Shanghai, May 13 (AP): A dean at one of China’s top universities has been fired after his claims to have invented a new computer chip turned out to be a fraud, the school announced yesterday.
The scandal at Shanghai Jiaotong University, the alma mater of former President Jiang Zemin, is an embarrassment for Chinese leaders, who are trying to promote homegrown technological advances to match the country’s economic progress.
Shanghai Jiaotong found that Chen Jin faked research on the Hanxin digital signal processing chip and that it couldn’t perform functions that he claimed, such as verifying fingerprints, the university said in a statement on its website.
It said Chen was fired from posts as a dean and professor at the university’s Microelectronics School and ordered to repay an unspecified amount of government money spent on developing the chip.
Phone calls to the university press office and the Microelectronics School rang unanswered late yesterday afternoon. No number was listed for Hanxin Sci-Tech Co., where the official Xinhua News Agency said Chen was a general manager.
The case resembles that of South Korean cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk ? a researcher who announced advances in a hot field in an Asian nation eager for scientific respect, only to crash in disgrace when his claims were revealed to be a sham. Yesterday, South Korean prosecutors indicted Hwang on charges of fraud, embezzlement and bioethics violations.
Unlike Hwang’s case, the Chen scandal received little coverage in China’s entirely state-controlled media, possibly reflecting efforts to contain damage to the country’s image.
Beijing has invested in recent years in a wide range of research, from genetic engineering to nuclear power, hoping to win prestige and create profitable technologies.
In February, the government announced an ambitious 15-year plan to pursue 11 fields including genetics, nuclear power, lasers and agriculture in an effort to develop “frontier technologies”. In the computer chip scandal, Shanghai Jiaotong, one of China’s top science schools, said it began investigating Chen after receiving a letter alleging that his research was fraudulent.
