I too was a 论文指导 thesis advisor for two years at a Chinese University.

Requiring English majors in Chinese universities to write a graduate thesis in English is insane, but the regulation is still in effect.

For the record: Chinese majors at Harvard University are not required to write a graduate thesis in Chinese. If they do choose a thesis, it is written in English.

At one University, I offered the Dean of the department a wager: choose ANY Chinese professor of English at the school and place her in a hotel room for a week with internet access to write a 5000 word 'thesis' in English. If she hasn't plagiarized 30% of the paper and didn't have 50 grammatical errors, I would pay for the hotel and give the teacher and the Dean 50K Rmb each. She laughed, knowing full well that not one of her staff wrote English well enough to write an actual paper. The entire staff, however, certainly did enjoy abusing the students about their lack of ability during the 'thesis defense', which when spoken in Chinese is pronounced similarly to the word for shit 大便/答辯, a mispronunciation I insisted on using.

Of 400 student during that two year period, not one actually wrote a thesis. Most purchased them or copied them from the internet. The best students actually did what I call a 'hot pot' thesis, choosing paragraphs from various online sources and simmering them together with every conjunction know to man.