The relaxed, friendly smile slowly dropped for Wang Zhengrong's face. The game was up, he knew he had failed in his last chance to persuade Luo Caixia and her father not to expose him.

Luo, a 23-year-old student, showed no mercy as she sat face to face with the former township leader who stole her identity in order to enroll his daughter into college.

Luo Caixia shows a photo of Wang Jiajun, her high school classmate and alleged imposter, to reporters from China Youth Daily on May 4. Liu Wanyong (Inset): The registration from for Wang Jiajun in sitting for college entrance examination. [File photo]

She agreed to meet Wang in March for food in Tianjin municipality, accompanied by her father and some friends, shortly after discovering her ID card number had been used to activate an online banking service in Guizhou Province.

"As I sat there, I was not afraid, but my dad was nervous and never took his eyes off Wang (Zhengrong)," Luo told reporters from China Central Television this week. "It hurt me to see my dad's hands trembling with fear."

She said that Wang, who ran a local government in Shaodong county, Hunan Province, before becoming the political commissar of the public security bureau in the neighboring Longhui county, had offered to use his connections to find her a job during the meal in exchange for agreeing to illegally change the number on her ID card and keeping the theft a secret.

But she refused, and Wang was this month detained over allegations he forged official documents and intercepted an admission letter from Guizhou Normal University (GNU), where his daughter Wang Jiajun, a former classmate of Luo, was enrolled in 2004 to do a teaching degree.

The scandal sparked fury among China's citizens over the social injustice, as well as the inequality of education opportunities after investigators revealed many officials had abused their power to help in the fraud.

The debate was also fueled yesterday by reports that a teacher called Liu Min, 46, helped a relative go to college in Shandong province by stealing his pupil Zhou Zhijing's identity 10 years ago.

In early interviews, Luo was quoted in the media as saying: "Why did they pick me? Was it because I came from a family in the countryside?" But her self-pity has made way for anger and, on May 15, a court in Tianjin accepted a lawsuit she submitted that listed seven defendants, including the Wang family and education officials in Guizhou and Hunan provinces.

Luo is demanding 135,200 yuan (US$20,000) in compensation for violations to her right of name and right to an education, and the emotional damage.

Lawyer Liu Jinghui, an expert in education law, said that although Luo's financial losses were relatively small, "Wang's alleged crime had also stolen a year of her life".

As former classmates at the No 1 Middle School in Shaodong county, both girls fell short of the 531-point pass mark set by the Hunan authorities for the national college entrance examination in 2004; Luo scoring 514, Wang Jiajun 335.

However, Wang Zhengrong is alleged to have manipulated GNU into offering Luo a place on condition she was pre-assigned a specific job upon graduation, and then intercepted the admission letter with the help of Tang Kunxiong, who worked at the university.