China targets an academic culture of cut-and-paste

After a scandal highlighting rampant plagiarism, the government tries to rein it in – and a new generation of teachers trained abroad could help.

By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the March 23, 2009 edition

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Beijing - Three professors at a leading Chinese university – including one of the country's top experts in traditional medicine – have lost their jobs in a new plagiarism scandal. And the government finally seems to have been jolted into tackling the academic dishonesty that plagues many faculties here.

Experts are not holding their breath, though. In a culture where knockoffs are normal, from sportswear to DVDs, it will not be easy to expunge deep-rooted academic habits, they warn. But some say hope may lie with a new generation of internationally trained teachers.

The latest fraud to rock Chinese academia centers on He Haibo, an associate professor of pharmacology at the prestigious Zhejiang University. He now admits to copying or making up material he submitted in eight papers to international journals and has been fired, along with the head of his research institute.

The affair has drawn particular attention because a world-renowned expert in traditional Chinese medicine, Li Lianda, lent his name as coauthor to one of the fraudulent papers. His tenure will not be renewed when his contract expires soon, the president of Zhejiang University has said.

"This biggest-ever academic scandal is for sure a wakeup call that the Chinese universities are facing a crisis of credibility," editorialized the state-run "China Daily."

Academic fraud is not new in China; scandals have broken sporadically over the past decade, but most cases never come to light, says Fang Shimin, founder of a website for academics.

University leaders "simply ignore the accusation or try to cover it up ... to protect the fame and gain of the university," Mr. Fang said in an e-mail.

Sparking debate

Plagiarism and sheer invention have flourished in Chinese academic circles, adds Stephen Stearns, a Yale University professor of ecology and evolutionary biology who taught two classes at Peking University in 2007, because "at least until recently, the rewards were great and the punishment was trivial. It paid off."

Professor Stearns sparked a firestorm of debate here when his admonition to his Chinese students about their plagiarism was published on the Internet.

"There is a long tradition of plagiarism in Chinese universities," Stearns wrote in an e-mail last week. "Some Chinese professors actually teach their students to plagiarize."

Fang, who closely follows cases of what he calls "academic corruption," puts its prevalence down to a nexus of rampant capitalism, which has commercialized Chinese education; a lack of freedom of speech, which keeps the lid on scandals; and the tradition of saving face.

Others suggest that universities' policy of promoting teachers according to the quantity, rather than the quality, of their published output plays a role.

"Chinese academics are under pressure to publish," says Jeremiah Jenne, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Davis, who is currently studying in Beijing. "In the worst cases that means slapdash cut and paste jobs on other people's work.

"There is a lot of wink-wink, nod-nod amongst professors," Mr. Jenne adds. "So a lot of people take short cuts and get away with it."

Academic morals are simply Chinese society's morals writ small, argues Hu Xindou, an economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology. "Corruption and fraud are very common in China and academic corruption and fraud just reflect the social situation," he says.

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