Fired After Reporting Fraud, a China Telecom Employee Took His Allegations to the Party's Top Watchdog
Zheng Jiyan says a national industrial-data project concealed rigged bidding worth tens of millions of yuan; after two years of internal reports went nowhere and cost him his job, he has gone public in his own name.
A former China Telecom employee has become the week's most-discussed whistleblower, publishing a real-name corruption report that alleges a national-level data project concealed tens of millions of yuan in manipulated procurement — and says he was fired for trying to raise it internally.
Zheng Jiyan, a Tsinghua University graduate, says the problems centre on the National Industrial Internet Big Data Centre, a flagship project his team worked on. In his account, which has spread across Weibo under the hashtag "Former China Telecom Group Employee Files a Real-Name Report," 38 million yuan of fiscal money was siphoned through a bidding process that was theatre: the four competing bidders were all wholly owned subsidiaries inside the China Telecom group, and the winning bid matched the budget to 99.97% — down to the decimal places.
The paperwork, he says, was just as thin. One core software contract was signed and declared complete in thirteen days, while the project claimed more than 33,000 person-days of development work — by his arithmetic, the output of one person working flat-out for decades. Unrelated old contracts were recycled as evidence of spending, and a promised 77 million yuan in self-raised matching funds was largely fabricated, according to the report.
Two years of internal reports
The route his complaint took is as much the story as the numbers. Zheng says he began escalating through the company's own channels in 2023. Instead of an investigation, he describes retaliation, ending in a dismissal he calls unlawful. Only then did he compile eighteen items of original evidence and submit a real-name report to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Communist Party's top disciplinary organ, before publishing the whole file online.
The post that pushed the story up the trending list came not from a journalist but from a peer: "This man is my classmate from the same year. He is reporting corruption under his own name," one Weibo user wrote, in a post liked more than 15,000 times (@西西厮福). Screenshots circulating with the report show Zheng himself, in a Tsinghua polo shirt, addressing the camera in short videos stamped with the case number of the disciplinary commission as the accepting body.
A familiar script, so far without an ending
Readers of Chinese business news will recognise the shape: internal escalation, then silence, then dismissal, then the internet as the last available forum. Earlier rounds of the same script ended differently — the Nanjing kindergarten food-safety scandal closed with eleven officials disciplined and the cook who spoke out vindicated (Nanjing Kindergarten Kitchen Scandal Ends With 11 Officials Disciplined and a Whistleblower Vindicated) — which is part of why commenters are watching this one so closely.
So far, neither China Telecom nor the disciplinary commission has published a response, and no regulator has disputed the specific figures. The allegations remain allegations; what is not in dispute is that a state-owned group's flagship data project became the subject of its own employee's public accusation, and that the accusation is still sitting at the top of the conversation, unanswered.