BEIJING: A Chinese court ordered a controversial professor who claims descent from the ancient sage Confucius to apologize and pay a fine after a heated online row over poetry, local media reported yesterday. Kong Qingdong, a professor at the elite Peking University who sparked an outcry in 2012 by calling Hong Kong people “dogs,” said online that a student was a “dog-like traitor” for criticizing a poem he wrote, the Beijing News reported.
The poem was in the style of China’s Tang dynasty (618-906 AD) but the student said it rhymed incorrectly, a local newspaper said. “Your talk is not pertinent, you dog-like traitor,” Kong wrote on China’s twitter-like Sina Weibo service, sources said. A court in Beijing ordered him to pay the student 200 yuan ($ 33) in damages and make a public apology.