Fraud Goes to School in China, Part 2 of 3

Plagiarism has become common in China’s universities and research institutes.
Fraud Goes to School in China, Part 2 of 3
Chung To, gives a class at Fudan University Sept. 7, 2006 in Shanghai, China. Plagiarism has become a serious problem at Chinese Universities. (China Photos/Getty Images)
10/12/2010
Updated:
10/1/2015
<a><img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/09/71830664.jpg" alt="Chung To, gives a class at Fudan University Sept. 7, 2006 in Shanghai, China. Plagiarism has become a serious problem at Chinese Universities. (China Photos/Getty Images)" title="Chung To, gives a class at Fudan University Sept. 7, 2006 in Shanghai, China. Plagiarism has become a serious problem at Chinese Universities. (China Photos/Getty Images)" width="320" class="size-medium wp-image-1813557"/></a>
Chung To, gives a class at Fudan University Sept. 7, 2006 in Shanghai, China. Plagiarism has become a serious problem at Chinese Universities. (China Photos/Getty Images)
Earlier this year, China’s academic world was put on notice as Acta Crystallographica Section E, a British science journal, retracted 70 articles published by two teams of Chinese scientists in 2007 for falsifying crystal structures. More papers were retracted by the journal later.

Editors of the journal wrote an open letter urging the Chinese government to “reinvigorate standards for teaching research ethics and for the conduct of research itself,” and establish “robust and transparent procedures” for handling instances of fraud.

The two leading Chinese authors, Hua Zhong and Tao Liu, both faculty members at Jinggangshan University in eastern China, have since been fired by the university.

This case of academic fraud in China led to other revelations. Last month, Nature published a correspondence from Zhang Yuehong of Journal of Zhejiang University–Science, revealing that 31 percent, or 692 of 2,233 submissions to the journal since Oct. 2008 were found plagiarized. The letter indicated that this was a conservative assessment.

Journal of Zhejiang University–Science, listed as a key academic journal by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, used CrossRef’s plagiarism-screening service for the screening.

The magnitude of fraud reported is consistent with a survey administered by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, showing that a third of 6,000 scientists surveyed admitted to “plagiarism, falsification, or fabrication.”

Beijing University Blemished

Beijing University, known as the Harvard of China, has been marred by a series of plagiarism scandals in recent years. Back in 2002, Wang Mingming, a well-known professor of anthropology, was found to have committed plagiarism in his Chinese book Imagined Foreigners. About 100,000 characters in the book were said to be copied from the Chinese translation of William Haviland’s 1987 book Modern Anthropology.

Wang received his doctorate from London University in 1993, and was quickly promoted to a professorship at Beijing University. At the time of the plagiarism scandal, he was serving as a director of the Folklore Study Center and the Teaching and Research Section of Anthropology, and member of the Academic Board of the Department of Sociology at Beijing University.

According to Beijing Review, Wang was stripped of all his academic posts, but he remains a professor and doctorate adviser at Beijing University. He wrote a letter to Haviland apologizing for using his work without proper acknowledgment.

While Wang’s case has been reported by newspapers in China and abroad, other similar or more severe accusations of plagiarism have been mostly circulated on blog sites, including the cases involving Beijing University professors Cai Hua of sociology, He Shunguo of history, Huang Zongying of English, and Liu Xiao of physics. Among these, only Huang Zongying was removed from her faculty position for copying from Peter Ackroyd’s T. S. Eliot: A Life.

Netizens claim that these cases are only tips of the iceberg for the pervasive problem of academic fraud at Beijing University.

Yale professor Stephen Stearns, who taught at Beijing University in 2007, was so disturbed by the rampant plagiarism that he e-mailed his students, stating, according to a Web copy of the e-mail, “The fact that I have encountered this much plagiarism at Beida [Beijing University] tells me something about the behavior of other professors and administrators here. They must tolerate a lot of it, and when they detect it, they cover it up without serious punishment, probably because they do not want to lose face.”

As the e-mail became widely circulated, Beijing University responded with a vow to root out academic fraud. According to Caijing Magazine, Rao Yi, the dean of the College of Life Sciences, stated at the university’s website that he would fire any faculty members for violating academic rules of conduct. Rao also promised that the university would not condone the common behavior of professors signing on reference letters written by the students themselves.

‘Boldest Chain Plagiarism’

Following the case of “the boldest plagiarism” in a master’s thesis (see Part 1 in this series), the “boldest chain plagiarism” was reported, involving more than 70 people from 16 institutions, with 14 published papers during 1998-2009, all copying from one original 1997 publication.

Two college students, using the pseudonym Zhongda Xuezi, exposed the chain plagiarism to China Youth newspaper, using a diagram showing the six-level plagiarizing relationship. Most cases involve copying 90 percent of the content, with only slight changes in data.

The original article by Tan Dexin and Pan Zhifen is on intrauterine adhesion following abortion procedures, published in a medical journal. Given the widespread practice of abortion under China’s population control policy, it is not surprising that the most replicated paper would be related to abortion. The plagiarizers are medical professionals.

“The harm brought by medical plagiarism is hard to measure,” stated Zhongda Xuezi to China Youth newspaper. “Academic fraud in other fields can interfere with research or lead to economic loss; but medical plagiarism may endanger lives.”

One of the original authors of the work was sympathetic to the plagiarizers. “The problem is caused by the system,” she said to China Youth, commenting on the escalating requirements for promotion since the 1990s. Publication is the main measure of success even for medical practitioners.

The full-length investigative report posted by Zhongda Xuezi on sina.com.cn has been removed.

Three Decades of Growing Academic Fraud

A long list of emerging plagiarism cases has come from many universities, such as the highly ranked Fudan University, Zhongshan University, People’s University, and China Politics and Law University.

Some cases are bizarre—a professor from a southern college was accused of plagiarism when writing an article on studying plagiarism.

This sarcastic saying has been circulating on university campuses in China, “A big act of replication yields research papers under heaven—all depends on whether you are skilled at it or not.”

Chinese law has been either nonexistent or lenient on plagiarism. According to China Youth, Ms. Meng found a textbook on operation systems, written by a Beijing University professor and an academician from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, had plagiarized her work. She sued the offenders. One year, three trials, and 54,900 yuan (US$8,231) later, Meng won the lawsuit in 2008, with only 4,000 yuan (US$600) in compensation from the plagiarists.

Tsinghua University, also called the “MIT of China,” is not free from plagiarism scandals. A recent debatable case is Wang Hui, a prominent professor and “new left” scholar, who is accused of lifting from other books in his 1990 publication, Resistance to Despair.

Some scholars and netizens have come to his defense, arguing that the amount of text-lifting in his case was deemed nonsubstantial, and that his work was published during a “special period” when China had no established academic standards.

Having graduated from a university in Beijing myself, I remember the late 1980s when it was an open secret in universities and research institutions that many books were compiled from passages and sections in the Chinese translations of English books.

In the past three decades, plagiarism has only become more widespread and daring. In 1994, I was thoroughly surprised to find one of my dissertation chapters published in an English journal under a colleague’s name. I had left the draft to her earlier at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

A couple of years ago, a professor from Beijing University revealed to me how state-funded research projects in his department were accomplished in the manner of the “boldest plagiarism” by copying every word of other reports. In researching for this article, it occurs to me what a treasure house those unpublished research reports would be in plagiarism finds. Most would never come to light.