Attitudes to plagiarism among Chinese journal editors in the 1950s-1960s

Abstract

Plagiarism is a sociolinguistic issue involving conceptions of creativity, originality, authorship and transgression. According to one view, plagiarism is a universal concept which can be applied to all, whilst an alternative perception is that conceptions of plagiarism may vary according to cultural traditions. This latter view has been propounded in the literature with regard to Confucian heritage cultures in particular. With the increasing globalisation of university education and academic research, the issue is an important real-world issue. In this paper, we consider this universal/relativist dichotomy by means of an analysis of a corpus of 300 items of editorial correspondence produced during the 1950s-1960s (i.e., following the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 and before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution) and published in Chinese academic journals. The corpus has been drawn from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, a database of publications including over 8540 Chinese academic journals. Using genre and corpus-based analysis (Swales, 1990; O'Keeffe & McCarthy, 2010), the findings reveal a range of rhetorical strategies used by the editors in their letters to call out examples of plagiarism, some which would be readily recognized in the West and others which are steeped in the Chinese discourse of the times. Examples of the former include highlighting what is plagiaristic in a given article and pointing out that plagiarism is cheating and stealing. Examples of the latter include urging the plagiarizer to self-check and rectify, highlighting the shame of tainting the image of socialism/communism and the Great Leap Forward movement, and stressing the role of the work unit (danwei) in rooting out plagiaristic practices. The study shows that, contrary to some received ideas, the concept of plagiarism, as understood in the Western tradition, was extant during the period in question in China, albeit with some particular Chinese characteristics. References O'Keeffe, A., & McCarthy, M. (Eds.) (2010). The Routledge handbook of corpus linguistics. Routledge. Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press.