A college in the northwestern Chinese province of Gansu has belatedly agreed to pay medical bills and compensation to a lecturer it fired after she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
Bowen College, part of Lanzhou Jiaotong University, apologized to the family of Liu Lingli, 32, after the former lecturer died on Aug. 14.
Liu’s father said her parents are “heartbroken” at the way she was treated before her death.
“We are heartbroken and devastated,” he told RFA. But he added: “We haven’t the energy to give interviews.”
Liu was fired for “absenteeism” after she applied for sick leave following diagnosis in July 2014. She later took to selling clothes on the street in a desperate bid to meet her medical expenses.
Liu, a former English teacher at the college, had already won a court ruling in her favor, but the college refused to implement it, official Chinese media reported.
Liu’s mother said the college stopped paying Liu’s salary and medical bills in September 2014.
Faced with a public outcry, the college has now suspended Jiang Xueyun, head of human resources, for “errors” when dealing with Liu’s case, and reinstated her posthumously, the Shanghai Daily newspaper reported.
Earlier media reports said the college had agreed to pay 57,600 yuan (U.S. $8,650) for lost salary plus 14,400 yuan (U.S. $2,160) in compensation for her unfair dismissal.
Additional suffering
A friend of Liu’s who asked to remain anonymous said her treatment at the hands of her employers had greatly contributed to her friend’s suffering as she faced enormous medical bills with no money to pay them.
“It was so unfair, because she would have had much less psychological pressure if the college hadn’t fired her and stopped paying her medical benefits,” the friend told RFA.
“Her parents would have been able to get her to a better hospital instead of to a much smaller, cheaper one,” she said. “The one she went to really wasn’t set up to handle specialist cancer cases.”
She said the college’s actions had brought additional suffering to Liu’s parents, who were “very angry” at its refusal to honor the court decision, and called for an investigation to find out who was responsible.
“This should never have happened,” the friend said. “The government should investigate.”
She said the personnel department was unlikely to have acted without the direct approval of college president Chen Ling.
“There’s no way that human resources would have dared to fire Liu without her signature,” she said.
Sacked for getting sick
Liu wasn’t the first employee of Bowen College to be sacked for getting sick, social media posts indicated.
Another former teacher at the college, Qian Yujun, posted an open letter to college president Chen Ling on social media after being fired last year. The complaint was soon deleted.
An employee who answered the phone at the Bowen College personnel department declined to comment, saying they were a new employee and didn’t know the circumstances.
Call to the cell phones of the suspended personnel manager and the deputy principal rang unanswered on Monday, as did calls to management offices at its parent organization, Lanzhou Jiaotong University.
An emailed request for comment from the head of the Gansu provincial education department went unanswered at the time of writing on Monday.
A Lanzhou journalist who gave only his surname Zhao said Bowen College is a private institution with strong political backing at a very high level.
“It uses Jiaotong University’s branding, but actually there is no real connection with the university,” Zhao said. “But Chen Ling has all manner of ties with the provincial government, so she fears nothing and nobody.”
“She is a businesswoman who got started in property development,” he said. “It seems that her policy is that if people get sick, they leave. She has no compunction about that.”
Zhao said Chen’s behavior is far from unusual, however.
“This is becoming quite typical of China,” he said.
Hubei-based online writer Liu Yiming agreed.
“They are only really concerned with the bottom line,” he said. “They just see that if a teacher gets sick, she won’t be able to teach, and they’ll probably have to pay out a lot of money, which will have a negative impact on the college’s balance sheet.”
“So they just kicked her out,” Liu said. “They never expected that there would be this much of a public outcry.”
Reported by Sing Man for RFA’s Cantonese Service, and by Qiao Long for the Mandarin Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.