新浪尚文

　　张悟本行医资质造假被曝光后引发了中国新一轮的捶胸顿足，许多学者和中国人抱怨称，中国社会充斥着不诚信的行为。这些现象包括高考舞弊的学生、进行虚假或者抄袭研究成果的学者、向婴儿出售毒奶粉的乳品公司。

　　最近的媒体披露令人触目惊心。在八月份发生飞机坠机事件后，官员们发现为那家航空公司母公司工作的100名飞行员伪造飞行记录。微软中国前总裁唐骏也被曝出简历造假，他错误地声称从加州理工学院获得了博士学位。

　　大多数国家都会发生引发人们高度关注的欺诈事件。体育运动中的非法服药和华尔街的渎职行为在美国制造着丑闻事件。但在中国，教育和科研领域的造假现象是如此地泛滥，以至于许多中国人担心，这将使中国在攀登经济梯子上的下一个目标时遭遇更大的难度。

　　正直缺失

　　中国为打造世界级别的教育系统和在具有竞争性的行业和科学领域内进行开创性研究方面投入了相当多的资源，在网络计算、清洁能源、军事技术上取得了引人注目的成功。但中国和海外学者称，研究人员的正直度缺失正在对中国学者和国外同行的潜在合作构成障碍，对合作关系造成损害。

　　人民大学国际关系学院教授张鸣称：“如果我们不改变我们的方法，我们将被排除在国际学术界之外。我们需要把重点放在寻求真理上，而不是为一些官员的日程表服务或者满足个人赢利的愿望。”

　　抄袭和造假

　　最近的一项政府研究报告称，中国六个最顶级大学的6000名科学家中有三分之一人员承认，他们曾抄袭或者干脆编造实验数据。中国科学技术协会对32000名科学家进行的另一项研究显示，55%的受访者表示，他们知道一些人存在学术欺诈行为。

　　学术打假人员方是民(笔名为方舟子)称，问题始自国家的大学管理制度，大学官员们对他们所监管的学术领域没有多少专业知识。由于研究经费、住房福利和职业晋升的竞争非常激烈，官员们以出版的论文数量为他们决策的根据。方舟子称：“甚至造假的论文也算，因为没有人事实上读过那些论文。”方舟子和他的网站新语丝已曝光了900多起抄袭事件，其中一些事件涉及大学校长和著名研究人员。

　　对作弊现象若无其事

　　当你就学术欺诈行为向任何一个中国学生发问时，回答是令人震惊的若无其事的态度。上个春季从清华大学毕业的工程系学生卢晓大(音译)称，学生们交换考试答案或者抄袭论文是常见现象。他说：“可能这是出于文化差别，但这没有什么不好或者令人难堪的。并不是学生们不会作功课，他们只是认为这是一个节省时间的方法。”

　　中国政府已发誓要解决这一问题。国家媒体的社论经常谴责剽窃现象。负责监管中国出版物工作的中共中央政治局委员刘延东上个月称，要关闭5000家学术期刊中的一些刊物。

　　Rampant Fraud Threat to China’s Brisk Ascent 

　　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. Last 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, over 55 percent said they knew someone guilty of academic fraud。

　　Fang Shimin, a muckraking writer who has become a well-known advocate for academic integrity, said the problem started with the state-run university system, where politically appointed bureaucrats have little expertise in the fields they oversee. Because competition for grants, housing perks and career advancement is so intense, officials base their decisions on the number of papers published。

　　“Even fake papers count because nobody actually reads them,” said Mr. Fang, who is more widely known by his pen name, Fang Zhouzi, and whose Web site, New Threads, has exposed more than 900 instances of fakery, some involving university presidents and nationally lionized researchers。

　　When plagiarism is exposed, colleagues and school leaders often close ranks around the accused. Mr. Fang said this was partly because preserving relationships trumped protecting the reputation of the institution. But the other reason, he said, is more sobering: few academics are clean enough to point a finger at others. The result is that plagiarizers often go unpunished, which only encourages more of it, said Zeng Guoping, director of the Institute of Science Technology and Society at Tsinghua University in Beijing, which helped run the survey of 6,000 academics。

