News of a research fellow who was suspended from a prestigious Chinese university on Sunday became a top trending topic on social media after he admitted the “homegrown” programming language he created, Mulan, was a Python fork.

Why it matters: “Homegrown technology” achievements are often trumpeted by Chinese officials and state-owned media as the country pushes aggressively to build up technological self-reliance amid trade conflicts with the US.

However, vast national funding schemes to support homegrown alternatives to foreign technologies also give rise to cheating and counterfeiting.

Details: Liu Lei, a research fellow at the Institute at Computing Technology (ICT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told state news agency China News Service Wednesday that he and his team had released a “fully autonomously designed” programming language.

The language, dubbed Mulan, or Module Unit Language, had been invented to fit “the next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) and internet of things (IoT) applications,” according to Liu.

He also claimed that Mulan was compatible with mainstream operating systems such as Android, iOS, Linux, and Windows.

Liu’s claims came under scrutiny late last week when users discovered that most of Mulan’s code was from Python, a 29-year-old open-source programming language created by Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum.

Liu apologized (in Chinese) for his exaggerations on Friday, admitting that a part of the compiler was redeveloped based on Python and that the language had actually been designed to teach coding to primary and secondary school-age children, rather than to be used for AI and IoT applications.

The ICT said in a statement (in Chinese) Sunday that Liu’s claims contained “false accounts” and that the institute had suspended him.

The incident became a trending topic on Chinese media over the weekend with the hashtag #MulanDeveloperApologizes gathering more than 68 million views on China’s microblogging platform, Weibo.

Context: Chinese companies and academics have been known to create forks for open source programs and claim that they are original.