教育部:严惩高考枪手

Chinese authorities are warning of harsh punishments after several ghostwriters were caught attending the national college entrance exam, or Gaokao, sparking a huge wave of repercussions.

CRI's Sophie Williams reports.

The education department in Jiangxi Province confirmed that nine ghostwriters involved with this year's national college entrance exam are now in police custody.

In response to this, Xiong Biao, director of the Nanchang Examination Institute, says an investigation is underway.

"We have a strict review process and methods. Every link in the process is overseen by someone. We will handle this case appropriately by our rules and law, no matter which link broke. We are investigating the matter right now."

According to local authorities, the first ghostwriter was detained on Sunday morning at Nanchang No. 10 Middle School.

An anonymous worker with the school says the man showed an authentic document when he passed a security checkpoint.

"He's using an authentic identity card. What can you do about that? You have to understand our situation, he's using a real document and the photo looks like him. It's such an important exam that we could not do anything to him easily. We can only doubt. What else can we do?"

In the afternoon, another person was caught taking the exam under someone else's name in Yingtan, another city in the province.

The second stand-in has been identified as a student from a university in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province.

That ghostwriter also revealed five other ghostwriters, and identified the chief organizer of a fraud gang.

Chu Zhaohui is a researcher at China's Institute of Education and science.

He explains how the security screening process at the exam sites failed to identify the ghostwriters.

Information input is the first step of the checking process. The staff responsible for this procedure may act in collusion with the fraud gang, which causes the problem right from the start. Then, in the information auditing process, unless staff carry out procedures with diligence, this existing problem is unlikely to be revealed."

The raids came on the heels of a report by Guangdong-based Southern Metropolis Daily.

The newspaper revealed that one of its reporters had infiltrated a fraud gang that hires university students to take the two-day exam for "clients".

The undercover reporter pinpointed the ghostwriters as several college students from Hubei province.

The Ministry of Education says it has asked the public security ministry to oversee the investigation and that cheating the Gaokao could amount to a punishable crime in serious cases.

For CRI, I'm Sophie Williams.