📰 From the news · Fake admission / seat promise
Forged transcripts for four prerequisite courses, a plagiarised thesis, nineteen officials punished: the Peking Union Medical College "4+4" case, and what China did to a doctor's degree once it was fo
Peking Union Medical College is the most selective medical school in China, and in 2025 the National Health Commission found that one of its graduates had entered it on forged documents.
According to Sixth Tone, Shine and Mothership, the commission punished 19 officials and revoked the credentials of a 29-year-old trainee doctor, Dong Xiying, after an investigation into how she had moved through China's top medical institutions. She had gained admission to the college's "4+4" MD pilot programme in 2019, a route for graduates of other disciplines, by submitting forged transcripts for four prerequisite medical courses; her doctoral thesis was found to be plagiarised; and family connections were found to have smoothed the path. The college annulled her diploma, degree and medical qualifications, and both her medical licence and that of a senior surgeon who had supervised her were revoked, the surgeon being barred from practice for more than five years. The case caused a public outcry over nepotism in elite medicine. Caixin had reported two years earlier on medical students faking their way to licences more generally.
The case is on this site for the remedy rather than the fraud. The forged transcripts were found six years after admission, after a completed degree, a thesis and a residency, and the response was not a reprimand but annulment of everything built on them: diploma, degree, licence. Nineteen people who had signed off along the way were disciplined. That is what a regulator does when it decides to act, and it is the same logic that strikes foreign graduates off registers when an admission document turns out to be false.
Peking Union is a real and excellent college, and nothing here is an allegation against it. China's official list of medical schools permitted to admit foreign students is recorded elsewhere on this site. For any student, the lesson is that admission is provisional for as long as the documents behind it are unverified, which can be a very long time.
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This is a news-sourced case summary written by the TrustMBBS team, not a first-person account; see the sources above. They reflect one person's experience and are not a verdict on any institution. Report your own: Report a scam or tell your story.