What the Wang Hui Affair Reveals About the Climate in Chinese Academia

Seeing Southern Weekly once again publish Wang Binbin’s article criticizing Wang Hui, http://www.infzm.com/content/44402

This time, after reading Wang Hui’s most famous magnum opus from his mature period, *The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought*, they also found obvious plagiarism. The chapter identified as plagiarized was taken from Collingwood’s *The Idea of Nature*—a book we know best of all, and I happen to have a copy at hand, so I personally checked the comparison and confirmed that Wang Binbin was by no means slandering him; the plagiarism is indeed right there in black and white, glaringly obvious. Even if this is not malicious plagiarism in the sense of academic ethics, it is at least a matter concerning the academic atmosphere, because such plagiarism at the very least indicates a terribly bad habit of scholarship.

Of course, one could also say: just like Chinese writers in antiquity, plagiarism or no plagiarism, the so-called norms of scholarship and rules of citation are all imports from the modern West, so we needn’t give them the time of day. If there really were scholars of such a style, I would actually be quite willing to support them. Unfortunately, there are no such scholars in China today either. Wang Hui is still clearly making a proper show of using modern Western conventions of scholarly citation, and also properly noting the sources of many quotations. In that case, the passages for which no sources are indicated stand out all the more starkly. Moreover, judging from the two passages identified this time and their comparison with Collingwood’s book, I do not think it is likely that this resulted from negligence due to the format of note-taking.

Wang Hui’s plagiarism incident reveals an extremely bad problem in the academic atmosphere of Chinese academia. This problem of academic atmosphere is not only the bad habit that scholars can casually and expressionlessly lift material from elsewhere and pass it off as their own; nor is it only that, after plagiarism is exposed, scholars can continue to say, without changing their expression: this little bit of lack of rigor doesn’t count as plagiarism; everybody does it… The more crucial problem is that the bad atmosphere in Chinese academia is manifested in this: for a plainly evident problem of scholarship, people can so easily elevate it into a dispute between schools. Those who support Wang Hui have all leapt up to make a mountain out of a molehill, raising the issue to the level of a left-versus-right struggle, accusing the anti-Wang Hui camp of vulgar conduct, and so on. This kind of behavior is exactly the same as before the Cultural Revolution. An obvious academic criticism, something that could have been made clear under the sun, quickly turns into a political struggle; the focus of the dispute soon shifts away from the issue itself and toward the critic’s class position, social background, sinister motives, and so forth. It is hard to believe that after several decades, even though scholars are no longer so tightly controlled politically, they still remain like this; it is truly lamentable. Of course, it is said that Wang Hui is quite Maoist, admiring the Mao Zedong era, and therefore the people on Wang Hui’s side have all continued to uphold the academic style of the Mao Zedong era; perhaps this is merely an isolated case in contemporary Chinese academia. If that is really so, I cannot help but from now on look down a little on Wang Hui’s camp. Wang Hui’s plagiarism was originally only an isolated case; if Wang Hui had taken responsibility and resigned, making a big issue small, it would not have affected the scholarly claims of this camp. But since these people insist on raising the issue to the level of principle and portraying it as a factional struggle, then they cannot blame me if I from now on “respectfully” keep my distance from such people.

June 23, 2010

Latest comments

• 依芜

  2010-06-23 15:42:36

  This is nothing but thuggish conduct. Ridiculous to the extreme: the moment the game starts, it turns into attacks on personality and politics, and then into a political struggle of mobbing and ganging up. Where is there any scholarly atmosphere to speak of? They’re all a bunch of ridiculous lackeys.

• 依芜

  2010-06-23 15:44:09

  “‘The so-called norms of scholarship and rules of citation are all imports from the modern West, so we needn’t give them the time of day. If there really were scholars of such a style, I would actually be quite willing to support them.’”——How should one explain this? What exactly was the tradition of our ancestors?

• 古雴

  2010-06-23 17:36:01

  The ancient Chinese simply lifted quotations and allusions from the classics with ease; if you can hear where it comes from, then you are cultured; if you can’t hear where it comes from, then you’re a bumpkin.

• 依芜

  2010-06-23 21:47:23

  … Well, it really is being a bumpkin.

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.