Bringing imposters and enablers to justice

Confucian traditions attach particular significance to education, in part because it has demonstrated life-changing potential since the days when the imperial examinations were a key channel for upward social mobility.

Even today, nailing the annual State-administered college-entrance examinations, remains a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for students.

Decades back, a poor father in rural Shandong province decided to stop financing his only son and concentrate his limited resources on his younger sister instead, who was performing better in school in the belief that she had a better chance of making it to a college.

Then 20-year-old Chen Chunxiu took the exams, and secured a score more than sufficient for junior colleges.

But that dream offer never arrived.

Chen wasn't stranded in farming as her family once worried though. After years working away from home, taking jobs from waitressing to cashiering, she became a kindergarten teacher, got married, and bought her own home and car.

Chen had been generally content with what life had to offer. She did not find out she had been admitted by a college 16 years ago until she tried to apply for a continuing education program online recently. But the offer was stolen by someone usurping her identity.

It turns out "she" had graduated from a local college and for many years worked as a grassroots civil servant. The imposter has been using her personal information－her name, her date of birth to her identification card number－with the sole exception of her photo.

Of course, Chen's imposter has been suspended from her job and faces further investigation.

And Chen says she is seeking legal redress through the courts.

Yet heart-rending as this case is, it is not an isolated one. It is almost beyond belief that in Shandong alone, the authorities have found that more than 240 people received diplomas from local institutions of higher learning between 2002 and 2009 using stolen identities. How many more imposters are still at large?

What are things like elsewhere in the country? It is likely that the imposters in Shandong are only the tip of an iceberg.

And this systematic misappropriation of someone else's identity could not be accomplished by individual wrongdoers without the collaboration of system insiders. But who are they?

While the imposters deserve due punishment, the dirty hands that made all this possible must be dug out if this outrageous injustice is to be uprooted.