China shuts down school run by ex-convict that taught women "obedience"

A school in China that claimed to educate women about "obedience" and how to be subordinate to men has been shut down after gaining widespread attention online. The education bureau in Fushun in Northeast China's Liaoning Province said that the institution had violated socialist core values.

The school was set up by a former jailed killer Kang Jinsheng, who left school at 14 after stabbing his teacher. After his release from prison in 2009, Kang founded the Fushun Traditional Values Association in 2011 and began offering "obedience" classes for women.

The school offered "women's virtue" courses in which the participants were required to wake up at 4.30am and work on domestic chores for eight hours under the command of their tutors. The classes also taught women to "talk less and work more" and chastised them for wearing make-up or having career ambitions, the South China Morning Post reported.

The school was shut down after a video surfaced online on a website called Video Pear. The clip showed women weeping, kneeling and apologising for "wrongful deeds".
The footage also showed teachers telling women they should not attempt to have a career but "just stay at the bottom level".

In addition, tutors were also seen lecturing women on sex. The school told women that if they have sex with more than three men, the semen would become poisonous and might kill them.

One woman, who attended the controversial class said, "What I find worse is that they instil the idea that men are superior to women and our teachers keep repeating that the most important task for a woman is to reproduce, that she cannot say 'no' to her husband and divorce is unacceptable."

However, the employees of the institution have protested against its closure, alleging the video was a misrepresentation of their work. An employee of the institute, surnamed Chai, told the Global Times that the "school has been opened for seven or eight years, and is free of charge. People who receive an education here are always grateful to us".

Authorities have also ordered a wider check to find similar institutes. "We must stop any phenomenon that violates the socialist core value," a post on the Weibo account of the local education bureau in Fushun said.