Baoding Opens Official Probe Into Parent Who Cited Cadre Titles in Class Group Chat
A father who introduced himself in a high school class group chat as a hospital discipline-inspection secretary and asked the teacher to look after his son is now the subject of a formal investigation: Baoding's health commission has confirmed the man exists and set up a dedicated task force to look into the case.
The parent who announced his official titles in a high school class group chat is now the subject of a formal inquiry. On September 3, the Baoding health commission in Hebei province said a dedicated task force had been set up to investigate, after a screenshot circulated showing a father introducing himself as the discipline-inspection secretary of Baoding People's Hospital, noting that the child's mother was deputy director of the personnel office at Baoding University, and asking a "Teacher Sun" to look after his son. A discipline-inspection group stationed at the commission has also stepped in, according to Cover News's report on the response, a post that has been liked more than 4,800 times.
The message spread first on the strength of its candour — a parent listing cadre posts the way another might list a home address. Then came the complication. Netizens checked public records and noted that the hospital's discipline-inspection secretary was surnamed Du, not Wang, the surname in the chat. When reporters called the hospital, staff said Du had already left the post, while confirming that "there is such a person" at the hospital — without clarifying what role the man in the chat actually holds.
The school itself has kept its distance: Baoding No. 1 High School said that after learning of the matter it would treat all students equally, a response that The Paper's post circulating the statement frames against the chat screenshot at the centre of the storm.
The case is the sharpest turn yet in a familiar genre. When a parent listing official titles in a class group chat surfaced earlier this week, we wrote about the reflex it exposed; what distinguishes the Baoding episode is that it has produced an official response, not just outrage. The story has escaped Weibo, too — it sits near the top of Baidu's trending board, and on Zhihu, commenters are debating what problems the episode reflects and whether the parents face any consequence.
The commentary underneath has widened into something larger than one chat message. One widely shared post argued that the couple — one a discipline-inspection chief at the city's biggest hospital, the other a personnel deputy at a local university — amounted to a "genuinely Brahmin family" in small-town terms, and that outsiders who dismiss the posts as too junior misunderstand the ecology of a small city: "In small places there is a huge chasm between those inside the system and those outside it."
What the investigation turns on is whether the man actually holds the post he claimed, and what the "look after" he asked for would have meant in practice. For now, both the hospital's confirmation and the surname discrepancy remain on the table — and the task force has been sent to find out which.