Huang Feiruo was once a respected scientist who studied ways to make pigs gain weight more quickly. He ran government-funded research projects at Huazhong Agricultural University in the central city of Wuhan. But last month 11 of his graduate students accused him of plagiarising the work of other academics and fabricating data. He had also, they said, put pressure on them to fake their own research. On February 6th the university announced that it had fired Mr Huang and retracted some of his work.
Scientific fraud is all too common in China. Bad incentives are a big part of the problem. Chinese universities typically reward researchers with promotions and funding based on the quantity of papers they publish, not the quality. That has got results. In 2017, for the first time, China published more scientific papers than any other country. It has kept the top spot ever since. But while some of the research has been cutting-edge, much has been dodgy.