Another Piece of Drama from the Western Medicine Camp

Lately it seems like every few days brings another scandal involving Western medicine practitioners. Today is no exception.

Yesterday, someone posted evidence online alleging that Dr. Zhang Wenhong of Huashan Hospital, Fudan University, plagiarized large portions of his doctoral thesis from a paper by researcher Huang Hainan of Qilu Institute of Technology. The evidence, frankly, looks damning. It wasn’t just casual borrowing — it was wholesale copying without citation, without even an acknowledgment. By today’s standards, this would never survive a Turnitin check, let alone make it past the thesis defense stage. It is, by any contemporary definition, academic misconduct.

Fudan University issued a statement today saying they are aware of the matter and will investigate. Online opinion has largely split into three camps. The loudest voice has been one of fierce defense — some netizens have gone so far as to say that going after Dr. Zhang would be tantamount to erasing a Shanghai hero. Curiously, the same commentators who were so vocal about academician Zhang Boli’s retracted paper have gone conspicuously silent this time around.

But here’s the thing: this was twenty years ago. Back then, plagiarism detection software didn’t exist. The old Chinese saying “all the world’s essays are copies of one another” wasn’t far from reality — it was practically the norm. Experts at the time tacitly accepted this practice. The bar for dissertations was essentially: demonstrate some originality and innovation in your core work, and the literature review section could be more or less assembled from existing sources. Plagiarizing a review chapter was both hard to detect and easy to overlook. I personally believe that applying today’s standards retroactively across decades is problematic — but that doesn’t mean we should look the other way. At the very least, Fudan would be ill-advised to set a precedent of sweeping this under the rug.

More than a decade ago, when I was in university, I had many conversations with senior professors about this. They didn’t consider borrowing content in non-essential parts of a paper to be a serious issue. It was, in their view, a legacy of the times. Many journals with “International” in their title, back in the day, essentially republished translated versions of foreign papers — because in an era before the internet, China desperately needed access to that information.

Similarly, simultaneous submission to multiple journals was quietly tolerated, and even duplicate publication was considered part of the unwritten rules of academia two decades ago. This was a social phenomenon born of a country learning to navigate unfamiliar waters. Over the past ten years, however, with the influx of returnee scholars, an increasingly open academic environment, and growing pressure to clean up academic culture, the new generation of researchers has come to view these practices with deep disdain. Today, anyone caught doing such things would be gambling with their career.

That said, even in that era, there were many scholars who pursued their work with genuine rigor and held the academic bottom line with absolute integrity.

中文原文 / Chinese Original