Peking U. faculty member found to have used 100,000 words from American textbook
All of Beijing’s major newspapers recently carried a similar news item deep inside their thin pages. The Beijing Morning News, for instance, carried a short item, with no more than 100 Chinese characters, that briskly talked about how officials at Peking University had demoted Wang Mingming, a renowned Chinese anthropology professor accused of plagiarizing the work of an American academic. That development competed for space within the tiny article with the news that the university had rewarded another professor with $625,000 for an innovation in printing Chinese.
“Peking University is not perfect, but we’ll fix what we’re doing wrong and emphasize what we’re doing right,” the item quoted the university’s president, Xu Zhihong, as saying.
That was the official end to the “Wang Mingming affair,” as the Chinese media dubbed it. For a month, starting in mid-January, Mr. Wang’s case had provoked a national, and very public, debate, and it seemed that all of China’s universities, intellectual circles, and major newspapers were engulfed in the case. China’s academic community was divided on whether Mr. Wang was guilty of plagiarism and damaging Chinese academe’s reputation or was unfairly and arbitrarily accused. While the public debate has died down, a private one continues in academic circles that is sure to erupt again, because of the prevalence of a “culture of copying” in China.
Prevalence of Plagiarism
For many years now in China, plagiarism among professors and cheating among students have been acceptable practices in a society that has shown little awareness of intellectual property-rights protectionalmost anything can be copied or counterfeited if the price is right, it seems, although more violations now occur in private as China tries to appease its trading partners. A few steps outside Peking’s tall, white south gate in the capital’s bustling Haidian district, a center of university life and computer stores, young men in black offer to sell diplomas to pedestrians. Scrawled on phone booths around university campuses are phone numbers of other diploma sellers and people offering to take tests for students, including the Test of English as a Foreign Language.
As one of the nation’s premier universities, Peking exerts enormous influence on its peer institutions, which took note when it announced that Mr. Wang would be demoted -- losing his ability to recruit graduate students and to run the Center of Folklore Studies. At the same time, Peking also announced a new clause in its academic-regulations handbook: “Anyone who plagiarizes a published or unpublished work or idea will be warned, reprimanded, or demoted depending on the severity of the offense.” This is the first time a Chinese university has adopted a written rule on plagiarism, and many academics hope that other universities will follow. Others are less optimistic, and argue that what happened to Mr. Wang had less to do with academic standards and more with power politics.
The affair started with the January issue of China’s Social Science Journal. A graduate student, apparently hoping to change Chinese academe’s lax attitude toward plagiarism, wrote an article accusing Mr. Wang of plagiarizing almost 100,000 words -- one-third of the entire book -- in his Imaginary Alien Nation, published in 1998 by Shanghai People’s Publishing House. The student accused Mr. Wang of copying from the textbook Cultural Anthropology, by William A. Haviland, now an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Vermont. The news media immediately picked up the story, and Peking University suspended Mr. Wang while it decided his fate. This sparked a debate about whether Peking should fire Mr. Wang, and whether the media attention alone had caused the suspension.
Hush-Hush Reaction
Even now that the controversy has subsided, Peking’s professors are wary of discussing it. Mr. Wang’s colleagues in the sociology department refused to comment. University administrators haven’t gone beyond the written statement they released.
Yang Yusheng, a professor of history at Beijing Normal University, who runs the Web site www.acriticism.com, says that Peking didn’t particularly want to punish Mr. Wang more because the Ministry of Education had an implicit rule that “young and talented” Chinese scholars should be “supported.” But Mr. Yang says Peking has hurt its reputation by not taking stronger action against Mr. Wang, although he praises it for being the first university to adopt a plagiarism rule.
“Peking’s new regulation is not tough enough,” says Mr. Yang. “A scholar should be demoted or fired for plagiarism instead of being warned the first time.”
Peking’s students are divided. Mr. Wang’s own students have defended him on the university’s Internet bulletin board, saying that his classes are enjoyable and entertaining. What’s more, when corruption is a serious problem at universities, other students asked, why deal so harshly with one professor accused of plagiarism? Chinese newspapers regularly report on misappropriation of funds on university campuses.
Ma Cheng, a senior at Peking, believes that Mr. Wang should have been fired, not just demoted. For Mr. Ma, Peking’s disciplining of Mr. Wang reflects the university’s efforts to adopt international standards. “Peking is becoming increasingly strict, and students feel more pressure to perform in school now,” he says. Professors often punish students for plagiarism and cheating, he says: “Every year around 10 students will be severely punished for cheating on the final examination.” But other students say that a lot of cheating goes undetected and unpunished.
A Sterling Start
On the surface, Mr. Wang, 40, seems like an unlikely person to be accused of plagiarism. He received his master’s degree in anthropology from Xiamen University, in southern China, in 1987, the same year he did an authorized translation of Mr. Haviland’s textbook into Chinese, the first modern anthropology textbook in China. He received his doctorate in 1994 from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Peking University doesn’t have an anthropology department, but it hired Mr. Wang for its sociology department, where he quickly rose in the ranks to become head of its Center of Folklore Studies.
