It was intense competition: five jobs, 120 candidates.

A woman topped both the written test and the interview.

Mei Jing should have been a shoo-in for the post but there was a catch: her academic credentials were fake.

Governmental recruiters at Jiangxia district in Wuhan, capital of Central China's Hubei Province, are in a dilemma. Should they hire Mei, who is clearly the best of the applicants" Or do they disqualify her because of her trickery"

To recruit civil servants for the social security service centre under the District Civil Affairs Bureau, the District Personnel Bureau conducted a public recruitment last November.

One basic requirement for candidates was that they must have passed at least junior college.

When the five successful applicants were announced in mid-December, reports about Mei's fake academic credentials surfaced.

An investigation by Wuhan Radio and TV University showed the allegation was true.

The news, which appeared in local Chutian Metropolitan Newspaper last Saturday, set off a furious debate.

Essentially there are two camps: one believes that her performance in the recruitment tests shows her innate ability; the other argues that whatever her showing in the exam, she's a cheat and doesn't deserve the job.

Here are some samples from the "no"group:

"If Mei Jing can be hired, what about equally-capable people who could not attend the recruitment examination just because they had no certificate"'' a reader asks.

"No, she should not be hired,'' a message on Xinhua News Agency's website says. "This person has moral problem "she doesn't have credibility.''

The news portal got more than 1,500 messages commenting on the event in three days.

"It's not a matter of certificate, but her cheating,'' another comments. "If she can cheat on a diploma, what about other matters"''

Over-emphasis on degrees

The "yes"camp is equally vociferous; they contend that her cheating was a result on the country's over-emphasis on academic degrees.

"It's a tragedy for the nation that a real competent person is worth less than a piece of paper,'' one message says.

"Finding a job needs a certificate, getting promotion needs a certificate, but does the certificate really represent a person's competence"'' another asks, adding that it is ironic that Mei, a person without a college certificate, could outdo 119 certificate holders.

But human-resources officials are clear in their minds.

"We will definitely not recruit such kind of applicants,'' says Zhang Rui, with the personnel department of Beijing Radio.

"Morality is an important factor when we consider a person's qualities. Besides, we have a large number of qualified applicants to choose from.''

Mei's case is a reflection of a much-larger issue in the country.

In many cities, a lot of people have had the experience of being approached by fake-diploma peddlers on the street.

The documents, they claim, will be exactly the same as genuine ones issued by any university. "You name it,'' they challenge.

As the country's economy grows, it has been attaching greater importance to educational background.

Bachelor's degree holders are no longer regarded as the rare talented; many corporate recruiters have been raising the basic requirement to master's or even doctorate degrees.

The degree pressure is no less serious for incumbent civil servants.

A governmental bureau chief with a high-school education, for example, will have to obtain a bachelor's degree to be promoted to the post of section leader, according to rules.

To accommodate this kind of needs, fast-diploma programmes have come up. But many, including those who do succeed through this route, admit that the degrees they eventually get mean virtually nothing.

"What can you expect to learn if you spend only one week in a year to prepare for a final exam"'' Xinhua quotes an anonymous official as saying.

If the certificates bought on the streets are "real"fake certificates, those obtained from the fast-diploma programmes can be called "fake"real certificates, a report in China Youth Daily says.

But the paper pressure could ease with the country recently unveiling a new human-resource policy that will judge qualified professionals by their integrity, knowledge, competence and performance, "not just their academic degrees, their posts, or their working years''.

(China Daily 01/16/2004 page5)