Recommended Blog: China’s Scientific and Academic Integrity Watch
Those of you in China having several years of experience hiring top research talent from the top universities are, I suspect, aware that Chinese students, even from these schools, must be vetted with care. It is not that Chinese are more likely to cheat than another nationality — academic dishonesty is rife everywhere there is an intent to cut corners (and cheap and easy internet access to sources ripe for plagiarism).
Instead, I think, many westerners have the wrongheaded notion that somehow Chinese students hold themselves to a higher standard of conduct. Steven Stearns of Yale, a guest lecturer at Beijing University （北大）, penned this severe remonstration to his students, noting with substantial emotion his great disappointment at the scale of plagiarism, even at the very apex of the Chinese academy.
Professor Stearns even adduces the Confucian ideal of the gentleman （君子）, a concept long dead to PRC Chinese, which still arguably lingers on in some overseas Chinese communities, especially the Taiwanese. The appeal to traditional virtue may, in fact, appeal to those few within China who have only recently seemed to rediscover the Classics, but it is likely to fall on the deaf ears of Chinese youth.
For how can a gentleman, in the classical sense, whose position as scholar was formerly elevated above all others, especially the merchant, prosper in a ruthlessly competitive commercial society? Is integrity integral to success? Or do they, at least in the mind of the ambitious, mix like oil and vinegar? And to what or to whom does one look as a model of virtue in China? Does one exist any longer?
The blog, China’s Scientific and Academic Integrity Watch, on which Professor Stearns’s letter may be found is of very great interest to the general reader on China.
Source: Asiabizblog – Business and Law for China and Asia
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