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Edith Mao

In a rare admission of misconduct, a county government in southern China has promised to “promptly correct” plagiarised sections of an official document.
The government of Pingle county in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region said on Tuesday that it had detected plagiarism in “a limited number of paragraphs” in its 2023-2030 forest fire prevention plan.
Authorities checked the document after media reports of suspected plagiarism and found the claim was “essentially true”, the county government said on its official social media page.
“We’ll promptly correct and reissue the document, strengthening review of official documentation,” the county said.
Web users reported the suspected plagiarism after finding that descriptions and data used in a Pingle hydrology report were nearly identical to those for Anhua county about 400km (250 miles) away in neighbouring Hunan province, according to official news platform Jiupai News.
The Pingle bureau collaborated with a third-party company to prepare the document, and the hydrological data involved was provided by the contractor, Jiupai News reported, citing an unidentified county official involved in producing the plan.
“[The data from Anhua] may have been used as a reference but not modified [when writing the Pingle document]. If there are errors, they must be corrected. The third party was careless,” the official was quoted as saying.


According to the report, the official said the county government would contact the company as soon as possible to amend the issue.
The plan was not on the official websites of the Pingle government or its natural resources bureau on Tuesday.
Not only was some of the data in the Pingle document identical to that for Anhua, some townships named in the plan were actually in Anhua, and there were no identically named towns in the Guangxi county, according to administrative records.
The two counties also have different hydrological features. Pingle’s waterways are part of the Xi River system in the Pearl River Basin, according to official records maintained by Guilin, a tourist resort city north of the county.
However, the plan claimed the county’s waterways were “distributed across the Zi, Xiang and Yuan river systems”. Those systems are part of the Yangtze River Basin and are mainly within Hunan – not Guangxi.
Moreover, the Pearl and Yangtze river basins are clearly separated by the Nanling Mountains, which run from east to west, eliminating any possibility of coincidental overlap in the data cited.
Plagiarism in official documents is rarely reported in China. Last year, Beijing introduced new regulations aimed at reducing the burden of excessive paperwork, meetings and inspections on grass-roots officials, citing these tasks as obstacles to their ability to perform effectively.


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Politics

Reports of suspected plagiarism ‘essentially true’, Pingle county in Guangxi province says in rare official admission of such misconduct


Reports of suspected plagiarism ‘essentially true’, Pingle county in Guangxi province says in rare official admission of such misconduct.


Communist Party politics

Chinese county admits plagiarism after web users flag data filed by another 400km away

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Reports of suspected plagiarism ‘essentially true’, Pingle county in Guangxi province says in rare official admission of such misconduct

Reports of suspected plagiarism ‘essentially true’, Pingle county in Guangxi province says in rare official admission of such misconduct