News: Leading China International School Lays Off Employees -- Part 2

On June 10, I wrote a post about how there had been a major reduction in force at a leading China International School. The purpose of that post, BREAKING NEWS: Leading China International School Lays Off Employees, was to generate discussion as to how China’s international economy is impacting expats in China. My theory was that the layoffs at this prominent school were a reflection of what is happening in the expat community as a whole.

When I published that post, I was confident that a number of employees at a particular school had been laid off and my confidence in those facts has not been shaken. That post actually generated a slew of communications to me from people I know and trust (and also some I do not know) describing layoffs at other schools as well.

There were a number of angry comments in response to my post, challenging me to name the school to which I was referring in the post.  My response to those comments was essentially: calm down, it’s real. And quit accusing me of being out to smear anyone when I never even mentioned the school by name.

Let me step back here a bit. Our policy is to print all comments, good or bad, so long as they are not hate speech or abusive or spam. I and my staff who review comments get to decide what we mean by these things. We do allow anonymous comments but we tend to hold those on a slightly tighter leash.

Now back to our International School post. In response to my fighting back against those who did not believe that the post was factual, a number of people left comments specifically naming one school that the commenters said had laid off employees. Those comments in turn received angry responses from people accusing the commenters (and sometimes me as well) as having it in for this particular school and of trying to destroy it. Some even accused me of hating China and doing whatever I could to drive business away from China — accusations which make zero sense since a large proportion of my law firm’s business depends on our China lawyers helping American and European (mostly) companies get into and do business in China.

Some of those angry with me or with the commenters who wrote about the layoffs claimed to be various different people at a particular international school. One of the people whose name was attached to a number of these comments — including one that threatened to report me to the Chinese government — allegedly was a high level employee at a school named by one of the commenters. I subsequently received a very professional (and not at all angry e-mail) from this person letting me know that he had not written any of the comments attributed to him and telling me that he did not agree with the thrust of what these comments in his name were saying.

He did NOT ask me to pull any comments on the post nor did he hint at suing anyone. But after communicating with him, I came to the realization — entirely of my own accord — that the comment stream to the international school post had become so tainted (not to mention, run so far afield from the original purpose of the post), that I went back and deleted most of them. I deleted the comments that sided with me and those that opposed me and kept only those that addressed the original issue of expats in China. I deleted the ones that I did because they did not add to the original discussion nor could I be sure that the names attached to them were real.

Our comment policy is not going to change, other than if we believe someone is posing as someone else, we will delete the post.

If anyone has any questions, please feel free to fire away below. If anyone wishes to comment on our comment policy — loose as it is — please feel free to do so below.

We now return to our regularly scheduled China programming.

The post BREAKING NEWS: Leading China International School Lays Off Employees. PART 2 appeared first on China Law Blog.

We will be discussing the practical aspects of Chinese law and how it impacts business there. We will be telling you what works and what does not and what you as a businessperson can do to use the law to your advantage. Our aim is to assist businesses already in China or planning to go into China, not to break new ground in legal theory or policy.