Illustration: Peter C. Espina/GT

The very name of the "institute" - China Commission of Inquiry on Domestic Dynamics, is in itself a tongue-twister that perhaps, in its perplexedly vague title, should have earlier hinted toward its illegitimacy.

But it wasn't until online rumors alleging an 18-year-old female student was having an affair with the director of the commission, said to be affiliated to the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, did it pop on to the radar.

The online murmurs were catchy enough. If it had proven true, it would have been yet another case of an official being brought down by the wave of an online anti-corruption campaign.

But as it was later discovered, the commission was set up under false pretenses. It had neither official approval nor an official website, and even the Party School denied connections to it.

It's not the first time for an unauthorized "official organization" to surface. In 2004, Zhang Ningquan, then 42, equipped with just a high school degree, set up a "government" agency - the China Scale Investigator Management Bureau, even renting office space in an old building that once housed the Ministry of Justice in downtown Beijing.

In the following years, he collected a large amount of money in training fees from people to whom he had promised job opportunities in the civil service. Zhang was finally charged with fraud, and his "bureau" was mocked as China's No.1 copycat institute.

From the names of the fictitious organizations, it appears that the individuals behind them favor a disguise under the appearance of an official ministry, bureau or commission at the national-level.

But after a closer look at what's behind the name, it isn't too hard to unravel their fakery - as was the case with China Commission of Inquiry on Domestic Dynamics. 

How such clumsy fakery is able to form into establishments that scam innocent people or embarrass the credibility of the government is curious, however.

Phoenix Weekly has reported on the similarities of such organizations: They claim to be under the leadership of officials and the Party and adopt tone and rhetoric on Internet blogs that match the style of that used in State-run newspapers from the 1960s.

Chinese people are striving to build a fair and equal society, but the struggle for power at the helm of society remains in the way. Without power, officials seem to have nothing for people to respect, if not envy.

If power-oriented values were not pervasive in society, people like Zhang would not be so inclined to set up illegitimate institutes, so unabashedly founded. The so-called institutes further manage to go unnoticed thanks to a general strong-hold on the secrecy that shrouds official organizations.

Ordinary people know far too little about anything that smells of officialdom - even when it is presented as fraud. And because of the honesty lacking from the power-obsessed so far removed from their circles, these people could care less.

If deep-rooted societal values centered on power cannot be reversed, or at the very least, not anytime soon, then the establishment of transparent government organizations is desperately needed now.

The author is a reporter with the Global Times. wangwenwen@globaltimes.com.cn