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An academic from China, who is a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore Business School, has been called out as a fraud in her home country.
News of her allegedly faking her academic credentials to land jobs at prestigious institutions of higher learning were reported by the South China Morning Post.
A check with the NUS website revealed that Professor Chen Chunhua, 58, is no longer listed and her profile appeared to have been removed.
In response to Mothership‘s queries, an NUS Business School spokesperson said: “We hold our faculty to the highest standards and are conducting a review of the adjunct faculty member’s credentials. The faculty member will not be teaching any modules pending our review.”
Why public fact-checked her
Chen, who is from Peking University, a leading university in China, allegedly has a degree from a fake university in Europe and pretended to be a “military adviser” for tech firm Huawei.
Members of the public in China fact-checked her declared qualifications after Huawei issued a public statement denying Chen's claims of her ties to the company and its founder Ren Zhengfei.
This announcement kickstarted the intense public scrutiny a few weeks ago.
Huawei says it’s all fake
“Huawei does not know her, and it is impossible for her to know Huawei,” the tech company said on July 6.
The company said it noticed “over 10,000 online articles”, with some referring to her as a “Huawei military adviser”, and even featuring Chen’s comments on the company.
It was even written that she met Ren.
Huawei called these articles “false information”.
Odd anecdote
The oddest anecdote stemmed from Chen supposedly recalling an alleged meeting she had with Ren.
This anecdote appeared in one popular article written by Chen published in early 2017.
She even went as far as to claim that Ren, the Huawei founder, acted as her driver after he insisted on picking her up personally.
Chen responded with her own statement after the Huawei statement was released.
She claimed that most of the articles that mentioned her and Huawei were not written by her.
She also claimed that the company was just a case study for her work.
What public found
The online sleuths who dug into Chen's background found that her doctoral degree was issued by an unlicensed university two decades ago.
The academic supposedly obtained a doctorate of business administration (DBA) from the European University of Ireland in 2001.
But the organisation has no website and is not one of 25 legitimate Irish universities the Chinese education ministry acknowledges.
The Irish Times reported in 2011 that the “university” operated without official approval from a Dublin address and had no office, according to SCMP.
In 2005, Chen went on to do postdoctoral research at Nanjing University, according to her own bio details.
She was even included in Fortune’s China’s 25 Most Influential Businesswomen Leaders list for four consecutive years from 2015 to 2018.
Besides her stint at NUS, Chen is also dean of Beijing International MBA (BiMBA) Business School at Peking University, as well as a professor and doctoral supervisor at the School of Business Administration of the South China University of Technology.
The issue of academic fraud has frustrated people in China, as there is intense pressure to enter top schools, while examinations can be life-altering experiences.
Top photos via NUS