China is THE place for plagiarism.
Today, researching some things for our China edition Newsweek to complement this story that the American edition did, I came across this from the folks at Sina News, which in turn was from 新闻晚报(Evening News), which had, basically, been completely ripped off from the American version’s story and translated into Chinese.
This happens all the time, but it really doesn’t cease to disturb me. These news organizations have plenty of resources — why don’t they write their own damn stuff? The perfectly logical explanation: they don’t have to. It’s so rampant they hedge their bets on anyone ever going after them — particularly the big American media corporations.
A friend recently complimented me on my review of a restaurant in the government-sanctioned English newspaper China Daily but, she wondered, why had I written about a restaurant that had closed down? I have never written a review for the China Daily, but the restaurant in question was one I had written about a year previously for a different publication. In my web search, I have discovered five, count them, five reviews that I had written for other publications reprinted in the China Daily within the last year — with added botched punctuation for spice, I assume.
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