Academic fraud, such as faking one's degrees, is not as unusual as some of us might have previously thought.

And top Chinese officials are no exception either.

Copied large chunks of their dissertations

On paper, China's top politicians are extremely educated.

For instance, seven politburo members are doctoral graduates, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, who received a law doctorate from Tsinghua University in 2002.

China's politburo consists of 25 of the party's most senior officials.

However, a recent investigation by Financial Times (FT) has revealed that several senior party officials plagiarised large portions of their dissertations.

This includes the act of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing it off as one's own.

Top Chinese official in Xinjiang

The Chinese official that has been put under the spotlight is Chen Quanguo.

The Xinjiang Party Chief oversaw the mass crackdown on the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities since 2016, and was behind the construction of the mass detention camps, according to Bloomberg.

He also previously occupied the top post in Tibet, making him the first official to have overseen the two regions where China's ethnic minorities are concentrated at.

While in Tibet, he designed a programme of intense surveillance in the name of "social stability", which was later replicated in Xinjiang.

His achievements in Xinjiang -- as well as public declarations of Xi's power in the country -- were said to have won him his promotion to China's elite politburo.

But FT's recent report has cast doubt on his academic qualifications.

FT reported that a 2004 doctoral dissertation he submitted at Wuhan University of Technology included several paragraphs that are exactly the same as a 2002 PhD dissertation that was submitted at Jinan University by a Zhu Yimin.

Zhu is currently an Associate Professor at Sun Yat-sen Business School.

Chen had not cited the paragraphs as well.

Out of all the politburo members, Chen's dissertation was the only one that was available on public academic databases.

FT also claimed that three out of 10 doctoral dissertations written by other Chinese officials had large chunks of words that were lifted wholesale with no citations given.

Academic "arms race"

An unnamed academic at a Chinese university told FT that it was a common practice for Chinese officials to pay agencies to write their dissertations for them.

Students who help these agencies write the papers then complete their task by putting together paragraphs from earlier works.

Minxin Pei, a renowned Chinese politics expert told FT that since the 1990s, it has been common for top ranking officials in China to get their postgraduate degrees as there is an "arms race" for credentials among them.

"A government official's work is really demanding, so how do they have time to write a PhD thesis?

It's a running joke in China."

And such demand for postgraduate degrees among Chinese officials is because official promotions have begun to depend on educational qualifications, said Li Datong, a former editor at the China Youth Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Youth League of China.

You can read the full article here.

Top image via China Tibet News