Every now and then, the internet confuses itself with a court. Then a bonfire. Then a battlefield.
This past week, a sordid affair involving a Chinese hospital doctor and a trainee lit up the nation’s social media. What should have been a localized scandal—a doctor cheating, allegedly abandoning a patient mid-anesthesia—swiftly metastasized into a nationwide referendum on medical training, gender, and the hierarchy of American colleges. The mob didn’t just want heads. It wanted credentials revoked and educational models dismantled.
That’s when it got embarrassing.
Let’s begin with the “4+4” medical program. Informed critics might debate its pedagogical merits. The mob, however, decided it was a scam. A backdoor. A shortcut for rich kids with foreign degrees and good hair. One might think they’d never heard of how most of the Western world trains its doctors.
The “4+4” model is not an invention of Beijing elites—it’s how the United States produces physicians. Students earn an undergraduate degree in any subject, then apply to medical school. The result is not less education, but more breadth. Humanities majors become surgeons. Engineers become psychiatrists. The system prizes adaptability and maturity, not rote biology scores.
To call this unqualified is not a critique of China’s reforms. It’s a confession of parochialism.
Then came the Barnard discourse. Ah, Barnard—Columbia University’s affiliate women’s college, target of every dropout who thinks U.S. admissions are rigged. Online, accusations flew: Barnard students “pretend” to go to Columbia, the degrees don’t count, and anyway, she studied economics, not pre-med—so what is she even doing in an operating room?
This is the kind of argument that can only thrive in a vacuum of fact. Barnard is part of Columbia. Not “adjacent to.” Not “near.” Part of. Columbia professors. Columbia degrees. Columbia diploma. If you’re going to rage, at least rage accurately.
But then, accuracy was never the point. The point was punishment—especially for a woman who looked too polished, rose too fast, and committed the cardinal sin of being both young and visible.
And somewhere along the way, the entire narrative flipped. What began as a man’s colossal, well-documented failure morphed—through innuendo, projection, and a generous helping of misogyny—into a woman’s crime. His transgression was diluted, even excused, because after all, he had merely “fallen for a femme fatale.” The story had been made neater, more palatable—by blaming the woman.
It’s tempting to excuse all this as the chaos of the internet: fickle, furious, and gone in a week. But that would be too easy. When crowds misidentify the enemy, they weaken the cause. When they conflate scandal with systems, they stall reform. And when they mock rather than learn, they don’t just fail to make things better—they make sure the next conversation is dumber.
The “Dong Missy” Incident—as it’s now mockingly called on Chinese social media—began as a question of ethics. It ends as a case study in collective insecurity. One doctor may have abandoned a patient. But a much larger group abandoned thought.
