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Milan (AsiaNews) – The account called “Geng Tongxue Jiang Gushi” (“Student Geng Tells Stories”) has recently gone viral on the internet in China. Its owner, Geng Hongwei, has a solid academic background: he obtained both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology from Jilin University; and subsequently undertook a PhD in biomedical engineering at Beihang University.
According to information available online, having refused to collaborate with his supervisor in falsifying experimental data, he chose to withdraw from his studies, becoming a full-time science communicator.
Since April this year, Geng Hongwei has been using short-form video platforms to champion the ‘fight against academic fraud’. Through reports made under his real name, he has directly accused leading academics from numerous key universities in the ‘Project 211’ (a government initiative launched in 1995 to raise university research standards – ed.) of publishing articles in the prestigious international journal Nature that are suspected of containing falsified data.
This series of revelations involved six universities: Tongji University, Nankai University, Sun Yat-sen University, Shanghai University, Beihang University and Beijing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Those implicated are mostly academic authorities, including deans of faculties, university vice-chancellors and figures honoured with prestigious titles such as ‘National Outstanding Young Scholar’ and ‘Yangtze River Scholar’.
Faced with the allegations, Tongji, Nankai, Sun Yat-sen and Shanghai Universities reacted swiftly, launching investigations in quick succession and taking measures to remove the scholars involved from their posts or demote them.
However, with media coverage now entering its third month, the response from some universities has shown signs of slowing down; furthermore, with the rapid succession of trending topics in online public discourse, public attention has waned somewhat, reflecting a sort of ‘aesthetic fatigue’. Nevertheless, Geng Hongwei’s series of revelations has undoubtedly once again laid bare a vulnerability in China’s academic ecosystem.
17,000 articles by Chinese authors retracted
In fact, the issue of academic misconduct had already attracted the attention of the international scientific community. As early as February 2024, the news section of Nature, in an article entitled China conducts first nationwide review of retractions and research misconduct had highlighted that, as of 2021, the number of articles by Chinese authors that had been retracted had exceeded 17,000, placing China, alongside Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Russia, among the top countries in the world. Several years on, Geng Hongwei’s revelations confirm once again that this problem in the country remains serious and deeply entrenched.
Although the Chinese government has already called for the establishment of a mechanism for reporting and reviewing the retraction of scientific articles, the root of the problem goes far beyond the management of regulatory compliance, being deeply embedded in the research evaluation system, supervisory mechanisms and the general culture of social governance.
Examining the development of Chinese universities: since the start of the new millennium, with the policy of expanding university enrolment, the number of master’s and doctoral students has grown exponentially.
Statistics from the Ministry of Education show that in 1995 the country had only 1,054 universities, 400,700 full-time teaching staff and 51,100 new annual enrolments on master’s and doctoral programmes (of whom 11,000 were doctoral students); by 2020, the number of universities had reached 2,733, annual new enrolments on postgraduate programmes had risen to 1,106,600 (of whom 116,000 were PhD students), whilst the total number of full-time lecturers had increased to 1,833,000.
In a high-pressure evaluation system, most universities regard articles published in top-tier scientific journals as a ‘strict benchmark’ both for the award of doctoral degrees and for the promotion of academic staff, thereby forcing the research community to endure enormous pressure to survive. For researchers in the natural sciences and engineering, publishing in prestigious foreign journals is regarded as an essential goal.
A manifestation of the imbalance in the power structure
The humanities and social sciences also face very severe challenges. According to research data published in February 2025 by the Journal of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the number of articles published in Chinese C-level journals has remained at a certain level for a long time: between 1998 and 2021, the volume of publications fluctuated between 60,000 and 100,000 articles, whilst in recent years it has stabilised at around 75,000.
However, the structural imbalance in publishing resources has exacerbated the difficulties young scholars face in gaining access. With the acceleration of the internationalisation process, since 2017 the number of articles published by Chinese scholars abroad has risen steadily by around a thousand per year. For some disciplines, particularly those subject to strict internal controls, this is certainly a positive development, but it has also given rise to the problem of heterogeneity in evaluation criteria.
According to reports from some professionals in the sector, the same open-access journal is sometimes recognised as an ‘authoritative journal’ in the assessments carried out by academic committees at different universities, whilst at other times it is classified as a ‘low-level journal’. This fragmentation of academic standards and the excessive internal competition within the evaluation system have now become the main obstacle to the healthy development of academic activity.
The distortion of the academic evaluation system is, at its core, a manifestation of an imbalance in the power structure. In a research model characterised by a high concentration of resources, certain academic authorities use public funds to engage in exchanges of interest, thereby seriously violating academic ethics and corrupting the ethos and morals of teaching.
From the cases involving the former director of the Central Translation Bureau, Yi Junqing, to the recent case of Renmin University Professor Yang Nianqun, such incidents have prompted reflection on the abuse of power on university campuses. Furthermore, within the context of an evaluation system based exclusively on performance, in some medical and engineering faculties there are frequent instances where supervisors treat students as mere ‘scientific labour’, causing tensions in teacher-student relationships and even leading to serious, tragic consequences.
The falsification of research data is merely one manifestation of the many chronic ailments afflicting universities: the imbalance in the power structure, the utilitarian focus of KPIs (key performance indicators ed.) based exclusively on performance, and the inadequacy of internal oversight mechanisms.
