It should not come as news to anyone in the world at this point that China has something of a reputation for selling low-budget copies of foreign goods. Equally self-evident at this point is the fact that this reputation is well-deserved. My first-ever trip to China was a two-week visit to Shanghai in February 2012 which included a visit to the West Nanjing Road "Fake Market," which it seems is now closed (Naumann, TripSavvy). After selecting a polo shirt from a rack, the vendor then opened a drawer containing labels and asked "this shirt, what brand you want?" I don't recall what brand I selected once I picked my jaw up off the ground, or how badly I got ripped off on the price, but I do recall that by the time I returned to China in August of the same year, the shirt had fallen apart.
Despite having the cheek to put the words "China's legislations on intellectual property rights, anti-dumping and countervailing seem to take its place in the front rank of the world" in a propaganda pamphlet masquerading as a textbook (Pan & Ma, China's Laws, 101), the sheer omnipresence of copycattery in China has become so infamous that even China's government has been forced to admit it (Crowe, Money and Markets). Indeed, selling fake copies of brand names is such a staple of China's economy that Jack Ma of Alibaba, now known to be a long-standing member of the Party (Li & Zen, South China Morning Post), actually tried to justify it (Clover, Financial Times), and there have even been cases when Chinese knockoffs have successfully sued the companies they copied and had them banned from China for too closely resembling their Chinese copies (Fenby, Will China Dominate the Twenty-First Century?, 112).
Of course, perhaps they could be excused for not having much respect for copyrights, considering how easy it is to convince someone you own a copyright or patent you don't own. For instance, a company called "Visual China" has even taken it upon themselves to sell copyrights they don't even own (Koetse, What's On Weibo). As author Tom Doctoroff said, "this is a society where, if you open a fake Apple store, people start writing articles about how innovative and creative you are (Rapoza, Forbes).
Wa-ta you min copy-lie-ta in-flin-ja-men-ta?
The People's Imitation Army
And then, of course, there's the issue of copied military hardware, which would almost require a separate entry. The PLA Air Force's J-7 was an open and unabashed copy of the USSR's MiG-21 (a copy made with tacit Soviet approval), and the J-11 was a much-less-authorized copy of their Su-27 "Flanker (Gao, The National Interest)," which was armed with a dazzling array of copied missiles, as Sebastien Roblin writes for The National Interest.
The J-11B is also adapted to fire Chinese missiles and munitions—namely, the short-range PL-8 infrared guided missile (a knock-off of the Israeli Python 3) and the long-range PL-12 radar-guided missile (the so-called Chinese AMARAM, with a range of up to one hundred kilometers).
Too avoid straying from my topic I won't get mired down in the details, but I'll simply say the J-20 (Adams, Wired), the shiny new J-31 (Brown, Business Insider), and even China's only carrier-launch-capable fighter, the J-15 (Tarantola, Gizmodo) are copied designs.
A "Certain Degree" of Authenticity
Given the prevalence of cheap imitations in this country, it wasn't really any surprise when China branched out into the business of selling counterfeit education certificates. One needn't search very hard in China to find someone who can't speak a word of English but has a Bachelor of English Language Studies proudly displayed on their wall. Given that China has not had any mechanism to verify foreign credentials until recently (Tao, Epoch Times) and even now it's mostly a witch hunt, selling these "d'oh!-plomas" to customers in China eager to impress potential bosses with their fancy foreign credentials was an easy way to make fast money. Later on though, China branched out into selling these fake credentials to overseas customers (Charrison, The New Daily).
This problem of fake credentials in China isn't new (He, Hu & Peng, ChinaDaily), and is found even the upper echelons of China's financial ladder (Lee, SCMP). Obviously the sector of China's society most well-known for fake credentials is teaching (Murphy, TEFL.net; NYME, The Beijinger), but after my recent (and rather horrendous) experience with China's healthcare system (see my three, previous, articles), an experience generally characterized by doctors who did not know how to administer anesthetic and nurses who demonstrated less understanding of medicine than what is taught in a semi-decent First Aid class, I began to suspect that classrooms were not the only place in China where forged credentials landed people in jobs where they could do damage. So I began some research into the frequency of fake credentials in a few key fields where an untrained individual is likely to get people killed: medicine, engineering, and aviation.
In the words of Ian Malcolm, "boy, do I hate being right all the time."
Is This What They Mean by "Traditional Chinese Medicine?"
I'd be lying if I said it was any surprise when it took a grand total of 15 seconds to find articles outlining rampant fraud in China's medical profession (Fang, Epoch Times), including the recent Chengdu "rape doctor" case (Wong, SCMP) and a notorious scandal involving a "doctor" who claimed to have genetically engineered an AIDS-resistant baby until it was discovered that his qualifications were as fake as his claim (Chen & Mozur, New York Times). What was a bit surprising was when I found China admitting the frequency of medical personnel without proper education or licensing, and acknowledging that the problem dates as far back as the early 20th century, when it was done at the orders of the Chinese government. In the manual Cardiothoracic Surgery in China: Past, Present and Future from Chinese University Press there is a description of a setting where untrained and semi-trained medical staff were assigned government credentials with the stroke of a pen.
"Orderlies, nurses and medical students were all pressed into service and 'are given the rank of medical officers and their partial training employed as best it can be.' "
(P. 49)
I also found one double-take-inducing instance wherein apparently Chinese men have used fake credentials to become one type of doctor I don't imagine many people aspire to be: proctologists (Scocca, Slate).
...I won't inquire as to the motivation behind this, especially considering that a doctor's salary in China is far less than impressive (Staff, Mypengyou).
