We are a group of Chinese Australians who are deeply concerned with an internal disciplinary investigation against PhD candidate and tutor Wu Wei in your School over allegations of racist online comments.

Collectively, we would like to express our concerns over the followings:

1. We do not believe Mr Wu's comments published on his personal password protected account on Chinese social website should be extracted out of context, scrutinized in isolation, and used to substantiate an allegation that will have detrimental impact on Mr Wu’s employment opportunity in Australia.

2. We believe Mr Wu is only expressing his opinion on a widely discussed topic of academic misconduct among Chinese international students. These conducts, including the hiring of essay writers, have been widely reported recently on international media such as Forbes and Wall Street Journal. At no stage has Mr Wu directed his comments against any individual student he is teaching.

- http://www.forbes.com/2010/05/26/china-cheating-innovation-markets-economy-plagiarism.html

- http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/05/29/u-s-schools-expelled-8000-chinese-students-for-poor-grades-cheating/

3. We are concerned that Mr Wu is becoming a victim of the Chinese government’s increasingly intrusive attempts to curb voices of dissent among overseas Chinese. Mr Wu has a long track record of critical comments against the Chinese government, its political system and social affairs on social networks. We are particularly alarmed by a biased report on Honi Soit, where the burning of a Chinese passport was cited as an example of Mr Wu’s racism against Chinese students. From our point of view, the burning of a Chinese passport is only Mr Wu’s way of expressing political dissent.

4. As Chinese-Australians, we do not interpret Mr Wu’s passport burning posts or his comments about academic misconducts among Chinese international students as humiliation or hatred towards the Chinese ethnic group as a whole, and believe many Chinese-Australians like us would share the same view.

5. We are also concerned that no evidence has so far been presented on Mr Wu's disrespectful conducts towards Chinese students during his day-to-day teaching in the University of Sydney. Nor has any case been cited of Mr Wu’s Chinese student being treated unfairly due to their ethnicity. This, we believe, would be a much more direct way of exercising racism.

We will be watching the development of this matter very closely. We urge the School of Business and the University of Sydney to respect and protect Mr. Wu's

- Rights of exercising his freedom of speech; and

- Rights to equal employment opportunity.





我们部分在澳华人对于近期悉尼大学商学院针对吴维老师歧视言论所展开的内部调查表示关切。

对于该事件，我们希望表达如下立场：

1. 我们不认为吴维老师在中国网站上受密码保护的账号中发表的个人观点，可以被剥离特定语境后，断章取义、拼凑嫁接作为反对其在澳大利亚从事科研教学的依据。

2. 我们认为吴维老师很多激烈言论是有明确针对性的，其中包括参与学术造假的特定学生。尽管措辞强烈，这些的言论是以社会普遍认可的事实为基础的。 - http://www.forbes.com/2010/05/26/china-cheating-innovation-markets-economy-plagiarism.html … - http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/05/29/u-s-schools-expelled-8000-chinese-students-for-poor-grades-cheating/ …

3. 我们担心吴维老师长期针对中国政府、政治体制、社会问题的尖锐批评，已经使其成为中国政府在互联网上的舆论引导者们关注的对象，并试图以吴维老师焚烧中国护照作为其侮辱华人学生的凭据。而在我们看来，这正是吴维老师表达异议的一种正常途径。

4. 我们强调，作为在澳华人，我们并不把吴维老师焚烧护照和针对学术不端的中国留学生的严厉批评言论，作为对于整个华人种族的歧视。我们相信，许多在澳华人也不会这样去解读。

5. 我们也注意到，吴维老师在悉尼大学的教学生涯中，并未有过任何来自学生因其种族、背景而遭遇歧视、侮辱、或不公正对待的任何指控。我们认为这才是一个种族歧视者更为直接了当的做法。

综上所述，我们对于此事件的发展会继续保持密切关注。我们希望悉尼大学商学院尊重并保护吴维老师行使言论自由的权利，以及平等获得工作机会的权利。