassment, although less than 4 percent had reported it.

Xu Kaibin, a professor at Wuhan University, issued a joint statement with 43 other professors last year calling for the Ministry of Education and schools at all levels to establish detailed policies and regulations on sexual harassment.

School officials should report to their supervisors once they receive a report of sexual harassment, and if a school investigation confirms the act, the professors involved should be fired and their teaching credentials revoked, the professors said.

Xiong Bingqi, deputy director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute in Beijing, said sexual harassment and assault have long been taboo subjects in China's conservative culture.

Especially at universities, many students have kept quiet about it because they feared the fallout on their academic careers if they tried to expose the transgressions of their professors, he said.

The ministry's new requirement might be difficult to implement because there is no incentive for universities to publicly deal with sexual harassment, Xiong said.

In China's highly bureaucratic higher education system, university officials would prefer to handle such cases quietly rather than let the incidents tarnish the university's reputation, he said.

Two Beijing universities contacted by China Daily said they might not set up special organizations to manage sexual harassment cases because their faculty affairs departments already deal with transgressions by professors.