The publishing house was accused of "unqualified quality of editing and teaching", and the court held a trial: the defendants were all absent

The Paper's reporter Lin Shan intern however

College students have sued publishers and other institutions for believing that there are many "content quality problems" in college textbooks, such as the interpretation of homosexuality as "sexual psychological disorders and sexual perversions".

On the morning of July 28, the Suyu District People's Court in Suqian City, Jiangsu Province, heard the case. The Paper (www.thepaper.cn) learned in an interview that since neither of the two defendants in the case (Jinan University Press and Jingdong Online Shopping Platform) did not appear in court, the court conducted a trial in absentia and said that it would announce the verdict at a later date.

The case began in 2016. After purchasing the textbook "Mental Health Education for College Students", first published by Jinan University Press in August 2013, Xixi, a university student in Guangzhou, found that the description of homosexuality was "wrong" and "misleading". Homosexuality is listed among the "common psychosexual disorders" and is described as "a disorder in sexuality or the perversion of the object of sexual love".

After communicating with the publisher and not getting satisfactory revision results, in July 2017, Xixi sued the publisher and the sales platform for "many obvious content quality problems such as contradictions, errors, misleading, unsmooth sentences, and language diseases in the content of the book".

In this case, the focus of the dispute between the two sides is not only the expression of homosexuality in the textbook, but also more on whether there is a "quality problem" in the book.

According to Article 5 of the Provisions on the Management of Book Quality, if the error rate of a book exceeds 1/10,000, it is "unqualified for the quality of editing"; in addition, article 17 stipulates that "if the error rate of a book with unqualified editing quality is between 1/10,000 and 5/10,000, the publishing unit must recover it all within 30 days from the date of publication of the inspection results".

In court, the plaintiff's lawyer Ge Ang submitted to the court a statistical table of book editing errors in the above-mentioned textbooks, and the proofreading results of the book showed that there were 72.2 errors in its error rate, including typos, punctuation misuses, grammatical errors, intellectual errors, etc., with a total error rate of about 1.94 per 10,000 - if this statistics is accurate, the book can be classified as "unqualified editing quality".

In its reply to the court submitted by Jinan University Press, it was stated that the quality inspection report of the book showed that the error rate of the book was only 0.85 per 10,000, which did not meet the standard of "unqualified editing quality" determined by the state, so there was no "quality problem".

The stamp on the quality inspection report shows that the proofreading report was issued by Jinan University Press.

In addition, Jinan University Press collected articles written by Xixi on his personal public account during the complaint in order to prove that "the real purpose of the plaintiff's lawsuit is not to believe that there is a content quality problem in the book".

Before and after the lawsuit, Sissi updated the progress of the matter on his personal public account for two consecutive years, and many people who paid attention to sexual minorities paid attention to the case. This case has also received the attention of many experts in the field of mental health, including Fang Gang, Liu Yan, Zhang Beichuan and so on.

On the day of the trial, the three defendants, Jinan University Press, Jingdong Online Shopping Platform Jiangsu Yuanzhou E-commerce Co., Ltd. and its Guangzhou branch, did not attend or appoint lawyers to appear in court.

Ge Ang, Xixi's lawyer, said that the defendant only submitted a legal opinion in court by Jinan University Press, while Jiangsu Yuanzhou E-commerce Co., Ltd. (JD.com) and its Guangzhou branch did not submit any defense opinions to the court from the beginning of the case to the opening of the trial.

The case has been postponed twice before. According to Sisi, in October 2017, the judge postponed the trial because she needed more time to study the case; in January 2018, the court notified jd.com to "postpone the trial" two days before the trial because the defendant JD.com applied to the court for a judicial appraisal of the quality of the textbooks involved in the case.

The plaintiff claimed that during the trial, the judge advocated the cancellation of the cross-examination link on the grounds of "saving trial time". Ge Ang, the plaintiff's lawyer, said that at his insistence, "the demands were basically expressed."

The Paper has repeatedly called the Suyu District People's Court in Suqian City on the matter, and a staff member who claimed to be surnamed Zhang said that the judge in charge of the case, Shen Guang (president of the First Civil Division of the Suyu District Court), has been busy and cannot be interviewed.

According to public information, the "Mental Health Education for College Students", which triggered the lawsuit, was first published in August 2013 by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council and funded by the Peng Phosphorus Foundation Foreign Enrollment Talent Training Reform Fund. Professor Zhang Jiangxing, one of the editors-in-chief of the editorial board of the book, is the director of the Mental Health Education Center of Jinan University.

The Paper flipped through the website of the Mental Health Education Center of Jinan University and found that as of the first semester of the 2019-2020 academic year, the above textbooks are still the only examination bibliography for public elective courses at Jinan University for multiple campuses across the university.

Editor-in-Charge: Li Kecheng