“Your misbehaviours on December 16, 2024, caused a terrible negative impact,” the announcement said, without giving details on what constituted the “misbehaviours”.

This has generated heated discussions across Chinese social media platforms about whether the university has the right to judge her personal life and elevate it to a matter of national importance. Thousands of comments on platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, flag whether the university has gone too far.

Some questioned whether the institution’s decision is a sign of the “Taliban style” by which a particular nation or group claims ownership over a woman’s body, while a another section of users called out the misogyny and gender bias.

On revealing the student’s identity, state-run newspaper The Paper said it was not just “inappropriate” to publish the student’s full name, but also “may even violate the Personal Information Protection Law”.

“It is improper to graft private affairs onto the public domain for public disposal,” it added.

Connecting the dots amid the outrage, internet users in China have found links of the accused university student to videos posted by a professional Ukrainian gamer Danylo Teslenko, also known as Zeus. An unverified video doing the rounds reportedly shows him being intimate with an Asian-looking young woman in a hotel room.

He met with the student at the final of the Perfect World Shanghai Major, a gaming competition held in December 2024, as per media reports.

Teslenko confirmed on Sunday that he posted “a few videos on Telegram with a girl I met in Shanghai” but later deleted them “as soon as I understood the seriousness of the situation”, according to his post on X.

“Our faces were visible, but there was no explicit content or anything disrespectful in those videos. I have never said that Chinese girls are easy,” the post said.

An email sent to Dalian Polytechnic University by AP was not immediately answered.-Agencies