In China, every motor vehicle must undergo mandatory annual “inspection” each year. This system, originally designed for public safety, has been corroded by layers of corruption and unwritten rules, forming a vast chain of interests. Recently, a former industry insider, An Qiang, who worked at a car testing station for over ten years, revealed the shocking truth of systemic fraud and collusion between officials and businesses.
An Qiang pointed out that the original intention of vehicle inspection was to check brakes, lights, emissions, and other safety and environmental items, but in reality, “many of the data are fake.” He witnessed a director carrying a black plastic bag into the control room to alter the inspection report of unqualified vehicles. Such situations are quite common in the industry and have directly led to serious accidents.
In May 2015, in Chunhua, Shaanxi Province, a bus that was originally unqualified overturned into a ravine due to brake failure, resulting in the death of 35 people. The bus had just passed the inspection but was falsely marked as “brakes normal” due to fraud. An Qiang said, “That is an event I will never forget.”
According to reports from mainland China, some inspection institutions designate originally qualified vehicles as unqualified to increase revenue, then urge vehicle owners to purchase the so-called “passing package” service.
At a testing station in Shenyang, the OBD (On-Board Diagnostics) system recorded 13,000 completely identical codes between mid-2023 and 2024. Upon investigation, it was found that the station used a purchased “OBD cheating device” to connect the testing interface to a falsified vehicle computer during inspections, generating false data and uploading them.
“You can never pass the inspection when you bring your vehicle yourself, but a middleman can easily handle it for a hundred yuan.”
An Qiang revealed that the testing stations and so-called “middlemen” have long formed a gray profit chain. They appear as ordinary people during the day, but at night, they become friends with the inspectors. If vehicle owners are unwilling to pay, even a qualified car can be tested as unqualified.
“We might have unqualified testing equipment, causing qualified vehicles to be labeled as unqualified,” An Qiang added. This is an unwritten rule in the industry. Through this exchange of power and money, inspectors make the cars brought by middlemen qualify. “If the middleman asks the car owner for two hundred yuan, he keeps a hundred for himself and gives the other hundred to the inspector.”
At the end of 2023, a testing station in Ma’anshan, Anhui Province, was exposed. If a protected vehicle was found to have exceeded emissions during the inspection, the data upload would be halted, and back-end staff would manually modify the parameters to let the vehicle “pass smoothly.”
An Qiang highlighted that besides vehicle inspection fraud, a more serious issue is the systemic corruption within the traffic police system. In China, the driver’s license implements a points system with 12 points deducted annually, leading to suspension upon full deduction. However, internal personnel could easily eliminate or change violation records to “warning processing” through a backend “mouse click.”
“I know a girl in the traffic police team who earned three million a month just by handling violations.”
An Qiang described that during his tenure, internal traffic police personnel dealt with violations at a rate of “100 yuan per point,” where an original three-point violation that required a hundred yuan “service fee” for penalty would be turned into a “warning process” through internal operations. In this way, around 400 yuan in total would enter the personal accounts of the internal traffic police.
An Qiang once had in hand a car owner’s record of 400 violation points, yet the owner had never received any violation notices in two years until discovering the accumulated points during the annual inspection, only to rely on “internal operations” to clear them.
According to official data, the number of vehicle testing institutions in China had increased to 15,760 by 2023, a 30% growth from 2020. These testing institutions are mostly outsourced entities under local traffic police teams, leading to management loopholes with blurred responsibilities.
An Qiang admitted, “We are just subordinate units on the edge of the system; the core corruption is even more rampant.”
He pointed out that positions like vehicle management offices and traffic police stations are often “bought,” with the bought officials quickly recovering their costs upon taking office, then passing on the position to the next person, with numerous means of monetizing power. Just by stamping a seal, tens of thousands of income can be obtained privately with no oversight mechanism from the public.
It is even more disheartening that such practices are prevalent in various industries in China, especially those involving public power and administrative approvals. He likened China to “a rotten tree with hollow holes everywhere,” where ordinary people have no way to distinguish truth from falsehood, and can only survive within the unwritten rules.
When asked why he dared to speak out and expose the truth, An Qiang bluntly stated that it was a culmination of his family’s experiences and long-term observations. He revealed that his mother had passed away early due to unequal medical resources, and even his elder sister was sent away due to the “family planning” policy and remains missing to this day.
During the city lockdowns amid the pandemic, he survived on instant noodles and sausage for two weeks, while the privileged class could easily access essential supplies. He described, “The security that the Communist Party talks about is all fake.”
By accessing information through circumvention tools, An Qiang realized the huge gap between the propaganda of the Communist Party and reality. “We have been brainwashed since childhood, thinking that the Communist Party is the country. It was only after circumvention that I realized a political party is not equal to a country, and people should not be slaves.”
An Qiang lamented that the governance by the Chinese Communist Party lacks effective supervision and democratic mechanisms, allowing those in power to turn public safety into a rent-seeking tool, resulting in data falsification, unqualified vehicles on the roads, and frequent major accidents. And these are just the tip of the iceberg of the systemic disasters under the coexistence of CCP dictatorship and corruption.