ANDREW JACOBS

　　《纽约时报》2010年10月6日

　　（翻译：ziren）

　　（北京）没人怀疑张悟本的推销才能。通过电视秀，光碟和畅销书，他使数百万人相信生吃茄子和大量食用绿豆能治疗红斑狼疮、糖尿病、抑郁症和癌症。

　　花450美元，即使重病患也能换来一次10分钟的咨询和一张处方，可是想见张本人一面却不容易——这位最炙手可热的老中医整个2012年的预约都排满了。

　　但随着今年春季绿豆价格飞涨，中国记者开始深挖内幕。他们发现与其一直所宣称的相反，今年47岁的张悟本并不是出自什么中医世家，其父是一名纺织工人。他也根本没有北京医科大学的学位——仅有的学历不过是从纺织厂下岗之后念了一段函授课程而已。

　　张悟本假履历的曝光引发了人们对时下泛滥的不诚信行为的热议——众多学者和普通民众抱怨已久——包括高考舞弊、研究造假抄袭以及在婴儿奶粉中掺入有毒化学物质。

　　最近对造假行为的一系列揭露才使人略感欣慰。在8.24伊春飞机失事造成42人死亡之后，有关方面调查发现该航空公司母公司的100位飞行员存在编造飞行经历的行为。接下来浮出水面的是唐骏浮夸的履历。这位百万富翁，前微软中国总裁曾一度被捧为中国的英雄，谎称自己是加州理工的博士。

　　很少有国家能保证不出这类轰动一时的欺诈。在美国，运动员嗑药和华尔街的丑闻层出不穷。但只有在中国，科研和教育领域的造假是如此泛滥，以至于很多人担心这会使中国经济在更上一层楼时遇到阻碍。

　　诚信的缺失

　　为了建立世界级的教育体系，为了在竞争激烈的产业和科学研究中做出开创性的成果，中国投注了大量资源，而且在网络计算、清洁能源和军事技术方面取得了显著的成绩。但有中外学者认为研究人员中诚信规范的缺失正在遏制中国的潜能，也了妨害了中外学术合作。

　　“如果不改变我们的方式，就有可能被国际学术界排除在外，”中国人民大学国际关系学院的张鸣教授说：“我们需要集中精力探寻真理，而不是听命于官僚或者一心满足私欲。”

　　公立大学的官员们不断压迫学者们去挣论文引用次数——一种衡量创新的标志，这使得论文剽窃和造假泛滥。去年12月英国的《晶体学报》（E）宣布由于数据造假一次性撤消了多达70篇来自中国的论文。

　　英国医学杂志《柳叶刀》今年初发表社论，警告研究造假和论文剽窃已经严重威胁到了胡锦涛主席提出的到2020年把中国建设成“科技大国”的设想。

　　社论说“毫无疑问，中国政府有必要把这一连串学术腐败案作为警讯，重新强化科研道德教育的标准和科研行为本身的准则。”上个月浙江大学出版的科学期刊相继公布了20个月内用软件侦测剽窃的结果，可以说是火上浇油。这款名为Crosscheck的软件拒绝了近三分之一的投稿，怀疑其中有内容抄自已经发表的研究。有的论文甚至超过80%的内容被认定非原创。

　　杂志编辑张月红强调并非所有的问题论文都出自中国，但她拒绝公布问题论文来稿的细节。“有些来自韩国、印度和伊朗，”她说。

　　浙大的这些医学、物理、工程和计算机类的专业杂志在国内开使用该软件之先河。不过现在也只有他们一家使用，张女士说。

　　剽窃和造假

　　张女士的发现并不令人惊讶——一项由政府委托的研究表明来自全国6家顶级研究机构的6000名科学家当中有三分之一承认有过剽窃或者直接编造数据的行为。在另一项由中国科协去年夏天对32000位科学家做的调查中，超过55%的人说他们知道有人涉入学术造假。

　　方是民是一位揭露黑幕的作家，因为倡导学术诚信和规范而声名远扬。他认为问题始于公立大学体系，出于政治考虑任命的官员在其负责的领域内没有专业能力。由于科研经费、房屋补贴提职加薪各个方面竞争激烈，政治官员们只能根据发表文章的数量来做决定。

　　“即使虚假的论文也算数，因为实际上不会有人去读，”方先生说。他的笔名方舟子更广为人知；他的网站《新语丝》已经揭露了900余起学术造假案件，其中不乏大学校长和学术明星。

　　一旦剽窃被曝光，学校的同事们和领导们总会和当事人肩并肩站在一起。方先生说其中部分原因是维持私人间的关系胜过保护机构的声誉。而另一个原因，他说，更发人深省：很少有学者的屁股干净到可以去指责别人。清华大学科技与社会研究所所长曾国平曾协助上文提及的针对6000人的研究。他说这样做结果之一就是当事人往往可以逃避惩罚，只会鼓励更多的剽窃。

