Identity Theft in China

[Randy W]

from the Sixth Tone

 

A Lost ID Card, an Identity Thief, and a Marriage Delayed

By Zhang Wanqing

Jun 10, 2020

According to a Guangxi woman’s recent saga, invalidating records made under a fraudulent identity remains an arduous task for some officials.

 

 

When a woman in southern China visited her local civil affairs bureau last November hoping to get married, she was shocked to learn that she was not only married already, but also divorced.

According to official records, the woman, surnamed Su, had tied the knot and filed for divorce two days later in the northern Hebei province. This happened in June 2014 — around four months after Su lost her national identity card.

 

. . .

 

To curb the misuse of government-issued documents, China in 2011 updated its resident identity card law to include a controversial clause requiring citizens to provide their fingerprints when applying. Five years later, the country’s public security bureau introduced a new system that was supposed to allow authorities to identify lost cards — though according to Legal Daily, it hasn’t been particularly successful.

Bai Xiangfei, a lawyer at Hansen & Partners law firm in Shanghai, told The Paper that China needs to upgrade its ID card system so that lost or stolen ID cards can be invalidated, as well as severely punish those responsible.

Under the current law, people found guilty of buying, selling, or “misusing” ID cards can be punished with 10 days’ detention or a 10,000 yuan ($1,400) fine.

 

Though Su eventually succeeded in purging the marital records made with her stolen card, it was a tortuous and frustrating process.

She told The Paper that officials at the civil affair bureau in Hebei’s Tang County refused to clear her marriage and divorce history even after she proved that an imposter had been responsible for the false records. She sued the bureau twice — first in December, then in May — only to have her lawsuits rejected by a court because the five-year litigation period set by Chinese law had elapsed.

 

 

 

[Randy W]

from the Sixth Tone - identity theft of gaokao scores

 

The Lasting Pain of China’s Identity Theft Victims

• For nearly 20 years, Gou Jing believed someone had stolen the life she should have led. Now, an investigation has proved she was right.

 

 

"Many thought I should have ended up begging on the streets or laboring on a farm."

 

In 1997, Gou was the victim of an elaborate hoax, which resulted in Qiu taking her exam results, her name, and her place at a vocational school in Beijing. Gou was misled into thinking she’d flunked her exams and had to repeat her senior year, plunging her family further into poverty.

For a long time, such deceptions were a silent, but persistent phenomenon in parts of China. Powerful families used their connections to game the gaokao — China’s college-entrance exams — allowing their children to steal the scores of brighter, but less privileged children.

 

But over recent weeks, a reckoning has begun over these long-ignored historical injustices. In June, an investigation uncovered hundreds of cases of stolen gaokao scores that took place in just one region — the eastern province of Shandong — between 1999 and 2006.

“I had no plan for the future, but there was one clear thing on my mind: to score highly in the gaokao,” she says. “The higher you score, the more choices you’ll have.”

But when it came time for the results, Gou’s teacher — Qiu Yinlin, also the father of the imposter Qiu Xiaohui — took her aside. To Gou’s horror, he informed her she’d done terribly, failing to get a score high enough to be admitted to any decent colleges.

Qiu Yinlin told Gou her best option was to repeat her senior year and retake the gaokao in 1998. Gou remembers feeling crushed, but accepted her teacher’s advice. She never even submitted her college application form.

“I never imagined anything unfair or even illegal could happen in such a sacred exam,” says Gou.

. . .

Without connections or a decent diploma, Gou was forced to take door-to-door sales jobs hawking shampoo and pay phones to make ends meet. But she couldn’t bear to return to her home region after what had happened to her, she says.

“I didn’t want to go back to Shandong,” says Gou. “It was a place of shame I wished to escape.”

It wasn’t until 2002 that Gou realized her failure in the gaokao might not have been her fault after all. Out of the blue, she received a letter from her old teacher, Qiu Yinlin.

The letter was a confession. Qiu Yinlin revealed he’d used Gou’s gaokao score to help his daughter — Qiu Xiaohui — get into college, begging her forgiveness.

Instead, Qiu Xiaohui attended the school in Beijing under Gou’s name, despite not having taken the gaokao in 1997. After graduating, she also got a job in Shandong using Gou’s identity and continued using her name until 2001.

The fraud was made possible by a network of officials — including employees from local education and public security bureaus — who doctored official records and overlooked discrepancies in Qiu Xiaohui’s paperwork at her father’s request.

Chinese authorities have so far identified 15 people involved in the deception, with most being dismissed from their posts, given warnings, or having their pensions deducted. Qiu Xiaohui has been fired from her job, while investigations into her and her father continue.

According to the report, there was no evidence of foul play related to Gou’s second attempt at the gaokao in 1998.

 

[Randy W]

[Randy W]

Another way to lose your identity

Woman Mistakenly Declared Dead Struggles to Obtain Residence Permit
Authorities erroneously canceled the 39-year-old’s household registration document while she was transferring her city of residence after marriage.

from the Sixth Tone

Quote

 

A woman in southwestern China’s Sichuan province was vexed to learn recently that she had been dead for over a decade.

 . . .

Wang told Red Star News her hukou was erroneously “canceled due to death” in 2005. Referring to her conversation with Lijia officials, she said the legal document was mistakenly annulled when she attempted to transfer her residency to the southern Guangdong province after her first marriage.

Wang and her first husband got divorced in 2014. Though she wasn’t notified of any red flags at the time, she found out about her canceled hukou last year during the pandemic, after she had started planning her second wedding, according to the media report. She has approached multiple government departments and spent thousands of yuan to correct the error, but to no avail.

“Don’t I have to carry this document for the rest of my life?” she told Red Star News, adding that not having her household registration booklet could create myriad problems for her and her family down the line.

This is not the first time an individual’s hukou has been erroneously canceled. Last year, a man surnamed Guo from the southwestern city of Liuzhou went viral on Chinese social media after his household registration was canceled “due to death.” To prove that he was alive, Guo was asked to gather several documents from his local village office, along with a photo of him holding a newspaper with the current date visible.

It’s unclear whether Guo was successful in restoring his hukou.