Justice won't be done till truth of college entrance fraud is revealed

A screenshot from CCTV news of Wang Nana, whose personal identification was used by another woman to obtain her degree.[Photo/CCTV]

A woman, who faked the identity of someone else to enter Zhoukou Vocation and Technology College in Central China's Henan province in 2003, has had her diploma invalidated and been dismissed as a teacher by the school where she worked. Nine government or college staff members involved in the scandal are being investigated and given penalties such as warnings and other disciplinary penalties. More details about how the impostor could get away with such a crime for so long need to be made public, said Beijing Times on Monday:

There is hardly a way to remedy the wrong to woman who should have been enrolled all those years ago. She has every right to demand the whole truth and that justice be done after failing to enter the college as intended.

Although the responsible officials, including the impostor herself, have received belated punishments, what really happened 13 years ago remains unclear. The victim still does not know how her admittance to the college was stolen by the impostor.

Such being the case, justice has not yet been done even though she has received support for punishing those responsible. Key information about how the impostor managed to get away with it has not been revealed.

More, it is not known whether those held responsible abused positions of power or not and what their respective roles in this shameful fraud were.

Holding a person accountable should be based on disclosing all his or her misdeeds, otherwise it is impossible for people to believe that justice has been done.

In the aforementioned case, local investigators only acknowledge that there were "loopholes" in the college's enrollment process, but a judicial investigation into these has not been launched. That the impostor succeeded in "buying" someone's college entry with the help of others suggests more than just the exploitation of some loopholes in the system.

To some extent, that one of the individuals responsible has died made it more difficult for the investigators to dig up the facts. Yet this does not justify their failure to provide further evidence, because there were a number of departments and individuals involved in the case. An independent and fair investigation is needed to disclose the truth behind the scandal.