　　他举了陈进的例子：这位计算机专家曾因创制出一种尖端的微处理器而红极一时，结果被揭露是用摩托罗拉的芯片充数，只不过磨去了原有的商标。由于陈所谓的微处理器通过了国家鉴定，还因此屡获奖励，所以2006年实情的曝光让支持他的研究机构十分尴尬。

　　即使陈进被所在大学解聘，却也没有受到任何起诉。“当人们看到被控造假的人指还能开着豪华车到处招摇时，这发出了一个错误的信号。”曾国平说。

　　造假问题也不仅限于科学领域。实际上很多教育工作者认为中学已经成为欺骗文化的土壤：挤进重点高校的竞争冷酷无情——在标准化的统考中获得高分是录取的最主要标准。而花钱就可以买到代写的文章和试题。当然也可以雇枪手冒名顶替参加费神费时的两天高考。

　　不仅如此，还有作弊工具——内置针孔摄像机的腕表和钢笔——可以和考场外的同伙呼应传递试题及答案。尽管上述做法均属非法，但根据武汉大学的一项调查，去年在网上买卖论文高科技作弊工具的交易额高达1.5亿美元，5倍于2007年的数据；调查还确认有多达800家网站提供诸如此类的非法服务。

　　当然学术欺骗绝非仅出在高中生身上。7月在中国大陆和台湾有分支机构的新泽西西森坦那瑞学院关闭了其在北京、上海、台北的商学院，理由是学生中欺骗泛滥。虽然校方拒绝透露不端行为的细节，但已经严重到可以停发这些分校中近400名学生学位的程度。该校官员说，校方允诺通过单另考试的学生可以获得MBA学位，但除了两人外其余都拒绝了这一机会。

　　波澜不惊的欺骗

　　随便向一个中国学生问起学术欺诈，得到的回应都是令人吃惊的无动于衷。去年春天毕业的清华工科学生卢晓达（音译）说，即使在所谓一流高校，平时抄作业考试抄答案对学生来说也是家常便饭。他说：“这可能就是一种文化差异，没什么不好，更没什么特别让人羞愧的。对学生们来说，并不是不会做，而是为了节约时间。”卢先生本学期将开始在斯坦福大学念硕士。

　　中国政府曾发誓要解决学术欺诈问题。国营媒体经常发社论谴责剽窃行为；上个月，负责管理出版工作的政治局委员刘延东坚决要求关停现有5000种学术期刊中的一部分。许多学者认为这些期刊的存在完全是为了满足博士生和教授们急于发文充数的需要。

　　方是民和另一位投身打假的记者方玄昌对这些坚决要求和谴责早习以为常。教育部早在2004年、然后又在2006年宣誓全力打假决不姑息，但为此专门设立的“学术道德监督委员会”和“学风建设委员会”两个机构至今没有做出任何惩处决定。

　　最近几年这两位矛头对准了泌尿科医生肖传国。肖自称发明了一种外科手术，旨在帮助患有脊柱裂的儿童恢复膀胱功能。脊柱裂是一种脊柱出生缺陷，会导致大小便失禁；如果不加以治疗最终造成患者肾衰竭和死亡。

　　在一系列调查报道和博客文章中，两位方先生揭露了肖大夫的网页上很多自相矛盾的地方，包括肖吹嘘他自己在国际期刊上发表了26篇英文论文（他们只能找到4篇）以及他曾赢得美国泌尿学会大奖（他只获得过一个论文摘要奖）。

　　他们揭发说，他自称“肖氏手术”成功率高达85%则更有问题。在回访的100多位病人中，两位方先生报告说没有一位病人的大小便失禁痊愈，而近40%的病人在接受所谓“肖氏手术”——将腿部的一根神经切断重新连接到膀胱上——后健康状况恶化。

　　不管真相到底如何，肖大夫被彻底激怒了。他提起了一些列控告方是民诽谤的诉讼，逢人便讲此仇不报誓不为人。

　　今年夏天两位方先生都在北京街头遭到残暴的袭击——方玄昌的头部被两名暴徒用钢筋严重砸伤，方是民被喷辣椒水，但从铁锤下侥幸逃生。

　　根据警方的通报，9月21日肖传国被警察逮捕后，很快就承认了雇佣凶手实施袭击的罪行。他说，报复的原因是他认定对他的揭发使他落选了中科院院士。

　　尽管肖已认罪，但他的雇主华中科技大学看起来并不愿意对他采取任何行动。在校方的声明中，领导说听到肖被捕十分震惊，但会等到司法审判的结果出来再采取进一步行动。

　　Rampant Fraud Threat to China’s Brisk Ascent

　　By ANDREW JACOBS

　　New York Times October 6, 2010

　　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.

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　　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. In 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, more than 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. One 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. After Mr. Chen was showered with government largess 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 fivefold 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. Arthur Lu, 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 started this semester 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 Yandong, 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 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.