In 1990, seventeen-year-old Qi Yuling took the entrance examination for secondary technical schools and was admitted to Jining Commercial School. But she never received her admission notice. Another girl at the same school took the notice, entered the school under Qi’s name, and later graduated and found a job. Qi did not discover that someone had taken her place until eight years later.

This became the famous “first case of judicial application of China’s Constitution.” In Episode 13 of Reasoned Talk, “China’s ‘First Constitutional Case’: The Stolen Right to Education,” we told the full story. In a 2001 reply to the Shandong High People’s Court, the Supreme People’s Court wrote that Chen Xiaoqi and the other defendants had “infringed Qi Yuling’s fundamental right to education under the Constitution by means of infringing her right to a name.” That sentence later became one of the best-known texts in the history of Chinese constitutional scholarship.

But if we temporarily set aside the grand debate over the “judicial application of the Constitution,” another question deserves just as much attention: when one person steals another’s identity and takes the educational opportunity that rightfully belongs to them, how exactly should the law address that conduct?

In 2001, the law had to explain this injury through the “right to a name” and the “right to education.” Twenty years later, it had acquired a far more direct name: the “crime of identity substitution.” What happened in between?

From Qi Yuling to Chen Chunxiu

What makes the Qi Yuling case so difficult to forget is not merely the misuse of her name. If Chen Xiaoqi had done nothing more than use Qi Yuling’s name, the case would not have led to everything that followed. The reality was much more serious: the stolen name was only the means and the outward appearance; what Qi Yuling actually lost was an educational opportunity. In the 1990s, admission to a secondary technical school could also bring a rural student an urban household registration, an assigned job, and an entire set of life opportunities. Qi did not lose only her name. She lost a promising path through life.

That is why the first-instance judgment, which protected only her right to a name, seemed somehow insufficient. The Supreme People’s Court’s 2001 reply therefore expressly connected the right to a name with the constitutional right to education. In retrospect, the formulation may seem somewhat circuitous. At the time, however, it represented an effort to locate a complex injury within the existing legal framework: the means was the misuse of a name, but the result was the loss of an educational opportunity.

Nearly eight years after the Qi Yuling case concluded, Luo Caixia, who was about to graduate from Tianjin Normal University, discovered an irregularity in her identity records while handling a bank transaction in March 2009. After investigating further, she learned that her high-school classmate Wang Jiajun had used Luo’s name and college-entrance-examination information to enroll at Guizhou Normal University as early as 2004.

Luo Caixia had fallen short of Hunan’s cutoff for second-tier undergraduate admission in 2004. She repeated her final year of high school and gained admission to Tianjin Normal University the following year. Unlike Qi Yuling, therefore, Luo did not completely lose the opportunity to continue her education. Yet the other “Luo Caixia” who had assumed her identity still intruded into her real life. Because Luo had repeated a year, she encountered all kinds of problems when graduating, applying for a teaching certificate, and looking for work. Once another person had already used the same set of identity information, the real Luo Caixia was forced to prove, again and again: I am who I say I am.

The timing is especially revealing. In December 2008, the Supreme People’s Court repealed Judicial Interpretation [2001] No. 25, the reply on which the Qi Yuling case had relied. A few months later, Luo Caixia sued Wang Jiajun and others for infringing her rights to a name and to education. But because the Supreme People’s Court’s reply in the Qi Yuling case had already been repealed, the judicial route that connected the right to a name with the constitutional right to education could no longer be used in Luo’s case. The court therefore continued to classify the dispute simply as one involving infringement of the right to a name. The case ultimately ended in mediation in 2010, with Wang Jiajun’s father, Wang Zhengrong, paying Luo Caixia RMB 45,000 in compensation.

The underlying problem did not disappear. Similar incidents that continued to come to light demonstrated that using another person’s identity to attend school not only inflicts enormous harm on the victim, but also carries serious and easily underestimated social consequences. Identity substitution may look simple, but in reality it can require the coordination of examination files, household-registration information, school reviews, and relevant officials. It is usually difficult for an impostor acting alone to “become” another person completely. In these cases, the law therefore confronts a chain of fraud extending across admission, student registration, household registration, and employment.

