Allow me to be both apologist and castigator. The New York Times has an interesting piece on the fraud that is "rampant" in China's academic and scientific communities. This phenomenon is a corollary of the country's obstinance over intellectual property rights. China is the world's leading producer of counterfeit and unlicensed goods, and has spawned a global supply chain for knockoffs. Fake perfume, for example, might be made in China, bottled in Eastern Europe, and packaged in Italy before being sold on a street corner in Milan.
While the good faith of Chinese manufacturers should not be overestimated, there are nonetheless some vestiges of an entrepreneurial naivete that believes it is simply "good" business to copy the bestselling mousetrap (or golf club, or sneaker, or erectile dysfunction medication...) than to build a better one. But by "vestiges" I mean only the thinnest veneer, and by "naivete" I mean the sort of ignorance of basic IP laws that, in the West, could only be excused in a child.
It has been just 20 years since the PRC initiated meaningful economic reforms and large sections of the country's interior remain underdeveloped, but the consumer tastes of China's upper-middle-class have grown remarkably sophisticated and Chinese industry has had to accept certain legal realities in the wake of the country's accession to the World Trade Organization. In short, any "veneer" that still exists is sandblasted on a daily basis--and not for the sake of the foreign business community, but for China's own long-term interests in becoming an industrial pioneer, not merely the world's factory. While technology transfer--be it in the form of joint-venture agreements or IP violations--helped China (by some measures) catch up to the industrialized world, its underdeveloped rule of law leaves domestic entities equally vulnerable to piracy. Too often naivete is replaced by willful blindness.
As for academic fraud specifically, I will say that the competition for admission to top-tier universities is brutally intense. Cheating on entrance exams, TOEFL tests, and other standardized exams is widespread, largely because most Chinese students (and their parents) see such exams as their one and only chance for a better life. At that still-impressionable age, status replaces merit as the key driver of success. Once in school, large numbers of students are willing to coast their way to graduation, believing their career prospects are largely predetermined (irrespective of any attempts at emigration they may make on the side).
Academic fraud in China might even be characterized as a way to game a hopelessly corrupt system. China's youth stand at a remarkable crossroads in history. They are the first generation never to know famine and they benefit from a technological age that their parents, and certainly their grandparents, can view only as miraculous. At the same time, however, they must question their role in a country wrenched by social upheaval and uneven economic development. China's communist leadership has been adept at placating the middle class since the Tiananmen massacre, but the Party is in a continuing state of flux, as public notions of patriotism collide with genuine concerns over the country's leadership. Only occasionally was I able to explore such issues with my students when I taught English at a Chinese university. Students were always on their guard in a classroom or group setting, and generally willing to echo the Party line, but even in private conversations I found a reluctance to discuss openly the motherland's dirty laundry, especially with an American.
I will stop short of a Horatio Alger-inspired rant for China's youth to pull itself up by its collective bootstraps (for their sake and ours--and for that matter, you do not want to hear my rants regarding the state of higher education in the U.S.), but ignoring the problem or lamenting that some Chinese "just don't know any better" smacks of paternalism. In any case, I will take the train whenever possible the next time I'm in China.
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