Peng Xiadong, a 21-year-old computer science student at Peking University. She is in a relationship with one of her professors and was asked to write their names in the book, so she could make money on it. But when the college took the book on appeal, she lost and had to cough up hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process.

Peng is one of the most famous cases of online harassment, but the issue isn’t just about individuals or families. This is a business model. The college in question, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, is now using the book as the basis of a “social action campaign” to raise awareness about its lack of funding, says Li Xiao, a sociologist. The academy, he says, is “willing to take on the challenge of the book by opening up a new front in the fight against the evils of online comments.”

Li doesn’t believe Peng is a victim of the book; in fact, most Chinese adults read them. Instead, the situation appears to be that the professor who published the book, Wang Yu, is looking to make some money on the back of Peng’s misfortune. He sells the book to academics, and the academy appears to have made a lot of money off it — just a few years into the scheme, it had sold more than 1 million copies.

According to the professor, he was a single dad until he learned that Peng was his student. His wife, he says, was busy helping Peng manage his work, and was willing to do so without him.

But the book, he says, is meant to draw attention to this very real issue. The professor wants the world to know that if a professor writes someone who is gay in their personal essay or academic letter — a kind of “spam letter” — many students, who don’t take issue with the letter, will use it without thinking twice.

And that’s a big problem. Wang is adamant that his position is not that the school should give up on the rights of a teacher to free speech and that he himself wouldn’t say something he didn’t want to say; that would be unprofessional. “But many in the academy don’t understand the role of the teacher,” he says, noting that “to be a good teacher, you have to learn to express your mind in a way that the students can understand and take note of.”

It is his