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Plagiarism!!!
Internet exposes plagiarism in China
But punishment of professors rare at universities
By Jehangir S. Pocha, Globe Correspondent | April 9, 2006
BEIJING -- A number of high-profile plagiarism cases among professors have roiled the academic world in China, shedding new light on a practice that has been quietly plaguing the country's university system.
Chinese academics have long been accused of stealing the ideas of others, but pinning specific charges on offending professors used to be difficult because of lax intellectual property rights laws and a culture of impunity. Now, the Internet has made it harder for plagiarists to hide their crimes, and many universities are beefing up their policies in an effort to discourage the practice.
Last month, Zhou Ye Zhong, a professor at Wuhan University in central Hubei Province and a prominent adviser to the Communist Party, was accused of copying large sections of a book by Wang Tiancheng, a former Peking University professor who spent five years in jail during the early 1990s for trying to form an independent political party. The discovery was made after excerpts of Zhou's work were widely published on Chinese websites. Zhou has not been disciplined.
A recent survey of 160 academics by the China Daily, an English-language, government-owned newspaper, found that 60 percent said they had plagiarized some part of their work.
While websites and chat groups devoted to tracking down and exposing fraud and plagiarism have made it easier to identify plagiarists, punishing offenders is still difficult.
Wang has launched an Internet campaign to try to shame Zhou and his university into acknowledging Zhou's plagiarism. But he is unlikely to make much headway. Apart from the uneven power equation between a shamed political dissident and a Communist Party hero, most Chinese universities do not have regulations against plagiarism and those that do seldom enforce the rules.
''The schools want to protect their own reputation," said Cui Fu-Zhai, of the School of Materials Science & Engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Gong Renren, a professor of law at Peking University, said university administrations are also partly to blame for the plagiarism in Chinese academia because they often link professors' salaries to the number of articles they publish, regardless of their quality. Thus in China, the pressure to ''publish or perish" is even greater than it is in Western universities.
Shantou University, in southern Guangdong Province, made a crack in the quiet complicity plaguing China's academic system by firing one of its professors, Hu Xingrong, in December after it was revealed that he had plagiarized the work of a doctoral student in media studies from Fudan University.
Chan Yuen-Ying, director of the Cheung Kong Institute at Shantou University where Hu taught, who is also director of the Hong Kong University Journalism and Media Studies Center, said she had ''no difficulty at all" in deciding what to do because she wanted the school to adhere to international academic standards. But Chan's decision to fire Hu, which spawned waves of debate about plagiarism on local Internet chat groups, was largely seen as the result of her Western-influenced Hong Kong values.
In mainland China, university administrators remain loath to take similar actions because plagiarism has become part of the culture, said Peter Hereford, an American journalist who teaches journalism at Shantou and who supported the decision to fire Hu.
''Chinese students virtually learn to plagiarize from their first years in school," Hereford said. ''Later on, many students are encouraged to plagiarize by professors who want them to get the best possible test scores in this test-happy nation."
Jin Han Que, 19, a freshman engineering student at Tsinghua University, said plagiarism was common among students even though they knew it was wrong.
With the government pushing to improve standards at universities, top institutions such as Tsinghua and Peking University are implementing a series of new regulations designed to punish professors and students who infringe on intellectual property rights.
''Any staff member caught plagiarizing at Tsinghua will be fired," Cui said.
Previously, the government had been ambivalent about adhering to the international standards for protecting intellectual-property rights, which it saw as being stacked against the needs of developing nations.
Now, Chinese researchers and academics are developing their own standards, and bureaucrats and decision-makers are awaking to the need to protect these inventions.
For example, when Cui and his research center recently developed a synthetic bone-grafting material, the government gave them a grant to help get it patented in the United States, where they soon hope to market the invention. But Cui said he fears that unless China tightens its intellectual property rights, all the hard work and money spent on his discovery could come to nothing. ''Maybe some other company will just take our idea, our formula and use it," he said.
Those fears are not unfounded, an analyst says. Stephen Green, senior economist at Standard Chartered Bank in China, said that around 80 percent of all property-rights violations in China involve cases of Chinese companies infringing on the patents and copyrights of other Chinese companies, not US companies.
Such changing imperatives are also changing attitudes in China. Hereford said that while some students ''still think it is OK [to plagiarize] because everyone else does it," the majority appear to be turning against the practice.
''When the shoe dropped and Hu resigned, they were supportive but also amazed that we had actually followed through with a faculty member," he said.
But Cui said the road ahead would be long and difficult.
''There are entrenched habits and interests," he said. ''A universal no-tolerance policy -- immediate expulsion, as you have in the West -- is still very far away."
But punishment of professors rare at universities
By Jehangir S. Pocha, Globe Correspondent | April 9, 2006
BEIJING -- A number of high-profile plagiarism cases among professors have roiled the academic world in China, shedding new light on a practice that has been quietly plaguing the country's university system.
Chinese academics have long been accused of stealing the ideas of others, but pinning specific charges on offending professors used to be difficult because of lax intellectual property rights laws and a culture of impunity. Now, the Internet has made it harder for plagiarists to hide their crimes, and many universities are beefing up their policies in an effort to discourage the practice.
Last month, Zhou Ye Zhong, a professor at Wuhan University in central Hubei Province and a prominent adviser to the Communist Party, was accused of copying large sections of a book by Wang Tiancheng, a former Peking University professor who spent five years in jail during the early 1990s for trying to form an independent political party. The discovery was made after excerpts of Zhou's work were widely published on Chinese websites. Zhou has not been disciplined.
