A Piano Professor's Suicide Note Exposes How Chinese Teachers Pay to Meet Research Quotas
Bai Baoguo, an associate professor of piano at Yan'an University, died by suicide in October after being told he had failed performance-assessment targets for two contract terms. His note describes the system's open secret: teachers self-funding 'research projects' through partner companies and paying out of pocket to publish papers.
Bai Baoguo taught piano at Yan'an University's Lu Xun Academy of Arts for more than three decades, and by every public account of his career he was good at it — a member of the Chinese Musicians Association and vice-chair of the Yan'an Musicians Association. In October he died by suicide, and the note he left has turned his death into a national argument about how Chinese universities measure their teachers.
The note, which his wife supplied and a student posted online, says that in September 2025 Bai was informed he had failed the university's performance-assessment targets in two consecutive contract terms and faced demotion or reassignment. His complaint was not the failure itself but the criteria: the assessment demanded banked "horizontal" research funding — money brought in from outside clients — and a set number of published papers, targets a piano teacher meets, if at all, by manufacturing the appearance of research. He described the practice in three characters: the emperor's new clothes (皇帝新衣).
The mechanism he laid out is the part that has struck a nerve. According to the note and The Paper's commentary, teachers routinely meet the funding quota by routing their own money through a partner company into the university — which books it as external research income and returns it to the teacher, accompanied by accounting that does not describe what actually happened. Publication quotas are met by paying page fees to journals. Caixin, interviewing teachers at other universities, found the practice described as common across Chinese higher education.
The university confirmed Bai's death and said it was verifying the letter; on November 4 the Shaanxi Provincial Department of Education announced it had formed a joint investigation team, "to handle the matter in accordance with law and regulations."
Public sympathy has run toward the dead man and his question. "A teacher whose job is to teach piano — why does he need research topics?" one widely shared post asked, voicing the obvious absurdity that the assessment system has never been built to answer. Cover News' report noted that the letter also alleges idle positions kept on payroll and unequal treatment in Bai's own assessment — allegations the investigation will have to test.
What the investigation will actually reach is the real question. The funding-and-pages system Bai described is not a Yan'an University eccentricity; it is the standard arithmetic by which Chinese universities prove productivity, and it survives because every party in it — teacher, company, university, ministry — can claim the forms are filled in. A piano professor's death has made the arithmetic visible. Whether it changes depends on what a provincial investigation is willing to write about a system that extends far beyond its own campus.