A few days ago I came across a news story that felt almost too convoluted to be real. Two brothers. More than twenty years ago, the older one used his younger brother's college admission letter to enroll at Xiangtan University. From there he went on to a master's program, a PhD at Nankai University, and eventually a postdoctoral position at Peking University. The younger brother recently reported him for identity theft, and all of the older brother's degrees were revoked.
What triggered the report wasn't an attack of conscience. The older brother had apparently used the younger brother's eligibility to buy an apartment in Beijing. As Beijing property values soared, the apartment multiplied in value. The older brother wanted to transfer the property to his own name. The younger brother demanded compensation. At first the older brother refused. The younger brother reported him. Then the older brother agreed to pay more than three million yuan. The younger brother withdrew the report. But after paying a little over one million, the older brother didn't pay the remaining two million. So the younger brother reported him again, and that's when the impersonation came out.
I read the whole thing with my mouth hanging open. Real life really does outdo fiction.
My first thought was that there must have been many cases of people taking someone else's college admission back then. This one just happened to surface. It might be only the tip of the iceberg. And this family's scheme wasn't even the worst kind. The worst is when someone steals the identity of a stranger's child. These brothers exploited a loophole in the system, and within the family they reached a kind of agreement—or maybe the younger brother was too young to understand what was happening, and his scores and identity were simply handed to the older one. Years later, when money got involved, they turned on each other. A double loss felt better than a single win. As an onlooker, the only word that comes to mind is "deserved."
But here's what puzzles me: the older brother couldn't even get into a regular university, yet later he managed to pass graduate exams, earn a PhD, and keep winning. Did he suddenly unlock some hidden potential, or is it just too easy to coast through college? If his poor performance was just a one-off bad exam day, why not repeat a year and try again?
I've heard many stories about college admissions being stolen. Swapped lives—who knows how many there have been. I lived through that era, and I can say that under the conditions back then, this kind of thing was genuinely easy to pull off.
There was no digitalization. No online score checking. Mobile phones weren't common, and most people didn't even have a landline. How did students learn their scores? Some rural parents and kids might not have known they could call a number to check. They just waited at home for an admission letter. That letter went through the county, the township, the village. No one required the recipient to sign for it in person. Often a village acquaintance would bring it over. It was easy for someone with ill intent to tamper with it—they just had to exploit the information gap. Rural students and their parents, if no letter arrived, had no idea where to go or who to ask. Universities relied on paper documents and human eyes. There were no second-generation ID cards yet, only first-generation ones that were hard to verify. Many students didn't even have an ID card.
I was lucky. I never got caught up in that kind of mess. If it had happened to me, I think I would have been suspicious and gone to check. After all, I'd taken so many mock exams over the years; I had a rough idea of what I could score on the real thing. But back then I never personally saw or heard the score feedback. My father went to the county to check—I don't know whether he made a phone call or asked at the school—and then he told me the results verbally. I never saw a score report. It wasn't until the admission letter arrived via the village that I felt certain.
Not long ago my daughter took the high school entrance exam. She could check her score directly on her phone, and the school admission results too. The whole process was so much smoother and more pleasant—even if the score itself wasn't exactly cause for celebration.