An 86-Page Report by Two Sisters Puts a Wuhan University Professor Under Investigation

Wuhan University is facing a fresh reputational storm after two sisters, aged 20 and 15, published an 86-page document accusing a female professor at the university's College of Chemistry and Molecular Sciences of a ten-year extramarital affair with their father, along with academic misconduct.

The document, which spread across Chinese social media on September 3, identifies the accused as Zeng Mengqi, a professor and doctoral supervisor born in 1991. Written by the two daughters of the man involved, it alleges that Zeng began pursuing her married doctoral supervisor in 2016, then used that relationship to rise through the ranks: inflated research results, misused grant money and, the sisters claim, even the interception of stipends meant for students. The authors also accuse her of quietly rewriting the university's own news pages to burnish her record — and, in a detail that fixed the story in the public mind, they noted that she and their father had used matching avatars of the anime characters Conan and Haibara Ai, a courtship signal familiar to anyone raised on Japanese animation. The phrase coined for her online, "academic Daji" (学术妲己), borrows the fox spirit of Chinese myth who bewitched a king — shorthand for a career built on a relationship with a mentor.

On the evening of September 3, Wuhan University announced that its discipline inspection committee had formally accepted the report and opened an investigation, promising to publicise the outcome. That statement, though, became its own controversy. The university confirmed it had received the report materials on August 19 — more than two weeks earlier — after multiple departments had told reporters they knew nothing of the matter. Baidu's commentary board carried the reproach directly: the university's announcement could have come half a month sooner.

Then the story grew a second institution. Users noticed that the man in the document had left Wuhan University last year for a senior post at Anhui University, and by September 4 the trending topics had a new headline: the man is a vice-president at Anhui University. When China News Weekly contacted the school, its discipline inspection body declined to answer and referred reporters to the publicity office, which said only that it was aware of the matter and investigating. Anhui University said on its own channels that it had "taken note" and would await official findings. On Zhihu, a question about the case drew the university's parallel troubles into one thread, with users asking how much damage successive scandals have done to the school's standing.

The affair is being read as more than one family's catastrophe. Weibo users pointed out that the daughters' choice to publish as the children — rather than the wronged wife — gave the accusations unusual moral weight, and that the document's scale, 86 pages of annotated screenshots, reflects a genre of online accountability that Chinese universities have grown familiar with. One widely shared comment captured the asymmetry of attention: tag Anhui University and the topic barely trends, "tag Wuhan University and it trends in an instant" (带武汉大学很容易上热搜). The school, still smarting from earlier controversies this year, is under pressure to show that its inquiry answers to evidence rather than to embarrassment — and the two daughters, whose document ends with their account of a family that came apart over a decade, are waiting for it.