An Open Letter To Politechnico Di Milan

This is Badiucao，a Chinese dissident artist. I am writing this letter to urge Politechnico Di Milan to formally investigate a political bully incident from one of your Chinese professors，Chen Zhen（contract professor in school of Architettura Civile, Politechnico di Milan）, towards a Taiwannese student in class.

Recently a class video of Mr Chen went viral on China's internet （Weibo）. In this video，Mr Chen used his class time to single out and target a Taiwanese student in order to criticize his decision to write his country as“ Taiwan” instead of “China” . He insisted on his political stand that “Taiwan is a part of China” in front of the entire class. When this video was uploaded on China’s social media，he commented on the video with his verified account to confirm the authenticity of the clip. The video then attracts massive trolling towards the Taiwannese student just for he has a different political stand from Mr Chen in China.

The video can be seen from this thread：https://twitter.com/badiucao/status/1507700466485846019?s=20&t=QCaKsft5xmlXjG1A-GbYHA

I found this bullying behavior of Mr Chen extremely appalling，unprofessional and unacceptable for a professor in any university.

Here are my reasons：

1. Mr Chen used class time of Architecture to enforce his personal political stand on a specific student. And this stand is completely irrelevant to the teaching content，a specific student.

2. Mr Chen enforced his political stand to the Taiwanese student in front of the entire class. Even Mr Chen used mandarin instead of English. It still subjected the Taiwanese student under extremely unhealthy peer pressure.  

3. During the video (video part2 1’12’ https://twitter.com/badiucao/status/1507701241178050564?s=20&t=QCaKsft5xmlXjG1A-GbYHA )，he indicated China may conduct an action in Taiwan soon which will significantly affect Taiwan’s society. Thus this Taiwanese student will have a great difficulty adjusting his identity to the new “reality”. This is apparently a very blunt and intimidating political threat to the Taiwanese student.

4. Although Mr Chen said in the video that he did not intend to “force” any idea on this Taiwanese student or mark the student‘s paper based on politics. But as a teacher in a classroom，he should understand that he is in a much more powerful position juxtaposing to any student in Class. Thus, no matter how he explained himself，he was exploiting his power as a teacher for his personal political agenda.

5. After the video leaked to China’s internet. Mr Chen did not choose to stop the spreading of the video to protect the Taiwanese student‘s privacy. But He encouraged internet violence and trolling towards the Taiwanese student from China‘s nationalists via confirming the authenticity of the video. The link for the video and trolling on Weibo：https://t.co/LR3L7fikRa

Therefore，I demand Politechnico Di Milan to take this misconduct of Chen Zhen seriously with a formal investigation. In my opinion such a disgraceful person shall not be given the privilege to be a professor for teaching any student. 

The Entire EU now is shocked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And many Taiwanese are worrying that China might follow Putin‘s step to launch a military aggression towards this beautiful new democracy in Asia.

I hope Politechnico Di Milan will stand up for its duty as a university，truly respect every student and protect them from any form of bullying and manipulation no matter if it's from externally or internally.

 

Badiucao

27/3/2022