In 2020, it became public that another woman had taken Chen Chunxiu’s place at university in 2004. Shandong University of Technology confirmed that its student Chen Chunxiu of the class of 2004 “had entered under a false name in another person’s place.”
The investigation found that the impostor had scored 303 points in the 2004 college entrance exam, below the cutoff for the first batch of junior colleges. Her father and her uncle, then the head of a township, had asked the head of the county admissions office to help her take another person’s place at university.