[Video] This PhD dropout exposes China’s academic fraud — can he change the system?

Student Geng, a PhD dropout with more than five million followers, has made a name for himself in China by exposing suspected academic fraud. Since April, he has flagged more than 15 papers, most of them published in Nature or its sister journals. His targets sit at the top of Chinese academia: university deans and recipients of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, titles that command considerable funding and influence.

The fraud itself was often crude, and with Geng’s sharp, unfiltered delivery, his videos went viral. “Some data points show an obvious ratio. The odds of that happening naturally in a lab might be one in ten trillion. And then it happens many times over. That’s when we consider it fraud,” Geng told ThinkChina.

The consequences have been swift. At least seven academics have been stripped of titles or demoted, and three have been dismissed. In late August, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) disclosed 31 misconduct cases involving more than 40 researchers, its largest investigation to date. Four of them were scholars Geng had named. They were stripped of their posts and ordered to return more than ten million RMB in grants.

To Geng, however, falsified data is merely the symptom.

The publish-or-perish culture

For Chinese researchers, papers in international journals and their impact factors have been the key, and at times sole, evaluation metric for years. They can determine whether a student graduates or a professor is promoted.

“Because there are too many people and no one knows how to assess them, they picked an indicator linked to academia: papers. They haven’t found a better metric, so they keep using it,” said Geng.

However, not every researcher is in it for the research.

China has built a tiered reward system around prestigious academic titles, bringing higher salaries, greater research funding and, often, a path into administrative posts with real authority. 

China’s state news agency Xinhua has reported that some academics spend more time on administrative roles, becoming detached from their teams’ research and less able to monitor its accuracy. Some take credit for work they did not contribute to, exacerbating the practice of honorary authorship.

Professor Yang Jianye of Xi’an University of Science and Technology and professor Rao Yi of Peking University have warned that many leading academics are drawn less by scientific curiosity than by power and position. Online, such figures are derided as “academic warlords” and “research tyrants”.

Many master’s and PhD students, too, may be in academia because of job market pressure rather than genuine interest in research.

A 2021 People’s Daily survey found only a very small proportion of master’s students chose postgraduate study out of interest in academic research. A 2018 Ministry of Education publication found fewer than half of PhD students cited interest in research as a reason for doing a doctorate.

Whatever the reason, those who cannot meet the demand for papers on their own often turn to paper mills, which sell fabricated studies. In China, the trade has taken on an industrial scale, as a CCTV investigation revealed in late 2025. The services are still on mainstream shopping platforms today. Search “ghostwriting” on Taobao and plenty of shops come up offering exactly that. Some do not even try to hide it. Right on the shopping page, “journals” and “SCI (Science Citation Index)” are splashed right across their banners.

One of the harshest criticisms was made by professor Rao Yi. In a lecture video that went viral, he argued that China’s record on academic misconduct cannot be explained by the sheer size of its research system. What worried him was the proportion of misconduct cases, which he called unprecedented in world history.

Researchers interviewed by Xinhua explained that, as in many countries, academic publishing in China depends largely on self-regulation and peer review rather than formal oversight, and that research offices cannot feasibly vet every paper. 

Where output is a hard target and quality control a soft one, academic integrity can easily fall through the cracks.

The same incentives also deepen the divide between what Chinese laboratories produce and what Chinese industry needs. “Students publish to graduate. Teachers publish to get promoted. No one cares what’s on the paper,” said Geng.

Reform on repeat

China has long recognised the problem. 

A 2018 reform called for an end to the “Four Onlys”, the practice of evaluating researchers solely on papers, titles, qualifications and awards. It also includes called for decoupling honourific titles from money and promotion, and declared zero-tolerance for academic misconduct. In 2021, the language hardened, calling for the “resolute” elimination of the “Four Onlys” and explicitly targeting “paper-only” evaluation and “SCI supremacy”. The principle was reiterated in 2023, this time focused on young researchers. In 2025, the Ministry Of Science and Technology launched a special campaign targeting retracted papers by Chinese researchers in international natural science journals.

This April, Chinese President Xi Jinping made the same call, explicitly condemning the conduct of academic warlords.

The fact that the same reforms must be issued repeatedly highlights the depth of the problem.

Fake research does not stay on the page. Research informs how patients are treated, what technologies are developed and which policies are adopted, and published data increasingly serves as training material for AI. Retractions often come too late. And much of the research is publicly funded.

As methods of manipulation become more sophisticated, detection will become harder. Whistle-blowers can expose individual cases, but they are no substitute for rigorous, systematic scrutiny by journals and institutions. This makes it imperative to move away from the “Four Onlys” and the publish-or-perish culture, and instead place greater weight on the scientific significance and socioeconomic impact of research.

Over time, people may no longer remember which papers Student Geng exposed. But if his work helps build a more transparent and credible system for policing research, his real legacy may be a system that no longer needs someone like him.

Related: Are Chinese universities abolishing the ‘iron rice bowl’? | Eradicating academic warlords and bandits in Chinese academia