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.