Interestingly, despite the plague of fake credentials among Chinese doctors, I did not find any accounts of fabricated nursing credentials in China, and China is not the safest place in the world to do one's own investigative reporting (nor the easiest when one has an unmistakably foreign face and doesn't speak Mandarin that well). This absence of news was a bit surprising, given the fact that in my time at the 306th I found myself frequently compelled to explain to the nursing staff how the various medical equipment, such as an IV, were supposed to work (I was amazed how many times I had to explain, to a nurse, that an air bubble in an IV tube was dangerous). The fact may simply be that nurses are so low on the pecking order in China's social system that nobody has bothered to look closely enough at them to see if there is a problem with faulty credentials, or it may simply be that anyone capable of affording forged credentials goes into a profession more lucrative than nursing, which pays an average 110 RMB hourly (Salary Expert). To put that in perspective, I charge 500 RMB hourly to teach ESL lessons. Still, even that absurd salary is up from the average of $200 monthly that a nurse with 3 - 10 years of experience could expect barely more than a decade ago (Fang, Health Services Research).
...In that case, it may be that the nurses in China DO have authentic credentials and the poor quality is an example of "you get what you pay for." Admittedly, nursing was the only profession I examined wherein a mechanism DOES exist for checking credentials (CGFNS International).
Having finished my research into false credentials in China's medical profession, it was then time to move on to aviation.
Scare Traffic Control
"Good evening ladies and gentlemen, and welcome aboard Xiamen Air flight 1313. This is your captain drinking... er, uh, speaking. Today we will be boozing... eh, cruising... at an altitude of approximately 35,000 feet. (clears throat) ...Or maybe higher. Our estimated time of survival.. eh, arrival, will be approximately happy hour... I mean 4:35 PM. Our in-flight movies will be 'Con-Air' starring Nicholas Cage, 'Air Force One' starring Harrison Ford, and 'Snakes on a Plane' starring Samuel L... uhhh, what does that red light mean?"
One of the main reasons I chose aviation as the industry to go snooping for fraudulent credentials in is because China's airline industry has an absolutely deplorable safety record. There was a time at the beginning of the 21st century when that record seemed to be turning around (Pasztor, Wall Street Journal), but as I've documented before, they have recently returned to a safety record more in line with what the world expects from China. And yet, I only found one report of pilots in China being found to have fake credentials. Of course, that report did find not one or two or even ten pilots with fake credentials, but apparently a system rife with forgery (China Daily), prompting a massive drive by multiple carriers to root out these fake pilots (Staff, SCMP). Interestingly enough, that report came less than a month after a deadly plane crash in Northeast China killed 42 passengers and injured 54 more (LaFraniere, New York Times), ending the "golden safety age" Pasztor gushed over. One has to wonder at the timing. In China, any admission of flaws in the system only comes at times of intense pressure. For the moment, recent articles about fake credentials in China's airline industry seem scarce, despite a safety record that has taken a dismal turn in the past few years. Personally, I'm more inclined to believe this means that reporters are being told not to look for it (part of Xi's push to make China look good), but that is 100% speculation and I cannot prove it.
Engineering Looks Legit, But...
This was probably the only phase of my research for this article that surprised me. Despite searching everywhere from the media to academic journals to what few "public documents" are actually ever made public in China, I have yet to find a single report of a Chinese engineer or architect getting busted for fake credentials. Frankly, given the catastrophic results of the "Tofu Buildings" Scandal after the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake, I assumed this would be the shortest search in history. Tens of thousands, including over five thousand schoolchildren were killed when buildings constructed with substandard materials collapsed "like tofu," hence the nickname (Choi, SCMP). After all, all the signs of massive fraud are there: horrendous loss of life caused by cutting corners, a forced and hurried government admission of this corner-cutting (Wong, NYT), and a government that even after ten years violently persecutes those who seek the details of the disaster (Hui, ABS-CBN) while doing backflips to portray itself as the "People's Hero" who rode in on a white horse to save the day in the aftermath (Tang, Zhang, Wang & Feng, China's Social Development, pp. 20 - 22; Pan & Ma, China's Laws, pp. 58-59 & 116)... all signs pointed to the fact that there was something embarrassing which the Party is willing to go to great lengths to hide.
And yet, as sated, if the counterfeit credential crisis has touched China's construction industry, it has not come out yet. The other fields I investigated were rife with fraud, but Engineering/Architecture, it seems, has a different problem. It seems that the shoddy construction methods that led to the deaths of thousands of innocent children were not the result of incompetence by an engineer or architect with fake credentials, but of knowing and willful negligence by officials seeking to maximize profit at the expense of safety. I hardly call it a relief, but it's a sin to be addressed in a different article.
Look! Evil Foreigners!
Of course, in typically Chinese fashion, the Party has done everything they can to deny the credential crisis. When that became impossible, they tried to downplay it. Finally, they attempted to portray themselves as the righteously indignant "People's Avenging Angel" seeking to root out the source of the crisis and punish it. And of course, anyone who has lived in China longer than a week can guess who they chose to "make an example of" when the need for a scapegoat arose: foreigners. Global Times, a State-Owned media outlet that is a bit more honest about its status as a propaganda source than, say, China Daily or CCTV, ran an article as recently as 2017 supposedly investigating forged credentials in China. Interestingly enough, it did not mention, r even hint at, a single example of one of the Zhonghua Renmin even thinking of using forged certificates. Oh, no no no. That level of sneakiness, the article makes plain, is the exclusive domain of Foreign Devils (Zhang, Global Times).
This is convenient for the Party, because by engaging in a perpetual witch-hunt for foreigners allegedly cheating the system, not only can they be seen as passionately pursuing justice and reform without the risk of incurring popular wrath when the widow of an arrestee goes on TV on Xinhua, but they can also gain hostages to use as political leverage against the West.
But that, too, is for another day.
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