Meet Lu Xiongbin. In 2024, he became a ‘Qiushi Distinguished Professor’ at Zhejiang University—one of China’s most prestigious institutions. The irony? The title’s motto is ‘Seeking Truth,’ but Lu hadn’t been truthful in years. By then, more than 20 of his papers had been flagged for data fabrication on PubPeer. International sleuths had already dismantled his work. Zhejiang’s hiring committee either didn’t know—or didn’t care.
The real scandal isn’t that two scientists faked their data. It’s that no one at Zhejiang or Tsinghua bothered to check.
Lu’s partner in crime, He Xiaoming, followed a similar path. A tenured professor at the University of Maryland, He had his own stack of retractions. In 2026, Tsinghua University hired him as a full professor and PhD advisor. The same university that prides itself on being China’s MIT, the alma mater of presidents and Nobel laureates, brought in a man whose scientific record was crumbling in real time.
How did this happen? The answer exposes a sickness in China’s elite university hiring system—one that rewards glossy CVs over substance, and treats verification as an afterthought.
Let’s walk through the mechanics. A university’s HR department receives an application. It’s packed with papers, grants, awards, top-tier university degrees. The HR staff? They’re administrators, not scientists. Their job is to count metrics: number of publications, impact factors, citations. They are not trained to spot image duplication in a Western blot. They assume that because something is published, it must be true. That assumption is the system’s fatal flaw.
When you hire someone with a PhD and 20 publications, you assume they’re honest. That assumption is what the system exploits.
Consider the case of Guo Wei, a high-school graduate who became the chief scientist at Jiangsu University of Science and Technology—for two years. His entire education and publication history were fabricated. He had no degree, no published work, no awards. And yet the university hired him. If HR can’t catch a fake high-school diploma, how can they catch sophisticated image manipulation?
The answer is they can’t. And they don’t try.
This isn’t just incompetence. It’s a structural equilibrium that benefits both sides. The universities get a high-profile hire—a former Ivy League professor—which boosts their rankings and funding applications. The fraudsters get a second life, a salary, and a platform to continue their work. As long as neither party asks too many questions, everyone wins. Except the students, the taxpayers, and the integrity of Chinese science.
You might think this is about a few bad apples. It’s not. It’s about a system designed to count, not to judge. The gatekeeping function is performative. ‘Vetting’ means scanning for red flags that aren’t there, because the real red flags require expertise to interpret. And expertise is expensive.
Academic hiring in China doesn’t reward truth. It rewards the appearance of truth.
This is a betrayal of the deepest kind. Every student at Zhejiang or Tsinghua relies on the implicit promise that their professors are legitimate scholars. That promise has been broken. And until universities stop treating HR as a checkbox factory and start investing in real scientific due diligence, the Lu Xiongbins and He Xiaomings will keep getting hired. The system will keep rewarding the appearance of excellence over its substance.
The next time you see a headline about a ‘prestigious’ Chinese university, remember: the CVs might be fake, but the complicity is all too real.
FAQ
Q: Isn't this just a few bad apples? Most professors are honest.
A: No. The problem is structural. When HR has zero scientific training, every application is a black box. The few bad apples that get caught are just the ones that slipped through—the system is designed to let them through.
Q: What does this mean for a student choosing a university in China?
A: You cannot trust a university's reputation alone. The brand name 'Tsinghua' no longer guarantees the integrity of its faculty. You need to look at individual professors' track records on sites like PubPeer, and demand that institutions publish their vetting procedures.
Q: But aren't these universities still world-class? Can't they just fire the fraudsters?
A: They can, and they have in some cases. But the deeper issue is that the hiring process itself is broken. Until they invest in real expertise for candidate evaluation, the same thing will happen again. World-class rankings should not be built on a foundation of 'don't ask, don't tell.'