In 2020, Chen Chunxiu’s experience brought the issue back into public view. Chen was born in Guan County, Shandong Province. She took the national college entrance examination in 2004 and scored 546 in the science track, twenty-seven points above the cutoff for first-batch junior-college admission that year. But she never received an admission notice. Believing that she had failed, she left home to work. Sixteen years later, she decided to continue her studies through the adult college entrance examination. When she checked the China Higher Education Student Information website, she was astonished to discover that “Chen Chunxiu” had already attended and graduated from Shandong University of Technology.

According to the official report, the impostor, Chen Yanping, had scored only 303 on the college entrance examination that year and did not meet the cutoff for first-batch junior-college admission. Her family used personal connections with the head of the Guan County admissions office and others to select Chen Chunxiu as the person she would replace. They printed Chen Chunxiu’s examination permit from the admissions system, intercepted the admission notice that had already been mailed, fabricated her high-school records, and obtained false household-registration documents. Multiple stages that were supposed to verify identity instead combined to create a channel for identity fraud.

In the summer of 2020, the experiences of Chen Chunxiu, Wang Lili, Gou Jing, and others entered the public eye one after another. In August, the Legislative Affairs Commission of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress responded that using another person’s identity to attend university not only causes irreparable loss and alters the victim’s life trajectory, but also undermines educational fairness. It expressly stated that it would study bringing such conduct within the scope of the criminal law. Two months later, the second deliberation draft of Amendment XI to the Criminal Law added a relevant provision.

Why Make Identity Substitution a Crime?

Before the “crime of identity substitution” was created, was the law really powerless to deal with the conduct? Of course not.

Before 2021, using another person’s identity to attend university was not an independent offense under that name, but the chain of fraud surrounding the substitution could still violate other criminal laws. Forging identity documents, official documents, household-registration records, or student records could constitute offenses involving the forgery or alteration of documents. Stealing or using another person’s identity documents could incur criminal liability. Admissions personnel who practiced favoritism or abused their authority could be guilty of the relevant dereliction-of-duty offenses. If favors, payments, or bribes were also involved, the conduct could further implicate the crimes of offering or accepting bribes.

The Luo Caixia case is a typical example. While helping his daughter complete the substitution, Wang Zhengrong forged documents issued by state organs. A court ultimately sentenced him to two years’ imprisonment for forging documents of state organs. Combining that sentence with a previous sentence for accepting bribes, it imposed a total term of four years’ imprisonment.

In other words, the old criminal law was not helpless against identity substitution, but it could punish only one of the discrete “acts” used to carry it out. This raised an intriguing legal question: if a person did not personally forge any documents or commit another act sufficient to constitute a separate offense, but knew they were unqualified and nevertheless took an admission place under someone else’s identity, did the act of substitution itself warrant an independent judgment under the criminal law?

On December 26, 2020, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress adopted Amendment XI to the Criminal Law. The amendment added Article 280-2, bringing three types of qualification within the scope of the new offense: admission to higher academic education, eligibility for civil-service employment, and employment-placement benefits. Whoever steals or falsely uses another person’s identity to take that person’s place in obtaining one of these qualifications may be sentenced to imprisonment of up to three years, criminal detention, or public surveillance, together with a fine. A person who organizes or directs another to commit the offense receives a heavier punishment. If a state functionary commits the conduct and thereby also commits another crime, the rules governing combined punishment for multiple offenses apply.

The amendment took effect on March 1, 2021. That year, when the Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate assigned names to the newly added offenses, they designated the offense under Article 280-2 the “crime of identity substitution.” As a matter of legal language, this marked a clear change. It also shifted the focus of criminal responsibility. The law would no longer punish only the forgery of documents, bribery, or dereliction of duty that happened to accompany the substitution. It would also punish the act of “taking a qualification secured by another person” itself.