Then suddenly, Mr. Wang’s career came crashing down. After the article accusing him of plagiarism appeared in the Social Science Journal, Mr. Yang, the critic at Beijing Normal University, wrote an influential criticism in the popular newspaper Beijing Youth Daily. “How could such a well-educated and well-paid Peking University professor do such a thing?” he wrote.
The Chinese news media reported that Mr. Wang had been accused of plagiarism before. In 1999, Cao Suji, a professor at Fudan University, in Shanghai, had written an article in Social Science Journal arguing that Mr. Wang’s book The History of Community had many parts that were plagiarized. The article went largely unnoticed.
Soon Web sites and Chinese newspapers were inviting academics to discuss the issue, and Peking University suspended Mr. Wang. By March 9, when Peking finally announced its decision that Mr. Wang will remain a professor without other official duties, the public had lost interest.
But academics continue to wonder what the impact of Mr. Wang’s case will be, given the widespread plagiarism in Chinese academe. Scholars often copy one another’s works, and many books are written by compiling chapters from different books. Stealing another’s scholarship is also quite prevalent. “Everyone in Chinese academe copies each other,” says Mr. Yang. “Professors copy graduate students, graduate students copy professors. There are some universities that are no better than plagiarism camps, others no better than photocopiers.”
“Wang Mingming is unlucky to get caught,” says Ying Jinan, a professor at Beijing’s Central Academy of the Arts. “The rest of academe is lucky.”
Damaged Pride
So why was Mr. Wang singled out? Ira Cohen, vice president of Universal Ideas, an education-consulting company based here, believes that nationalism is a strong motivating factor. Chinese academics had hoped that the problem of plagiarism would resolve itself over time, he says, and Chinese are upset that some of their leading scholars are still copying Western scholars. “It hurts national pride,” he says. “I’m not surprised that everyone’s making such a big deal out of this.”
In an early explanation of what he had done, Mr. Wang did belittle Chinese academe. When the debate was beginning to flare, Mr. Wang sought to explain himself to China’s national television network, Central China Television: “When I published the book in 1998, anthropology in China was still a new, empty field. I had to fill this void by importing from the West.” Chinese anthropologists considered Mr. Wang’s words insulting, and scholars immediately attacked him for rationalizing his impropriety.
Pursuit of higher academic standards and nationalism may both have played a role, but nothing is as simple as it seems in China. When Chinese pick up the newspaper on a street corner and read in big characters how a high official in a distant province has been executed for corruption, they ask themselves: Was this official really guilty of corruption, or did he lose out in a power struggle? The answer is usually both.
Zhang Haiyang, an anthropologist at the Central University of Minorities, in Beijing, believes that Mr. Wang is “a victim of irresponsible tabloid journalism.”
Mr. Zhang also argues that Mr. Wang’s scholarly credentials cannot be disputed. China only has 150 to 200 anthropologists, he says. “And only 10 percent of those are accomplished, and Wang Mingming is definitely one of them. He does not need to copy others’ works.” Mr. Haviland himself has publicly stated that he thought that Mr. Wang committed “an honest mistake,” and has written a letter to Peking on Mr. Wang’s behalf.
In January, China’s influential weekly newspaper Southern Weekend wrote an editorial questioning how such a minor affair could attract so much attention, and blaming a cartel of scholars for fanning the fire. “In China there is no scholarship, just factions,” it quoted a philosophy professor at Wuhan University, Deng Xiaomang, as saying. “And in China there’ll always be factions nipping at each other.” Mr. Deng argued that Mr. Wang was a victim of jealous peers, and that Mr. Wang’s real crime was arrogance. If Mr. Wang had better relations with his peers, this would not have happened, Mr. Deng suggested.
Mr. Wang’s Enemies
Huang Jisu, a sociologist at China’s top research institute, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, concurs: “I’m not surprised that Wang Mingming finds himself in such a mess. He has plenty of enemies but no friends.”
A professor of folk-culture history at Beijing Normal who describes himself as a friend of Mr. Wang’s suggests that the plagiarism accusations are part of an attack on Mr. Wang’s Center of Folklore Studies by the sociology department at Peking University. The professor, who requested anonymity, says that the center may have angered the sociology department by accumulating too much power and independence.
“Mr. Wang may be corrupt, but his corruption is much better than the writing of the obvious and inane that is rampant in Chinese universities today,” says the professor. Mr. Wang may have copied ideas from the West, says the professor, but at least he brought in new ideas to China.
Still others hasten to point out that the message and symbolism of Mr. Wang’s case matter. “A professor needs to set a moral example to students, and Wang Mingming has violated the trust between professors and students,” says Zhou Xiaohong, who is an expert in education at Northeast Normal University, in Changchun in northeastern China. “Peking is letting Wang keep his job, and I think that’s being quite fair to him.”
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