Dream of the Dragon

Oh man. A teacher in China, when asked about his willingness to ghostwrite for any academic in need of aid, justified the flagrant falsification thusly:

“There will always be a time when one needs help from others. Even our great leaders Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping needed help writing.”

I love that this guy regards his uncredited drafting of entire published works as just helping out. That’s some poorly compensated (roughly 45 bones per article) anonymity. He also drew a parallel to his work and that done for the two biggest dogs of the communist movement in China, which isn’t the humblest of choices.

The AP ran a story about the absurd number of papers being pulled from international journals because the content was either plagiarized or exaggerated. The publish or perish concept is really hitting its stride, with aspiring academics presenting copied work at conferences organized by the original source. Reckless, right? According to a study cited in the article, 70% of research articles bought and sold in China weren’t original. Supposedly this stems from a relentless pressure to achieve in academic fields, especially science, with very little oversight and only slight repercussions for being caught in a lie – like a professor losing his position as chairman but not his job teaching. It’s got to be tough to demand all good news all the time.