Betraying Confucius: Academic fraud in China
By Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - It is one of the great ironies of China's rise on the international
stage: a nation that reveres Confucius and the devotion to truth and learning
symbolized by the great sage has become one of the world's leading perpetrators
of academic fraud. Cheating among Chinese scholars has reached such epidemic
proportions that at least one leading academic journal will no longer consider
their submissions.
This month, a prominent British medical journal, The Lancet, urged the Chinese
government to take action against rampant cheating in scientific research. But
that call is likely to go unheeded in a university system that has taken the
maxim "publish or perish" to the extreme. For a Chinese lecturer aspiring
to be a professor, it is quantity, not quality, that counts; indeed, quality is
often irrelevant as evaluation teams of bureaucrats, many of whom have no
knowledge of the disciplines they have been assigned, tick off who has
published the most papers.
The greater the number of publications, the greater the chance of advancement.
It is no surprise then that a cut-and-paste culture of academic fraud has
thrived ever since China opened its doors to capitalism and turned education
into another commodity.
President Hu Jintao's trumpeted plan to turn China into a research superpower
by 2020 seems laughable as long as the copycat mentality of Chinese merchants
selling everything from pirated DVDs to fake designer jewelry and clothing
continues to seep into university life, where many professors teach their
students not just the finer points of their discipline but also the best ways
to cheat and get away with it.
The case that prompted The Lancet to call out the Chinese government is just
the latest in a long string of examples of fraudulent research by Chinese
scholars. It involves dozens of papers that were written by two teams of
Chinese chemists and published in 2007 in a specialist journal called Acta
Crystallographica Section E. The authors claimed to have invented at least 70
structures in crystallography, the study of the arrangement of atoms in solids
and a key aspect of materials science.
Editors of Acta Crystallographica Section E said that a new computer program
had belatedly uncovered the ruse, revealing that the new structures claimed by
the authors were actually older inventions that had been slightly altered by
changing one or two atoms to make the compound appear new.
One of the study groups was led by Hua Zhong, the other by Tao Liu, both of
Jinggangshan University in eastern Jiangsu province. According to the editors,
Zhong's group has admitted fraud in 41 papers and Liu's in 29, but further
admissions are "likely" to be forthcoming.
The powers that be at The Lancet were so alarmed by the case that they issued
this broadside against the Chinese leadership in a January 9 editorial:
"Clearly, China's government needs to take this episode as a cue to
reinvigorate standards for teaching research ethics and for the conduct of the
research itself, as well as establishing robust and transparent procedures for
handling allegations of scientific misconduct to prevent further instances of
fraud.
"For Hu Jintao's goal of China becoming a research superpower by 2020 to be
credible, China must assume stronger leadership in scientific integrity."
Zhong and Liu have been dismissed by the university, and their Communist Party
membership has also been revoked. But that doesn't change a system that
encourages fraud or disguise the fact that most of the cheaters never get
caught.
The ballooning PhD industry in China has been suspect from the very start. The
country only resumed post-graduate university programs in 1978, in the
aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, but by 2008 China had surpassed the
United States as the world's top producer of PhDs. Also by 2008, Chinese
scientists accounted for 11.5% of the 271,000 papers published in scientific
journals. China now ranks second to the US in the number of academic papers
published each year.
In the past three years, according to a study by Wuhan University, the market
for buying and selling scientific papers in China has grown five-fold. More
than US$100 million is spent yearly for ghost-written academic papers, the
study found.
Other studies, recently cited in the international science journal Nature,
indicate that one in three researchers at major Chinese universities and
research institutions have admitted to committing plagiarism or falsifying or
fabricating data.
After three professors at the prestigious Zhejiang University were found guilty
of plagiarism last year, the Ministry of Education vowed to curb the widespread
cheating taking place in academia. In March, free trials of anti-plagiarism
software, already reportedly being used by 1,000 Chinese science journals, were
offered to 200 universities. The ministry also issued a statement urging
universities to report all cases of academic fraud and to crack down on the
perpetrators with punishments ranging from warnings to lawsuits.
But this was hardly the first time officials have made such noises. Three years
ago, with make-believe studies by Chinese scientists mounting, the Office of
Scientific Research Integrity was established under the auspices of the
Ministry of Science and Technology. To date, the office has not dealt with a
single case of fraud.
China is not the only country where academic cheating is out of control. In the
most notorious recent case, a South Korean researcher, Hwang Woo-Suk, was
dismissed from his post at Seoul National University in 2006 for his false
claims, published in the eminent US journal Science, that he had created the
world's first stem-cell line from a cloned human embryo.
Fortunately, Hwang was outed - otherwise, he might have won a Nobel prize. But
his disgrace prompted a curious reaction among many South Koreans, who
demonstrated in support of Hwang even though he had clearly been revealed as a
charlatan. For the demonstrators, Hwang's fraud was not as important as the
loss of face for the nation when its putative scholar-hero fell from grace.
While there has been no case as spectacular as Hwang's in China, a similar
mindset often prevails in a system that can be both undemocratic and corrupt.
In academia, honest professors are the gatekeepers of the classroom; peer
review by those same professors has traditionally been the foundation for
research that has integrity and truly advances humankind. But all this can only
take place in a system that rewards honesty and punishes deceit. That's not
happening in China. Until it does, there will be no Nobel prizes for Chinese
scholars.
Confucius would weep.
Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached at
kewing@hkis.edu.hk.
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