A man who posed as a Yale University PhD holder and won a job as deputy publisher at a state-owned publishing house was jailed for 13 years for graft yesterday.
Shen Zhenlin , 36, was accused of embezzling 540,000 yuan of royalties owed to authors and claiming 50,000 yuan in false expenses from 2001 to 2002, when he worked as the deputy publisher at the Beijing Hope Publishing House, a subsidiary of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Shen smuggled himself to the United States in 1989 after graduating from high school and worked as a casual cleaner at Yale and Stanford universities, Xinhua reported.
He posed as the holder of a PhD in computer science from Yale in an online chat room and became a friend of a Ms Qin, the then publisher at Beijing Hope Publishing.
Impressed by his use of technical terminology, Ms Qin invited Shen to work in her publishing house and he smuggled himself back to China in 1999.
Neither his passport nor his educational background was checked.