A recent survey of 160 academics by the China Daily, an English-language, government-owned newspaper, found that 60 percent said they had plagiarized some part of their work.
While websites and chat groups devoted to tracking down and exposing fraud and plagiarism have made it easier to identify plagiarists, punishing offenders is still difficult.
Wang has launched an Internet campaign to try to shame Zhou and his university into acknowledging Zhou's plagiarism. But he is unlikely to make much headway. Apart from the uneven power equation between a shamed political dissident and a Communist Party hero, most Chinese universities do not have regulations against plagiarism and those that do seldom enforce the rules.
''The schools want to protect their own reputation," said Cui Fu-Zhai, of the School of Materials Science & Engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Gong Renren, a professor of law at Peking University, said university administrations are also partly to blame for the plagiarism in Chinese academia because they often link professors' salaries to the number of articles they publish, regardless of their quality. Thus in China, the pressure to ''publish or perish" is even greater than it is in Western universities.
Shantou University, in southern Guangdong Province, made a crack in the quiet complicity plaguing China's academic system by firing one of its professors, Hu Xingrong, in December after it was revealed that he had plagiarized the work of a doctoral student in media studies from Fudan University.
Chan Yuen-Ying, director of the Cheung Kong Institute at Shantou University where Hu taught, who is also director of the Hong Kong University Journalism and Media Studies Center, said she had ''no difficulty at all" in deciding what to do because she wanted the school to adhere to international academic standards. But Chan's decision to fire Hu, which spawned waves of debate about plagiarism on local Internet chat groups, was largely seen as the result of her Western-influenced Hong Kong values.
In mainland China, university administrators remain loath to take similar actions because plagiarism has become part of the culture, said Peter Hereford, an American journalist who teaches journalism at Shantou and who supported the decision to fire Hu.
''Chinese students virtually learn to plagiarize from their first years in school," Hereford said. ''Later on, many students are encouraged to plagiarize by professors who want them to get the best possible test scores in this test-happy nation."
Jin Han Que, 19, a freshman engineering student at Tsinghua University, said plagiarism was common among students even though they knew it was wrong.
With the government pushing to improve standards at universities, top institutions such as Tsinghua and Peking University are implementing a series of new regulations designed to punish professors and students who infringe on intellectual property rights.
''Any staff member caught plagiarizing at Tsinghua will be fired," Cui said.
Previously, the government had been ambivalent about adhering to the international standards for protecting intellectual-property rights, which it saw as being stacked against the needs of developing nations.
Now, Chinese researchers and academics are developing their own standards, and bureaucrats and decision-makers are awaking to the need to protect these inventions.
For example, when Cui and his research center recently developed a synthetic bone-grafting material, the government gave them a grant to help get it patented in the United States, where they soon hope to market the invention. But Cui said he fears that unless China tightens its intellectual property rights, all the hard work and money spent on his discovery could come to nothing. ''Maybe some other company will just take our idea, our formula and use it," he said.
Those fears are not unfounded, an analyst says. Stephen Green, senior economist at Standard Chartered Bank in China, said that around 80 percent of all property-rights violations in China involve cases of Chinese companies infringing on the patents and copyrights of other Chinese companies, not US companies.
Such changing imperatives are also changing attitudes in China. Hereford said that while some students ''still think it is OK [to plagiarize] because everyone else does it," the majority appear to be turning against the practice.
''When the shoe dropped and Hu resigned, they were supportive but also amazed that we had actually followed through with a faculty member," he said.
But Cui said the road ahead would be long and difficult.
''There are entrenched habits and interests," he said. ''A universal no-tolerance policy -- immediate expulsion, as you have in the West -- is still very far away."
But I did notice that cheating was positively reinforced in the culture. Students respected cheaters who got away with it. It didn't matter whether the cheating was clever or not, if it got past the teacher (who often didn't care) the students would be admired by their peers. During my first semester of teaching there, I gave weekly vocab quizzes. They had to learn 5 new words and then place them in proper blanks in sentences I wrote. The cheating was rampart. I tried so hard to get them to learn the words. We had reviews before the quiz. I later changed the quizzes to every 2 weeks. I eventually gave up because so few students were learning the words and rather just cheating or failing. What a miserable experience, and the school administration was no help.
For science, I got to see two polar ends at the one university. First, I shadowed a graduate student to help him with his paper as well as learn a bit from him myself. His PhD project was to develop a drug to treat a common disease. Sadly, his research was lacking. While he had a lot of data that sounded good, it didn't take long to notice that he had no controls. There was no way to determine whether his drug was effective or not. Also, there was no study for side effects. He wasn't concerned because his mentor's brother was already prepared to start producing the drug for the market through his company. So the student's PhD was guaranteed. I quickly distanced myself from this group.
I later began working at the hospital branch of the university. Assisting them with one of their projects while gaining valuable educational experience. Their lab couldn't be any more different. Sure, it wasn't completely up to Western standards, but real science could and was being done there. The people there were bright and dedicated to their work. It was a pleasure to work with them.
Note: UR, if you're not going to contribute productively to this thread, please don't bother to post here. Thank you.
Frankly, because our first teacher was so terrible the class was too easy to need to cheat in. A month on Ni hao! Leave already!!
I wonder if I should have suggested that. 
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