Moreover, the term that recurs in the provision is not “name,” but qualification. Places in higher academic education, civil-service appointments, and employment-placement benefits all involve the allocation of opportunities. They are often limited in number and distributed through examinations, admissions, or recruitment procedures. When one person obtains such a qualification under another’s identity, the injury extends beyond personal identity to the system of fair distribution built around that qualification.

The Restraint of the Criminal Law and the Supplementary Role of the Education Law

It is worth noting that, in the field of education, Article 280-2 of the Criminal Law does not protect every kind of “admission qualification.” It is expressly limited to admission to “higher academic education.” If the Qi Yuling case were to occur today, the qualification taken from her would be for a technical secondary school, which is not a form of higher academic education. A court therefore still could not find the defendant guilty of identity substitution under Article 280-2.

This is not wordplay. It follows from the restraint of the criminal law and the principle of legality. The idea of restraint means that criminal law should serve only as the “last resort” for protecting rights. Criminal punishment includes the harshest measures the state can impose on a person, from depriving someone of liberty to taking a life. Precisely for that reason, the state must exercise extreme caution when applying the criminal law. It should ordinarily do so only when other legal means are insufficient to protect the relevant interests effectively. Put differently, criminal law should be the ballast that stabilizes the entire legal system, not an instrument to be deployed lightly.

This leads to the criminal-law principle of legality: no act is a crime, and no punishment may be imposed, unless the law expressly provides for it. Article 280-2 expressly limits the crime of identity substitution to qualifications for “higher academic education.” Under the principle of legality, a court cannot therefore treat the substitution of another person’s technical-secondary-school qualification as this offense. That is not pedantry. It is a necessary consequence of the criminal law’s restraint. No matter how morally reprehensible an act may be, the first question must still be whether the statutory elements of an offense actually cover it.

To fill the legal gap left by the restraint of the criminal law and the principle of legality, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress amended Article 77 of the Education Law in April 2021. It added provisions specifically addressing conduct that steals or falsely uses another person’s identity in order to replace that person and obtain an admission qualification. Unlike the Criminal Law, the Education Law does not limit “admission qualification” to higher academic education.

More importantly, the Education Law also added a distinctly restorative provision: a person whose admission qualification has been taken and whose rights have been infringed may request restoration of that qualification. This sentence performs a completely different function from the Criminal Law. The Criminal Law answers, “How should the impostor be punished?” The Education Law goes further and asks, “How can the victim be made whole?” One focuses on the wrongdoer; the other on the victim. One emphasizes punishment; the other attempts to restore an opportunity. Following the path that began with Qi Yuling, the law finally moved beyond evaluating the perpetrator and began to confront the essence of identity substitution more directly.

Reflections Beyond the Law

Of course, the law is not a time machine. For someone who has only just discovered the substitution, these remedies may still be meaningful. But for someone who learns the truth ten or twenty years later, even the restoration of an admission qualification on paper may not restore the life they could have lived. If Qi Yuling had entered Jining Commercial School at seventeen, might she later have found more stable employment? If Chen Chunxiu had walked into Shandong University of Technology at twenty, how might her life have changed? No one can know.

This is where the limits of law become clear. A court can apply the Civil Code to recognize direct and consequential losses, and it can award damages for emotional distress. The Criminal Law can convict an impostor. The Education Law can revoke a fraudulent degree and restore an admission qualification. But the law cannot create a seventeen-year-old Qi Yuling again, nor can it erase the sixteen years Chen Chunxiu spent working away from home. That may be why this kind of identity substitution provokes more anger than ordinary identity theft. What it truly steals is the most precious and possibility-filled period of a person’s life: their youth.

From Qi Yuling to Chen Chunxiu, and from 1999 to 2021, Chinese law took more than twenty years to confront the problem of identity substitution directly. The law still has many limitations when it comes to remedies for violated rights. At the very least, however, it now provides a clearly divided and intelligible path for resolving similar cases in the future. Beyond the debate over the “judicial application of the Constitution,” this may be another historical thread in the Qi Yuling case worth remembering.

