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The Web site of the elite Tsinghua University, considered as competitive as Beijing University and even superior in the sciences, was victimized by hackers recently. An article purporting to express the views of the university’s president, Gu Binglin, criticized China’s university education system in harsh and even dirty terms. The majority of Chinese netizens expressed support and understanding toward this unidentified hacker, however.
The item first appeared as an “interview with the president” on the school’s Web site on Aug. 25. In the made-up interview, the president said that students’ rigid thinking was the product of an education system that is exam-oriented and disconnected from society. He blamed this on China’s corrupt academic environment.
The “president” criticized universities for failing to focus on producing qualified personnel. As a result, he said, students lose their original aspiration to pursue valuable knowledge and shift their focus to merely obtaining a diploma.
He said that China’s education quashed innovation, independent thinking and the courage to challenge authority. He asked educators to “stop stifling people of talent.”
The interesting thing about this item was that it was widely circulated on the Internet, where it was received with almost complete approval. People expressed their excitement, surprise and comfort at reading such comments from a supposed school official, whom they took to be unusually brave.
The school removed the original from its Web site the same day it was posted, replacing it with a notice expressing “strong outrage and condemnation” over the article. The discovery that it was a hoax disappointed many readers – although many had already guessed it must be a spoof.
A lawyer warned that the hacker who posted the article, if discovered, could be sentenced to more than five years in prison. He could be accused of harming the school’s computer system and misusing the president’s name to damage his reputation, he said.
However, several media critics advised the school to be more magnanimous, claiming the hacker’s intention was not to humiliate the president. It was merely a radical attempt to bring his concerns about university education to public attention.
Damaging the school’s information system and misusing the president’s name are illegal and inappropriate, the critics conceded. But, they argued, the president in the story had aroused people’s respect rather than giving him a bad name. The strong clarification released by the school, on the other hand, made the university look bad, some wrote.
Regarding the dirty words used in the story, one critic said that whoever considered the language too coarse did not understand the context of the Chinese language. Using such words in this context constituted a “rebuke” of the system, he explained.
An online poll on this matter showed that 92 percent of respondents supported the hacker. About 5 percent said it was hard to judge, and only about 3 percent said they would side with Tsinghua University.
In online forums, blogs and chat rooms, most people praised the hacker for pinpointing the critical issues affecting China’s universities. His concerns are widely shared, many revealed, but people felt it was difficult to bring them to the attention of education authorities. They approved of the hacker’s creative approach to broaching their concerns.
“Good points!” one netizen wrote. “But China’s education system is still concealing its shortcomings for fear of criticism.”
“The points presented in the story aren’t made up at all,” another said.
Those problems, along with many other problems such as extra fees charged by top schools, from pre-schools to universities, have long plagued China’s schools, one netizen pointed out.
“The real president has no guts to speak the truth or he wouldn’t have been able to take his post,” one online critic said. “If this was spoken by the real president, he would be a really good president,” another wrote.
“The real president should thank the hacker,” another said. Many people agreed that the image of the real president, Gu Binglin, had actually improved through this incident. Others expressed the hope that education authorities would pay as much attention to the contents of the article as they did to the fact of its illicit posting.
