The Chinese-English bilingual lost and found notice for the tablet Photo: ifeng.com
A university student from Southwest China's Sichuan Province became victim of cyberbullying for writing and posting a Chinese-English bilingual lost and found notice for a tablet he found on campus.
The student, whose internet name is Axixi de shengfulangxisi, is a freshman from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu, Sichuan. He found an iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil in a classroom desk last Thursday.
Since English was set as the language of the tablet and there were only notice messages from foreign applications rather than Chinese, such as Tencent QQ or WeChat, he supposed it belonged to an international student attending his university.
The young man thoughtfully wrote a lost and found notice in Chinese and English and posted it at several platforms to look for the owner of the tablet.
Although he got contact with its owner just several hours later, he started suffering from harassment from his school peers on the campus forum because of the bilingual post. He was criticized for worshiping foreign things and fawning on foreign powers.
Some netizens called him an opportunist who attempted to fish a settler, because he wrote the notice in English to show his language ability and to please foreigners. Others even arbitrarily supposed he was a girl.
Being unable to tolerate the cyberbullying full of racial and gender discriminations, the young man posted an explanation of the reason for writing the bilingual notice.
He explained that he got a high mark of 146 in his Gaokao, the national college entrance exam, and writing an English notice was just very easy for him.
Besides, he thought about the cost of the tablet, which is not a small amount of money for a student, and would love to return it to its owner.
He expects netizens to stop launching personal attacks and to be more tolerant.
His posts were supported by many netizens who praised his warm-hearted behavior.
Some netizens commented that those who resort to cyberbullying have low self-esteem and an indecent attitude towards women since they thought only female students could write the English note.
Others believe that some netizens may have been motivated by the sense of injustice associated with the preferential treatment given to international students in the past.