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发帖数: 254 | 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/world/asia/07fraud.html?_r=1&hp
By ANDREW JACOBS
BEIJING — No one disputes Zhang Wuben’s talents as a salesman. Through
television shows, DVDs and a
best-selling book, he convinced millions of people that raw eggplant and
immense quantities of mung
beans could cure lupus, diabetes, depression and cancer.
For $450, seriously ill patients could buy a 10-minute consultation and a
prescription — except Mr. Zhang,
one of the most popular practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, was
booked through 2012.
But when the price of mung beans skyrocketed this spring, Chinese
journalists began digging deeper. They
learned that contrary to his claims, Mr. Zhang, 47, was not from a long line
of doctors (his father was a
weaver). Nor did he earn a degree from Beijing Medical University (his only
formal education, it turned out,
was the brief correspondence course he took after losing his job at a
textile mill).
The exposure of Mr. Zhang’s faked credentials provoked a fresh round of
hand-wringing over what many
scholars and Chinese complain are the dishonest practices that permeate
society, including students who
cheat on college entrance exams, scholars who promote fake or unoriginal
research, and dairy companies
that sell poisoned milk to infants.
The most recent string of revelations has been bracing. After a plane crash
in August killed 42 people in
northeast China, officials discovered that 100 pilots who worked for the
airline’s parent company had
falsified their flying histories. Then there was the padded résumé of Tang
Jun, the millionaire former head
of Microsoft China and something of a national hero, who falsely claimed to
have received a doctorate from
the California Institute of Technology.
Few countries are immune to high-profile frauds. Illegal doping in sports
and malfeasance on Wall Street
are running scandals in the United States. But in China, fakery in one area
in particular — education and
scientific research — is pervasive enough that many here worry it could
make it harder for the country to
climb the next rung on the economic ladder.
A Lack of Integrity
China devotes significant resources to building a world-class education
system and pioneering research in
competitive industries and sciences, and has had notable successes in
network computing, clean energy,
and military technology. But a lack of integrity among researchers is
hindering China’s potential and
harming collaboration between Chinese scholars and their international
counterparts, scholars in China and
abroad say.
“If we don’t change our ways, we will be excluded from the global academic
community,” said Zhang Ming,
a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing. “We
need to focus on seeking truth,
not serving the agenda of some bureaucrat or satisfying the desire for
personal profit.”
Pressure on scholars by administrators of state-run universities to earn
journal citations — a measure of
innovation — has produced a deluge of plagiarized or fabricated research.
In December, a British journal
that specializes in crystal formations announced that it was withdrawing
more than 70 papers by Chinese
authors whose research was of questionable originality or rigor.
In an editorial published earlier this year, The Lancet, the British medical
journal, warned that faked or
plagiarized research posed a threat to President Hu Jintao’s vow to make
China a “research superpower” by
2020.
“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,” the editorial
said. Last month a collection of
scientific journals published by Zhejiang University in Hangzhou reignited
the firestorm by publicizing
results from a 20-month experiment with software that detects plagiarism.
The software, called
CrossCheck, rejected nearly a third of all submissions on suspicion that the
content was pirated from
previously published research. In some cases, more than 80 percent of a
paper’s content was deemed
unoriginal.
The journals’ editor, Zhang Yuehong, emphasized that not all the flawed
papers originated in China,
although she declined to reveal the breakdown of submissions. “Some were
from South Korea, India and
Iran,” she said.
The journals, which specialize in medicine, physics, engineering and
computer science, were the first in
China to use the software. For the moment they are the only ones to do so,
Ms. Zhang said.
Plagiarism and Fakery
Her findings are not surprising if one considers the results of a recent
government study in which a third of
the 6,000 scientists at six of the nation’s top institutions admitted they
had engaged in plagiarism or the
outright fabrication of research data. In another study of 32,000 scientists
last summer by the China
Association for Science and Technology, more than 55 percent said they knew
someone guilty of academic
fraud.
Fang Shimin, a muckraking writer who has bec |
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