　　He cited the case of Chen Jin, a computer scientist who was once celebrated for having invented a sophisticated microprocessor but who, it turned out, had taken a chip made by Motorola, scratched out its name, and claimed it as his own. Showered with government largesse and accolades, the exposure in 2006 was an embarrassment for the scientific establishment that backed him。

　　But even though Mr. Chen lost his university post, he was never prosecuted. “When people see the accused still driving their flashy cars, it sends the wrong message,” Mr. Zeng said。

　　The problem is not confined to the realm of science. In fact many educators say the culture of cheating takes root in high school, where the competition for slots in the country’s best colleges is unrelenting and high marks on standardized tests are the most important criterion for admission. Ghost-written essays and test questions can be bought. So, too, can a “hired gun” test taker who will assume the student’s identity for the grueling two-day college entrance exam。

　　Then there are the gadgets — wristwatches and pens embedded with tiny cameras — that transmit signals to collaborators on the outside who then relay back the correct answers. Even if such products are illegal, students spent $150 million last year on Internet essays and high-tech subterfuge, a five-fold increase over 2007, according to a Wuhan University study, which identified 800 Web sites offering such illicit services。

　　Academic deceit is not limited to high school students. In July, Centenary College, a New Jersey institution with satellite branches in China and Taiwan, shuttered its business schools in Shanghai, Beijing and Taipei after finding rampant cheating among students. Although school administrators declined to discuss the nature of the misconduct, it was serious enough to withhold degrees from each of the programs’ 400 students. Given a chance to receive their M.B.A.’s by taking another exam, all but two declined, school officials said。

　　Nonchalant Cheating

　　Ask any Chinese student about academic skullduggery and the response is startlingly nonchalant. Lu Xiaoda, an engineering student who last spring graduated from Tsinghua University, considered a plum of the country’s college system, said it was common for students to swap test answers or plagiarize essays from one another. “Perhaps it’s a cultural difference but there is nothing bad or embarrassing about it,” said Mr. Lu, who this semester started on a master’s degree at Stanford University. “It’s not that students can’t do the work. They just see it as a way of saving time。”

　　The Chinese government has vowed to address the problem. Editorials in the state-run press frequently condemn plagiarism and last month, Liu Dongdong, a powerful Politburo member who oversees Chinese publications, vowed to close some of the 5,000 academic journals whose sole existence, many scholars say, is to provide an outlet for doctoral students and professors eager to inflate their publishing credentials。

　　Fang Shimin and another crusading journalist, Fang Xuanchang, have heard the vows and threats before. In 2004 and again in 2006, the Ministry of Education announced antifraud campaigns but the two bodies they established to tackle the problem have yet to mete out any punishments。

　　In recent years, both journalists have taken on Xiao Chuanguo, a urologist who invented a surgical procedure aimed at restoring bladder function in children with spina bifida, a congenital deformation of the spinal column that can lead to incontinence, and when untreated, kidney failure and death。

　　In a series of investigative articles and blog postings, the two men uncovered discrepancies in Dr. Xiao’s Web site, including claims that he had published 26 articles in English-language journals (they could only find four) and that he had won an achievement award from the American Urological Association (the award was for an essay he wrote)。

　　But even more troubling, they said, were assertions that his surgery had an 85 percent success rate. Of more than 100 patients interviewed, they said none reported having been cured of incontinence, with nearly 40 percent saying their health had worsened after the procedure, which involved rerouting a leg nerve to the bladder. Wherever the truth may have been, Dr. Xiao was incensed. He filed a string of libel suits against Fang Shimin and told anyone who would listen that revenge would be his。

　　This summer both men were brutally attacked on the street in Beijing — Fang Xuanchang by thugs with an iron bar and Fang Shimin by two men wielding pepper spray and a hammer。

　　When the police arrested Dr. Xiao on Sept. 21, he quickly confessed to hiring the men to carry out the attack, according to the police report. His reason, he said, was vengeance for the revelations he blames for blocking his appointment to the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences。

　　Despite his confession, Dr. Xiao’s employer, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, appeared unwilling to take any action against him. In the statement they released, administrators said they were shocked by news of his arrest but said they would await the outcome of judicial procedures before severing their ties to him。

　　(纽约时报)

　　(解雨)