Robin Li Yanhong, Chairman and CEO of Baidu Photo: IC

The recent nomination of Baidu CEO Robin Li Yanhong to hold the country's most acclaimed academic title in engineering has triggered heated debate, as some netizens claimed Li was "morally unqualified" mainly due to the search engine's ineffective regulation of fraudulent medical advertising.

Li was on a shortlist of nominees to the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), known as CAE academicians, read a post by the CAE on Tuesday. 

To recognize their contributions in the engineering and technology sectors, a total of 531 candidates are on the shortlist for 2019, and 114 of them are entrepreneurs, including Alibaba's technology chief Wang Jian and BYD CEP and President Wang Chuanfu.

Among the entrepreneur candidates, Li's nomination aroused the most doubts. 

According to the rules of the CAE, "a candidate should be of unquestioned moral rectitude, but Li is not qualified under this requirement," an unidentified doctor wrote in an article published by an official WeChat account known as Dahanchengxiang.

"As a doctor, I often have access to patients who have ... delayed treatment because of Baidu's advertising, and they are unable to be cured," read the article.

The death of a 21-year-old university student Wei Zexi in 2016, who used the Baidu search engine to look for a place to treat his cancer, drew national ires.

Baidu did not offer comment when reached by the Global Times on Sunday.

Netizens showed doubts toward Li's nomination online.

"Li was a technology major and excelled in the IT sector, but now he puts much focus on doing business instead of technology research. No matter how professional he is or how well he makes money, the basis is morality," a netizen named Shan Yuan said on Weibo on Sunday.

"Please respect the honor of CAE academicians! It is not just a title, but the highest honor that the country's scientists pursue in their lifetimes. If Li is qualified for the nomination, please show the public his research outcomes," a netizen named Shao Hua said.

"Being an academician is a kind of value. It should create positive energy to lead our society forward," a Beijing resident named Yan Peng told the Global Times on Sunday.

After Wei's death, Baidu announced an organizational restructuring and optimization of its medical business. It also strengthened efforts to shut down medical promotion accounts and set up a separate blacklist of risk control keywords for the medical sector, according to media reports.

But as one of the income sources for Baidu, medical advertising persists in various forms. 

Police in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province, recently seized a medical fraud team that sought rankings on the Baidu search engine through bidding, domestic news site finance.sina.com.cn said on April 28.

Academic research and strict morality are two requirements for electing an academician, but the latter is the prerequisite, said Zhang Yi, CEO of iiMedia Research Institute, a mobile internet consulting firm based in Guangdong Province.

Baidu still faces credibility issues after Wei's case as its regulation of distorted information from medical advertising is not effective, Zhang told the Global Times on Sunday.