In recent months a plagiarism scandal has roiled Chinese academia.  It seems that Wang Hui, a prominent "new left" intellectual, was accused of copying the work of others without proper attribution in his dissertation, written in 1985.  There have been charges and counter-charges, accusations of political motivations and even a letter/petition from international scholars in support of Wang.  A detailed analysis of various copied and/or translated passages can be found, in Chinese, here.

Personally, I think Wang did plagiarize.   But I want to step back and think about the whole affair from a somewhat broader cultural perspective.

Charles Custer, of Chinageeks, early on wrote:

Plagiarism is far from uncommon in Chinese academia. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences told the Nandu Daily
that they “often encounter cases of plagiarism”, and in fact had just
recently resolved a rather brilliant case where the plagiarist had
taken his material from a foreign language source and translated it
without attribution.

According to the Nandu Daily reporter, one problem is that
there is no real consensus on “academic standards” or exactly what
amounts to plagiarism. Some have argued adopting rigid Western
standards inhibits freedom, but the CASS apparently supports adhering
to the Western golden rule for academic work…

Two thoughts come to mind here.  First, it is true that plagiarism is common in Chinese academia; or, at least, that was my experience twenty some-odd years ago when I taught college students there.  Teaching at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, I had the pleasure of working with some very bright, assiduous Chinese college graduates.  And I still have a clear memory of the first paper assignment.  We were supposed to teach and evaluate according to American standards and I was shocked at the number of unabashedly plagiarized papers handed in.  Since it was the first paper, and it was a new experience for the students, I did not fail any of them outright.  But I told them that if they had done this in the US they would face immediate failure on the paper and possibly the class.   Indeed, my most cherished accomplishment in the year I was there was to watch as the Chinese students developed independent and critical writing skills.  Quite a subversive thing if you think about it…

But the second thing to notice about the quote above is how academicians in China now recognize the intellectual failure that plagiarism represents. It may have been true that copying was accepted in the not so distant past, but now proper citation and attribution is required.  This might signify something more than just a change in academic standards.

We might ask why plagiarism was so prevalent in the 1980s in China, and why it is still widespread today? 

Of course plagiarism is to be found everywhere, and that suggests large structural forces, especially economic forces, at work.   Globalization makes everything more competitive: college admissions, graduate schools, job markets.  Thus students are under increasing pressure to put up good grades.  And that pressure pushes them, too many of them, to cheat.  That happens in China, in the US, everywhere.

But there is a cultural context to plagiarism in China as well.  And, yes, I am thinking of a diffuse effect of "Confucianism."  

Confucius, and his followers, tell us, generally, that the best human society, the most morally upright expressions of human community, existed in the past.  The Sage-Emperors Yao and Shun, among others, were the best rulers and, under them, society settled into a harmonious ethical order.  It is this longing for times past that leads to Analects passages like:

The Master said: "Transmitting insight, but never creating insight, standing by my words and devoted to the ancients: perhaps I'm a little like that old sage, P'eng."  7.1

The idea here is that we should seek to "transmit" the best ideas from the past, instead of thinking that we can create our own better ideas in the present.  And that is because the wisest minds of the past offer us the best solutions to our contemporary problems.  Ironically, Confucius, in fact, was a great moral innovator, but he presented himself as simply a guy who drew inspiration from what had come before.

Something similar has infused Chinese academia.   When thinking of an intellectual problem, a Confucian-influenced approach (and there has been a continual, albeit diffuse, Confucian influence in Chinese intellectual life, whether direct or indirect), would ask: what have the best answers been in the past?  The project is to find the best of the available past answers, and copy them.  That is what my students did.  And, I suspect, that is what Wang Hui did, too.

There is, actually, something humble about that approach.  It expresses a certain respect for those who came before.  What is the old saying? -  "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery".  

The problem arises, obviously, when clear and direct attribution is absent and the reader is lead to believe that the imitation is an original thought.  Such is the scourge of plagiarism.

But Custer's quote above, about how the CASS is embracing "Western" standards of citation, suggests that the old Confucian sensibility, which celebrate the artfully mobilized unattributed quotation, is giving way to a more literal and direct style of cultural expression.  This transformation has been underway for a long time in China, since the introduction of Western academic practices in the 19th century.  It has been a long, slow process of cultural change, still incomplete in the 1980s when Wang Hui was writing is dissertation and I was teaching in Nanjing.  Its continued progression will not halt plagiarism in China – the competitive pressures of globalization insure its persistence – but it will undermine an older cultural justification for copying.

Chinese academics can no longer say that Confucius made them do it.