Faking it in China

A bizarre ritual is currently under way among China’s business elite, many of whom are giving a bit of spit-and-polish treatment to their resumes, particularly those that are available in the public domain and list their numerous glowing credentials.

But curiously, in doing so, some of China’s most famous entrepreneurs and executives aren’t adding to their list of achievements, as one might reasonably expect, but deleting specific references that they were proud to flaunt until barely a fortnight ago. In particular, references to their educational qualifications, and more specifically about their having secured overseas degrees, are being erased.

It isn’t a virulent and contagious attack of swadeshi scholastic spirit that accounts for this hurried cover-up of academic tracks. The tycoons — or, more correctly, their public relations spinmeisters — are busy papering over their previous, exaggerated claims about their academic credentials.

This follows the sensational unmasking of one of China’s top professional managers Tang Jun — the former president of Microsoft China, no less — as having inflated his credentials somewhat. 

China has, of course, long borne the deserved cross for being the global capital for fake manufactured goods: everything from the iPad to fashion accessories to automobiles has been counterfeited with clinical precision.

But the events of the past fortnight have held up an unflattering mirror to the manner in which even men who have made it to the top of the managerial and entrepreneurial class in China have been exposed as fakers of the first order, whose reputation and integrity rests on very slippery ground.  

It all started a fortnight ago with a fairly benign microblog post by Fang Shimin (better known as Fang Zhouzi), a crusader against scientific and academic fraud. Fang posted, in response to a query from a follower, that Tang’s claims in his best-selling autobiography Wo de Cheng Gong Ke Yi Fu Zhi (My Success Can Be Replicated) about his having been awarded a PhD by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) were false.

Tang, who is a celebrated motivational speaker in China, initially did not respond, but when the controversy refused to die down even days later, he came out with a denial — but it only damned him further.

He said he had never claimed to have graduated from Caltech — which was easily disproved, since even his LinkedIn profile page listed a computer science PhD from Caltech as one of his qualifications. He instead said he had received his doctorate from the California-based Pacific Western University. 

But Fang, who had scented blood, then exposed Pacific Western University as a disreputable “diploma mill” that sold academic degrees for a price. He also established that Tang’s claims to having had industrial patents registered in his name were, well, patently false.

These claims are more than a little embarrassing for Tang, of course. But some of the other companies that Tang started or headed — including entertainment media empire Shanda — find themselves on a sticky regulatory wicket since they listed his fake qualifications in their prospectus while raising funds from the US stock market. 

More dirt came flying out when the mainstream media joined in the scrumfest. Newspapers and magazines put out public lists of Chinese businessmen and professionals and managers who had graduated from institutions like Pacific Western that sold doctorate degrees for dollars. The list included prominent executives, judges, and even lawyers.  

It is this that has set off the frenzied scramble among businessmen and managers to ‘cover up’ details of their dubiously earned overseas degrees, which they were happy to advertise in their public profiles until recently. 

The episode has served to open a can of worms in China, where the market for fake overseas university degrees runs into millions of dollars. Unaccredited overseas universities have even set up shop in China and minted money by doling out degrees for hefty sums.

One mainstream columnist noted that the Tang scandal had exposed the fact that China as a whole had become something of a diploma mill, and that if there was one “overheated sector” in China it was not the property market but the educational system that churns out an army of “mediocre” master’s degrees and doctorates.

Curiously, however, on the Chinese-language internet there is also a vigorous counter-campaign in defence of the discredited Tang by people who argue that he is a “self-made successful entrepreneur” and an “inspirational hero” for a generation of Chinese youngsters and should, therefore, not be “picked on”.

In the end, despite his fake qualifications, Tang, to them, is a “winner” in life. In many ways, the Tang scandal, with its success-at-all-costs formula, epitomises the slippery slope of morality that Chinese society skates on. The fact that although he’s fallen from his pedestal, he is still valorised as a ‘hero’ further points to a disquieting disorientating of the moral compass in some sections of China today.