Tianjin University Fires an Admissions Influencer Accused of Vanishing With 20 Million Yuan From 1,300 Families
Tianjin University has fired Li Ze, an associate professor who built a 620,000-follower social media brand on admissions advice — after his companies allegedly went dark with nearly 20 million yuan from more than 1,300 families, some of whom had paid for services as far ahead as 2031.
Li Ze's business was built on a title. On Weibo, his account was "985 returnee professor talks admissions" — the 985, shorthand for China's most elite universities, doing the persuading — and it carried 620,000 followers. His company sold gaokao volunteer-filing packages for 8,000 to 14,000 yuan, and postgraduate-admission packages for 90,000 to 380,000 yuan. The business was, by the standards of the genre, already aggressive: in 2025, it was pre-selling services for the 2031 college admissions cycle, six years ahead of the students.
Then the companies stopped answering. Multiple Chinese media outlets reported this week that Li Ze and two affiliated companies were accused of absconding with roughly 20 million yuan, and that more than 1,300 families had paid and been left with nothing. The response was fast and, on the university's side, unusually blunt. Tianjin University's publicity office told Blue Whale News on November 9 that Li Ze had been dismissed and was no longer employed, and that the university was pursuing legal responsibility. The main account and a backup have been suspended by the platform, and more than ten other accounts in the matrix have been locked private.
The story is the latest in a genre that has become a structural feature of Chinese education: the admissions influencer who monetizes a credential. The gaokao volunteer-filing industry — brokers who sell families guidance on how to convert a student's exam score into a university offer — has grown into a market of its own, with individual consultants charging fees in the tens of thousands of yuan and a handful of the biggest names, like Zhang Xuefeng, turning the trade into a national media business. The credential is the product. The families paying for it are the ones most anxious about the squeeze — the ones for whom a 380,000-yuan package for graduate-school admission is a bet on the only route to a stable job in a market where the number of graduates keeps rising.
The cautionary framing is the part Chinese readers are passing on. One comment on the trending topic, posted by a user, warned that "the education anxiety is being packaged as a high-priced product" — and that the money ordinary families saved for their children's future is the heaviest footnote in the whole affair. The university's dismissal is the cleanest cut. What the 1,300 families are left with is the open question: whether the money comes back, or whether the credential that sold it — a 985 returnee professor — was the real product all along.