Women attending one of the Women’s Virtue Classes

Dongguan has cancelled a class that taught women to tolerate domestic violence after critics said the class was chauvinistic and twisted traditional Chinese culture, New Express Daily reported.

The controversial “Women’s Virtue Class” that targeted women from teenage girls to women in their 70s had asked its students to strictly adhere to its four basic principles: never fight back when beaten, never talk back when verbally assaulted, take it as it as and never file for divorce.

The class came to light after a women’s organization went undercover at the school, Tencent reported. Song Yuping, a student that took the class, said she was taught a woman can suffer from headaches, arthritis, heart disease and thrombosis if she does not care for her father-in-law and husband. Conversely, absolute obedience to a husband can eventually cure lung cancer and albinism.

Following an investigation into the program by local authorities, Dongguan’s propaganda department announced the class has been officially shut down. An investigation found “its teaching curriculum was against social morals, and its class was run without a legal license,” the report said.

The Mengzheng Chinese Study Academy ran the women’s virtue class annually in 12 separate sessions, each of which was filled with 50 students. In addition to Dongguan, similar classes were taught in Beijing as well as Shandong, Hebei, Shanxi and Hainan provinces, Chinese National Radio reported earlier.

Most of the teaching materials were loosely based on Confucius classics. The popular class suggested “some modern women are desperate and hopeless when facing a family crisis. They can’t solve their immediate problems, and instead turn to those brainwashing women’s virtues to hypnotize themselves (for temporary relief)”, Jiang Jingjing, a commentator told Hong Kong newspaper Oriental Daily.

Photos: Wen Wei Po