To your first point, it is the sheer volume of it that makes it easy to assume there are many cases that haven’t (yet) been caught. China is producing such an absurd amount of patents, and there are clearly people who are willing to try and defraud the government in China enough that it’s been a real problem. There is also a huge problem with providing enough jobs for qualified scientists in China, it is not hard to imagine that there will be people doing whatever it takes to provide for their family if the alternative is not having any job at all. I wasn’t even saying China was trying to hide anything, although we know that they do that. The Thai building collapse I mentioned in another comment was pretty quickly scrubbed from Chinese social media, for example. In the case of fraud, I would imagine that China would prefer to be open about that data domestically because it shows they are diligent to the masses and potentially scares other people from trying. I haven’t had the time to look for it myself yet. Either way, I wasn’t making a point that there are many cases that haven’t been caught, I was saying that in context to being told the very notion is a conspiracy theory with no evidence, that there are some that have been caught that we can see makes it real, and surely there are more that haven’t been caught.

I’m just posting on forum, not writing to convince an audience of anything, so I feel fine making speculative statements without statistical evidence. I get if you hold yourself to a different standard, but I don’t take any of this seriously enough to think about it like that. I agree that China is probably setting the global standard on fraud prevention and prosecution, and that the US does something like the opposite.