Chinese academic exposed as fraud

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Not very long ago, China saw itself as a nation on the verge of a high-tech breakthrough.

But today, China appears shamed at a scandal that has already begun to tarnish that vision. It involves a computer scientist named Chen Jin who became a national hero in 2003 when he said he had created one of China's first home-grown digital signal processing computer chips, a sophisticated microchip that can process digitized data for mobile phones, cameras and other electronic devices.

His milestone met with breathless excitement and held the promise of closing the enormous gaps with the West in science and technology.

On Friday, however, the government announced that it was all a fraud. Chen, the government said, had faked research conducted at Jiaotong University and simply stolen his chip designs from a foreign company. Chen was fired from his university posts and stripped of his government honors and privileges.

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