Fang's rogue's gallery made it seem like every time a light bulb goes on in the head of a genuine genius, there's a mainland scientist at hand to steal the idea and bask in the illicit glory, but the list came as no surprise to followers of the blog. For close to a decade, Fang, who goes by the pen name Fang Zhouzi, has been using the site to battle academic corruption, which, some say, has become so endemic on the mainland, it poses a threat to the country's development.
Fang, who earned a PhD in biochemistry from Michigan State University, in the United States, in 1995, became concerned about the phenomenon in 2000, when he started to see an increase in reports of academic cheating on the internet and in the print media. A fan of literature, Fang had a literary website called New Threads, which he has since employed to expose academic fraud.
'I care about science in China,' he says, sitting in a Beijing cafe. 'I want to see it go somewhere. [Academic fraud] is more common [here] than in any other country and more common than in any other period in Chinese history.'
A survey conducted by the China Association for Science and Technology showed more than half of the scientists contacted said they were personally familiar with cases of scientific misconduct. However, few of the guilty parties are punished and that's what irks Fang, whose training in the US exposed him to a system in which plagiarism is rare and, when it does occur, is severely punished.
Shen Yang, an associate professor at the Information Management School of Wuhan University, pioneered software that detects plagiarism in university papers, but the will to implement such innovation has yet to surface.
Fang says that out of the more than 900 cases of academic corruption he has exposed only 20 have resulted in punishment - and the majority of those involved students.