Key People

  • Qi Yuling (originally named Qi Yuling with a different final character, 齐玉玲) — Took the Shandong Province technical-secondary-school entrance examination in 1990 and was admitted to Jining Commercial School, but her admission notice was taken. She filed suit in 1999 and received compensation after a final judgment by the Shandong High People’s Court in 2001.
  • Chen Xiaoqi (formerly Chen Hengyan) — Qi Yuling’s classmate. With the assistance of her father, Chen Kezheng, and other relevant personnel, she used Qi Yuling’s name and admission notice to enter Jining Commercial School and later obtained employment under Qi’s identity after graduation.
  • Luo Caixia — Discovered in 2009 that her high-school classmate Wang Jiajun had used her name and college-entrance-examination information to enter Guizhou Normal University in 2004. The related civil case concluded through mediation in 2010.
  • Wang Jiajun — The person who entered university under Luo Caixia’s identity. Her enrollment under Luo’s name caused the real Luo Caixia to encounter persistent conflicts in her identity records during graduation, qualification examinations, and job applications.
  • Wang Zhengrong — Wang Jiajun’s father. He forged documents issued by state organs while helping his daughter enter university under another person’s identity and was later punished for multiple offenses, including forging documents of state organs and accepting bribes.
  • Chen Chunxiu — Scored high enough on the 2004 college entrance examination to qualify for admission to Shandong University of Technology, but believed that she had failed after her admission notice was intercepted. Sixteen years later, she discovered through the China Higher Education Student Information website that another person had used her identity.
  • Chen Yanping — The person who entered Shandong University of Technology under Chen Chunxiu’s identity. Her family arranged the substitution through personal connections with admissions personnel, interception of the admission notice, and the fabrication of school records and household-registration documents.
  • Right to a name — The right of a natural person to decide, use, change, or authorize another to use their name in accordance with law. Identity substitution first appears as the stealing or false use of another person’s name, but in educational cases the victim often also loses an educational opportunity and its associated benefits.
  • Judicial Interpretation [2001] No. 25 — The Supreme People’s Court’s reply in the Qi Yuling case, which found that Chen Xiaoqi and others had infringed Qi Yuling’s fundamental constitutional right to education by means of infringing her right to a name. The reply was repealed in 2008.
  • Articles 1012 and 1014 of the Civil Code — The former provides that a natural person enjoys the right to a name; the latter prohibits any organization or individual from interfering with, stealing, or falsely using another person’s name or designation.
  • Article 3 of the Criminal Law (principle of legality) — Only conduct expressly defined as a crime by law may be convicted and punished. Conduct that the law does not expressly define as criminal may not be convicted or punished. The crime of identity substitution therefore cannot be expanded at will beyond the types of qualification specified in the provision.
  • Article 280-2 of the Criminal Law (crime of identity substitution) — Punishes a person who steals or falsely uses another person’s identity to take that person’s place in obtaining admission to higher academic education, eligibility for civil-service employment, or employment-placement benefits. The prescribed penalty is imprisonment of up to three years, criminal detention, or public surveillance, together with a fine.
  • Article 77 of the Education Law — Provides for administrative, public-security, and criminal liability for using another person’s identity to obtain admission, and expressly permits a person whose admission qualification has been taken and whose rights have been infringed to request restoration of that qualification. “Admission qualification” here is not limited to higher academic education.
  • Supplementary Provisions (VII) of the Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate on the Designation of Offenses under the Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China — Took effect on March 1, 2021, and formally designated the offense under Article 280-2 of the Criminal Law the “crime of identity substitution.”
  • Restraint of the criminal law — Criminal punishment should serve as the last resort for protecting legally recognized interests and should be used cautiously when other legal measures cannot effectively address serious social harm. Together with the principle of legality, this concept limits the expansion of the state’s punitive power.

This article is further reading for Episode 13 of Reasoned Talk. If you have not yet listened to the episode, you can begin there for the complete story of the Qi Yuling case and the Supreme People’s Court reply that sparked more than twenty years of legal debate. If you have thoughts of your own, feel free to share them in the comments.