Rape in China: A Nightmare for 26 Pupils

June 21, 2005

By JIM YARDLEY

XINJI, China - The teacher always sent a girl to buy his cigarettes. He left the class unsupervised and waited in his office. When the girl returned to class with flushed cheeks and tousled hair, the other students said nothing.
For nearly three months the teacher, Li Guang, raped 26 fourth- and fifth-grade girls in this rural village, parents and court officials say. Some girls were raped more than once as Mr. Li attacked them in a daily rotation. He was found out when a 14year-old refused to go to school for fear that the next morning would be her "turn." She did not want to be raped a third time.
"School is where our children learn," said Cheng Junyin, the mother of the 14-year-old. "We thought it was the safest place for them."
It is the sort of horrific case that in many countries would be a national scandal but in China has disappeared into the muffled silence of state censorship. That silence matches the silence at the heart of the case: the fact that students considered a teacher so powerful that they did not dare speak out.
Indeed, even as the conventions of Chinese society are being shaken by the tumult of modernization, the Confucian reverence of teachers remains strong, particularly in isolated areas like this farming village in Gansu Province in western China. Parents grant teachers carte blanche, some even condoning beatings, while students are trained to honor and obey teachers, never challenge them.
"The absolute authority of teachers in schools is one of the cultural reasons that teachers are so fearless in doing what they want," said Yang Dongping, a leading expert on China's education system.
Yet modernization has helped drive many teachers away from the poorest areas like Gansu. Low pay in rural areas and better opportunities in cities have caused teacher shortages in many poor areas. One study found that 35 percent of village teachers leave within three years.
Poorer schools are left to hire cheaper teachers, many of them only marginally qualified, a trend that has coincided with a string of sexual abuse cases. Mr. Yang believes that rapes are rare, far less common than beatings, but he noted that in 2003 the Education Ministry published a list of 10 cases in which teachers had raped students.
In December 2003 a teacher in rural Shaanxi Province was executed for raping 58 girls in 15 years. Last October a teenage girl in rural central China tried to commit suicide after a teacher forced her to watch him rape her cousin.
Mr. Li, 28, may go on trial by the end of June, according to a court official in Dingxi, the city where the case will be heard. If he is convicted he will face a prison term of at least 10 years, or possibly the death penalty.
Local education officials as well as prosecutors refused to be interviewed about the case, other than to confirm that the trial would be forthcoming. China's state-controlled news media have remained silent, except for a short initial newspaper article that reported Mr. Li's arrest.
But a visit to this village found families who vented their anger at such a violation of trust. The village is nearly six hours from the provincial capital, Lanzhou, the last three hours on a dirt road through the mountains. The hilltop ruins of old fortifications are reminders that clans once ruled this remote land. .
Farming is the primary livelihood, although it provides only subsistence for some families, who often delay sending a child to school to avoid the fees. Girls are usually the first to be kept home, and some do not start school until age 9 or 10. Mr. Li's fourth-grade class had about 50 pupils, of whom about 26 were girls, with ages ranging from 10 to 14. In all, the school has more than 900 students, drawn from nearby villages.
Zhang Shengxia, at 10, was one of the youngest girls in Mr. Li's fourth-grade class and, as it happened, one of the luckiest. She said the rapes began last fall as the teacher selected girls, one after the other. The girls talked to one another about what was happening but did not dare tell anyone else.
Inside the classroom, Shengxia said, Mr. Li would sometimes physically abuse male and female students by ordering them to pile atop one another on his desk. "Even then," she said, "we were afraid to cry."
As the weeks wore on, Mr. Li either sent girls out for cigarettes or simply called them to his office every day. "When the teacher would ask a student, they would try to run away or yell out," Shengxia recalled. On the day he called out her name, she said, "He told me, 'Don't listen to all the bad things the other students say about me.' " He sent her outside for cigarettes, and she sprinted from school to her home. She was never raped.
"I was scared," she said. "I hate him."
"I hate the school," said Zheng Gaiguo, 40, the mother of a girl in the fifth-grade class. Her daughter is 14 and was raped once. "The teacher took my daughter to the office and told her: 'Do not be afraid. Your mother and your father are doing this.' "
The rapes lasted for almost three months, until the morning that Cheng Junyin's 14-year-old daughter refused to go to school. Word began to spread through the village, and other mothers began to hear horrible stories. Jiao Zhencai, 35, said her 12-year-old had been raped twice. Yet she said the girls had been too frightened to confront the teacher. Instead, Ms. Jiao said, some of the girls would share tips on how to escape from the teacher's office by picking the lock.
The precise details of Mr. Li's background remain uncertain. He grew up in Xinji and took his first teaching job in the village of Qingpu, a few hours away. He later returned to his hometown for a job at the local primary school. Villagers say his cousin worked as director of instruction, a connection they say was essential in helping him land the job.
"Anybody who has connections in the government can become a teacher, whether they go to college or just some vocational school," said Tian Ziming, 40, an uncle of the young girl, Shengxia, who was not raped. "It is not difficult to get a certificate."
The authorities will not release information about Mr. Li, but some villagers say he is also being investigated for possible rapes at his school in Qingpu. Nine other teachers were removed from the village school here, including Mr. Li's cousin and the headmaster. No explanation was given as to why so many teachers were removed.
In the conservative culture of rural China, the shame of rape has been devastating for many families. Some have refused to talk to prosecutors or get involved in the case. Others fear that their daughters will be forever damaged, not the least when they reach marrying age and may be stigmatized.
Ms. Jiao, the mother whose daughter was raped twice, may have the most difficult time forgetting what has happened. Her neighbors are Mr. Li's parents. She said they had gone to her home after their son had been arrested and warned her not to talk about the case.
"His parents came here and asked me, 'How many people know about this?' " Ms. Jiao. "I said, 'All the kids in school know about this.' "
She said she then told them: "Everybody has children. What if this had happened to you?"