With more young people suffering from the tough job market, the business of selling fake employment contracts to graduating university students is booming, according to illegal vendors.
To maintain their school's high employment rate, some Chinese universities are requiring proof of imminent employment from soon-to-graduate students before providing them with a copy of their diploma, according to media reports. While students can sue their schools over such behavior, they choose to stay quiet out of fear they will never receive their degree, said previous reports.
As more students resort to purchasing of fake contracts, vendors are reporting brisker business than usual.
One seller, a man surnamed Zhang from Fujian Province, who uses China's largest online marketplace, Taobao, to sell the fake contracts to students, told the Global Times that business is good.
"We're selling a lot since the market is been really tough for graduate students," he said. "We're swamped with requests."
Most vendors sell "officially stamped" employment contracts online for 50 yuan ($8) to 500 yuan. Several claim to have ties to real companies, which are able to provide "authentic" contracts.
A near-graduate, surnamed Lu, from a Guangdong Province university, admitted that she has just resorted to buying a fake employment contract from a Guangzhou-based vendor for 200 yuan.
"My classmates have done the same thing," she told the Global Times via popular Chinese social networking site QQ. "I know it's horrible, but I had to make sure that I would get my diploma, otherwise fours years of hard work and study would have been wasted."
Universities, which rely on high employment rates of graduates for funding and resources, say that they have no choice by to follow the policy, reported Chinese news portal chinanews.com.
In the same report, Zhang Lei, a professor from Hangzhou-based Zhejiang University of Technology, described the university measure that pushes students to lie as "ironic", given that schools are supposed teach right from wrong.