It’s been reported on Twitter that the current Xinjiang party boss Chen Quanguo, who directly oversees the massive concentration camps in Xinjiang, is also a PhD thesis plagiarist, one of many among Chinese officials. His PhD thesis shows heavy plagiarism: over 80% of intro, and large parts of text body, appear directly lifted from other’s works.
Because this is a politburo member in charge of the ongoing genocidal crimes in Xinjiang, this is major news.
See this Twitter thread by @AirMovingDevice: https://twitter.com/AirMovingDevice/status/1097175443017392128
It includes, in the third message an onwards, direct evidence of Chen’s copying from someone else’s thesis from just four years earlier.
Full materials are here, on Github: “Analysis of post-graduate theses by Chinese government officials”, https://github.com/airmovingdevice/postgradTheses
The tweets also say that journalists and others are free to ask the writer for all the data. The writer says this is only a hobby for him.
Another Twitterite added Chen Quanguo’s official bio: http://ldzl.people.com.cn/dfzlk/front/personPage4958.htm
This is also newsworthy because the PhD institution in Chen Quanguo’s case is the Wuhan University of Technology, which issued Chen’s PhD in 2004, while he was party boss of the Hebei province. This university collaborates with many universities around the world, http://english.whut.edu.cn (including McMaster U in Canada where the recent ugly ultranationalist incidents took place).
It’s widely known that Chen previously worked in Tibet, quelling dissent and denying freedom to Tibetans. But before that he was also a party boss in Hebei, associated with the use of extralegal brainwashing methods to brutally suppress Falungong people there: https://jamestown.org/program/the-learning-curve-how-communist-party-officials-are-applying-lessons-from-prior-transformation-campaigns-to-repression-in-xinjiang/
As a reward for these extremist measures, he and his collaborators have received promotions, so that Chen Quanguo is now a politburo member, de facto a top Chinese leader.
Footnote: To me, Chen bears direct comparison with Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s henchman who was perhaps No. 4 or 5 in the Nazi hierarchy overall, and the #2 in the SS. Until his assassination in Prague in 1942, he was a leading architect of the Holocaust, including as chair of the infamous Wansee conference that fixed the framework for the Holocaust.
It’s less well known that Heydrich also actively oversaw the Germanization of Czechs and Slovaks in occupied Böhmen and Moravia, and drew up plans to classify the occupied people, post-war, into the Germanizable, to be forced-assimilated, and the non-Germanizable who would probably have been “eliminated” after WWII, if the Nazis had won.
There are lots of similarities to the ongoing genocide and the forced assimilation policies in occupied Xinjiang/Turkestan right now. I’m writing something about those aspects.
–Sincerely,
Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>