In China it is now quite easy for a student to destroy his teacher's career.

Just like a few days ago at a university of applied sciences in Shanghai.

There a student secretly filmed his lecturer's lessons in a film class on his cell phone.

Topic: interview techniques.

In the background you can hear the person sitting next to you giggling.

A shortened, misleading version of the video found its way onto the Internet.

Friederike Böge

Political correspondent for China, North Korea and Mongolia.

  • Follow I follow

The teacher talks about the massacre in the east Chinese city of Nanjing that Japanese occupation forces carried out on the Chinese civilian population in December 1937 and January 1938.

She says: "If we don't know the names and ID numbers of the dead, the figure of 300,000 victims in Chinese history texts is only an estimate."

This phrase not only sparked a storm of outrage on the Internet, but also called the Communist Party on the scene.

Its public announcement organ “People's Newspaper” found that “the piles of evidence (for the official number of victims 300,000) are as high as the mountains.

Anyone who questions historical truth is not qualified as a teacher.

Anyone who forgets about suffering and denies the evil deeds of other countries is not worth being Chinese. "

State television comments on dismissal

Lecturer Song Geng Yi was released on the same day.

The University of Applied Sciences announced that it had investigated the incident and found “massive misconduct with serious social consequences”.

The university did not want to answer a telephone inquiry from the FAZ.

An employee just hung up.

State television commented that the dismissal was not enough.

The lecturer must apologize to the victims.

It is a case of "historical nihilism".

This is a term that the head of state and party leader Xi Jinping regularly implies in his speeches.

It says that anyone who deviates from the official historical reading should be punished.

On the day of discharge, however, an uncut version of the video appeared in which the lecturer's statements appear in a different light.

In it, Song says that her history teacher always said it was a shame that the then Kuomintang government (which was later defeated by the communists) did not record the names of the victims while their loved ones were still alive.

Massacre is instrumentalized

If the names were documented, said Song, the number could not be questioned by Japanese historians.

As a counterexample, she cited the meticulous documentation of the Holocaust.

Obviously, she wanted to emphasize the need for fact-based research.

In China, the Nanjing massacre is considered to be the epitome of Japanese war crimes, which in Japan have been denied or played down by high authorities to this day.

On the Chinese side, the massacre has been aggressively used in school lessons since 1990 to arouse nationalist feelings.

The Hong Kong Education Authority last month also made footage available as teaching material to elementary schools for the first time, showing civilians being murdered and corpses piled up.

Parents complained after being shown to six year olds.