The same people who donate to elect chief prosecutors also donate to these schools. If you ran a campaign on prosecuting scientific fraudsters at Harvard the next election cycle you'd have 20 multi-millionaires trying to scalp you in hopes they can parlay that into their mediocre child's admission.

Nope. There's way more money in academia than in prosecution

I guess it depends on how you perceive "face". Admitting to and taking responsibility for mistakes can be good, but both academia and the PRC are united in their delusion that pretending to never make any mistakes is somehow good, even when it's almost an open secret that those mistakes exist. Doubling down and tripling down, if you will.