A friend of mine has been highlighting the case of a NUS visiting professor with forged credentials as a “winner”. Well, there are even bigger winners like the scholars who had absconded. On a Chinese forum, one of them even rubbed it in by saying “who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch? Singapore has it.”
Ah, the things we are prepared to overlook for the sake of the biggest market in the world.
But as the saying goes, there’s always a higher mountain. For me, Zhai Shan Ying 翟山鹰 takes the cake as the biggest “winner”. While in China, he presented himself to the Chinese public as a financial guru with a string of fake qualifications and appointments. Nobody bothered to question him or investigate his background because he said everything that was in line with China’s current nationalist movement.
Zhai had lambasted US monetary policies and predicted that the country’s economy would collapse in no time. He convinced his millions of fans that China would lead the world and attracted huge investments in his various funds. What did he do next? He converted his RMB to USD and fled to the “doomed country” that he hated so much. His oratory skills are as good as his acting skills. He’s a dangerous man, no doubt, but it’s also good that we have people like him around to tell the cautionary tales.
And Zhai Shan Ying 翟山鹰 didn’t hide in shame. He turned up on YouTube to gloat about this success and mock the fools who had invested in “Chinese assets” with him. Not only that, he made a 180 degree turn against the Party. The observers are right. It’s difficult to feel any sympathy for the victims who were still bragging, boasting and insulting the West just moments before Zhai Shan Ying absconded with their money.
But the unfathomable and unbelievable thing about 翟山鹰 is that people never learn. Crooks like him will crop up again and again, play that “patriotic” card over and over again and guess what? It will still work.