It’s tough climbing the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party, membership: 89 million. One popular way of getting ahead is to get hold of a PhD. Unfortunately, a really ambitious party official can’t always take time out to study.

So it’s not unusual to earn one’s doctorate in a topic relevant to party work while also serving as a full-time official.

The Chinese are famously hard-working, but nevertheless, there are only so many hours in a day. It’s a tall order to expect a promising vice-mayor in a place like Sichuan, for example, to find time to enrol at Chengdu University and complete a dissertation on “Effective human resource management in Sichuan state-owned enterprises”, or some such, while simultaneously managing a sizeable local budget.

Naturally, there are shortcuts. The FT recently analysed 10 doctoral theses available online by now-senior party officials and found apparent examples of plagiarism in three of them. And one was authored by a member of the national ruling politburo.

That case was uncovered by an anonymous China researcher posting online under the name “AirMovingDevice”. The politburo member, the researcher noted, “contributed to less than 10 per cent of the [introduction] outlining the contents of his thesis.” Throughout the rest, there are passages “from a hodgepodge of sources”.