Postgraduate education in China came under scrutiny after secondyear East China University of Science and Technology student Li Peng was reported to have died in a chemical explosion while at a facility belonging to his supervisor Zhang Jianyu. Li’s sister and classmates told the media that Li often complained that Zhang had refused to allow him to graduate until he had successfully recreated the results of his lab work on an industrial scale.
Many netizens subsequently came forward to reveal similar abuses, detailing how their postgraduate advisers with outside business interests had treated their students as cheap, or even free, labor by channeling their efforts into commerce rather than academia.
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