Doctoral supervisor disqualified following student’s death

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The death of a PhD student in northwest China’s Shaanxi Province has gained wide attention in China’s social media lately.

Yang Baode, 28, a pharmacology student at Xi’an Jiaotong University drowned to death on December 25, 2017.

Death Certificate of Yang Baode /Photo from Weibo

Police say no evidence shows it is a criminal case, but Yang’s girlfriend wrote an article online earlier this month, claiming the tragedy is directly attributable to his supervisor Zhou Yun, who constantly insulted her student, and used Yang to help her with personal business.

Yang's girlfriend posted the article on Weibo, which gained enormous attention. / Screenshot from Weibo

Internet users express their fury against Zhou’s behavior.

On China’s leading social platform Weibo, user @Dingshichao said, “There are problems existing in the current tutorial system, time to reform it.”

Meanwhile, @_yinzhou commented, “Some people say Yang Baode is mentally vulnerable even though he is academically excellent. It is understandable that he felt stressed, sensitive, and uncertain about the future. However, shouldn’t we thoroughly investigate the supervisor, and not blame Yang’s weakness?”

Screenshot of comments on Weibo

The university immediately launched investigation into the case, and found Zhou Yun did demand Yang to do matters irrelevant to academic studies, including watering flowers, cleaning office, taking her bag, picking her up from parking lot, going shopping with her, and installing curtain at her apartment, based on chat history.

Zhou has since been disqualified to recruit postgraduates following the incident.

The university vows to strictly manage faculty and improve mechanism to promote work ethics and integrity. At the same time, faculties will work hard to make sure the students have good mental health to prevent such tragedies from happening again.

In the wake of numerous scandals exposed at Chinese universities including sexual harassment recently, a commentary from People’s Daily says twisted relations between students and teachers should be changed. Students should not act as “labor,” while teachers should not be “bosses.”