On May 9th, the purchasing project for firewalls and DNS equipment at the Three Gorges University in Chongqing was announced with a winning bid of 750,000 yuan, despite the actual market price of the winning product being only 299 yuan, sparking doubts.
A public official named Mr. Huang from mainland China expressed to Epoch Times, “What kind of firewall is this? Many people, including internal colleagues, don’t even know what it is. Because a firewall is a software-based service, it’s not just a matter of a box. It was originally a function of network management software, but now it’s being deliberately misrepresented as that kind of thing.”
The “TPLink TL-R473G Export Firewall” purchased by the Three Gorges University was priced at 750,000 yuan per unit, while the same model was priced at only 299 yuan on a certain e-commerce platform. After facing scrutiny from the public, the university explained that the product intended for procurement was actually a basic gigabit wired router, which severely deviated from the network firewall technical standards required by the school. As a result, the procurement contract has been terminated.
“It’s definitely the leaders trying to make money, then they work with the procurement people to find ways to describe it and inflate the cost, increase the procurement price, and even have two or three internal individuals cooperate, doing things like fake bidding. This kind of thing is everywhere,” said Mr. Huang. “After 40 years of reform, with so much GDP and tax revenue, the common people still have nothing. It’s all taken away by them. We within the system have always known about many of these things.”
Mr. Huang believes, “This is caused by the Communist Party’s system of profit-sharing. Those in official positions have all obtained their positions through layers of bribery and promotion, so they are definitely going to recoup that. Therefore, there are hardly any clean officials or impartial individuals within the system now.”
The supplier of the winning bid information was the “Fengdu County Hongzheng Trading Co., Ltd.,” with a winning bid price of 850,000 yuan. The other two companies participating in the bidding were the “China Mobile Communication Group Chongqing Co., Ltd.,” with a quote of 887,000 yuan; and the “Chongqing Changlong Ji Industrial Co., Ltd.,” with a quote of 899,980 yuan.
Some prominent social media figures have questioned, “Selling a router with a retail price of 279 yuan for 750,000 yuan to the Three Gorges University and successfully winning the bid – a script that seems so ludicrous and unbelievable is actually happening in reality. If the bid announcement didn’t specify the exact model, no one would believe such an outrageous price difference. The service fee for this procurement is as high as 127,500 yuan, enough to buy 45 of the same routers.”
Incidents like this are not isolated cases. Just this past March, Chinese state media reported that in the bid procurement for disaster recovery equipment in the Hope Primary School in Asbestos County, Sichuan Province, there was a huge difference between the purchased price of the goods and their market prices. A model camera named DC201S from Sungdean was priced at 14,050 yuan, while the official market price for the same model camera brand was only 631 yuan.
Mr. Ning, a resident of Chongqing, expressed to Epoch Times, “Almost every school here experiences this kind of thing, it’s just that this university is being exposed now. For example, in the school canteen, some underprivileged families can apply for free or state-subsidized meals, but then these needy students are required to pay so much money to the school again. It’s like the schools are playing both sides. They apply for state subsidies and, at the same time, collect money from these students.”
Mr. Ning further stated, “Now all schools are charging overtime fees. For instance, if the normal school dismissal time is 5:30 p.m., and they make the students stay an extra two to three hours, each student has to pay over 800 yuan more, under the guise of makeup class fees. This means that external tutoring has been prohibited, and only internal makeup classes are allowed, so the education and training sector has been cracked down in recent years.”