'Money talks' comment gets people talking

China Daily, April 7, 2011

People often say that money talks, but when a college professor said so, it was his critics who did the talking.

Dong Fan, a professor of real estate with Beijing Normal University, said he would be ashamed for any of his students who failed to amass 40 million yuan (US$6.1 million) worth of assets by the age of 40.

Dong made the remarks on Monday in his micro blog on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. By Wednesday night, the message was forwarded more than 18,760 times and received more than 7,500 comments.

"When you are 40 years old, do not come to visit me if you do not have 40 million yuan. That is my requirement for my graduate students," Dong said in his micro blog, adding that part of his work is to cultivate the sense of wealth.

"Because when you become rich, it means that you make more contribution to society by providing more jobs, spurring higher GDP growth and paying more tax.

"For highly-educated people, poverty means disgrace and failure," he said, without anticipating this sentence would invite anger from the country's netizens.

"A teacher should guide his students to do something good for society after graduation, not simply make money," said Chen Meng, a 29-year-old Shanghai resident.

"We cannot use money as the sole gauge to evaluate one's achievement," Chen said.

He Jie, a Shanghai-based businessman, said in his micro blog that amassing a fortune is not necessarily equal to making a contribution to society.

"Scientists who build spaceships do not have 40 million yuan. Can you say that they do not help society make progress?"

In response to He's question, the professor replied that he wrote the message simply to encourage his own students to study real estate harder, and did not mean to discriminate against any particular group of people.

According to an online survey conducted by ifeng.com, 61.7 percent of the 76,049 respondents do not think they can earn 40 million yuan by the age of 40, and 79.3 percent said they would not feel ashamed if they failed to earn that amount of money.

"A professor should shoulder the responsibilities of instructing his or her students not to use their knowledge to do harmful things to society," said Beijing resident Liu Chen.

"Basically, I cannot agree with the way Dong Fan encourages his students," Liu added.