Starting in late October, multiple provinces across China have launched campaigns to stop “recycling old drafts” and “copy-pasting materials” within their local-level governments.

The campaign follows two plagiarism scandals that came to light in July.

In the northern province of Shanxi, a July 9 report on the Wutai County head’s flood control inspection shared 320 of its 390 characters with a report published four days earlier about another official’s inspection of a local scenic area.

That same month, domestic media reported that a forest fire prevention plan issued in February 2024 by the Pingle County government in southern China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region had copied hydrological information from another county in the central Hunan province, and forgotten to remove township names under the latter’s jurisdiction.

Both counties later acknowledged that plagiarism had occurred, corrected the documents, and launched internal investigations, the results of which have yet to be announced.

Provinces across China have reported problems with internal governmental plagiarism since 2017.

“Official document plagiarism has long been a problem. It’s acceptable to reference how other regions implement certain policies, but the policies should be adapted to local needs,” Hu Xiaodong, a professor at the School of Political Science and Public Administration in Beijing’s China University of Political Science and Law, told Sixth Tone.

In the months following the scandals, multiple regions have also taken action to curb plagiarism. On Nov. 5, a municipal bureau in northern China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region pledged to tackle plagiarism by implementing writing training, strengthening review mechanisms, and imposing stricter punishments. 

That same day, a municipal committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in the northwestern Qinghai province convened to reflect on “sloppy paperwork, a weak sense of responsibility, and poor writing skills.”

Geoffrey Chun-fung Chen, associate professor in the Department of China Studies at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, told Sixth Tone that document plagiarism often stems from a promotion system overly reliant on paperwork, as well as a lack of time, personnel, and budgeting for on-the-ground research.

Chen described the phenomenon as a “formalism trap,” a long-standing problem in which lower-level officials are bogged down by red tape. 

In August 2024, the central government introduced new regulations aimed at “rectifying formalism and reducing burdens” to ease the workloads of grassroots officials, including streamlining documentation and revising the local governments’ assessment protocols. 

Chen suggested promoting “collaborative governance” among local governments — by creating shared databases, for instance — to shift the focus away from “who writes better” or “who packages policies more impressively.”

Dr. Steven Hai, assistant professor in tech innovation at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, told Sixth Tone that the rise of generative AI has “made plagiarism between and within government documents more accessible and easier.”

Since its release earlier this year, local governments have begun integrating the China-developed DeepSeek large language model into their cloud systems to streamline administrative and public service processes.

Hu, the public administration professor, noted that such AI technology could also be used to address plagiarism via checks. 

On July 18, state-run Xinhua News Agency published a commentary urging a stricter accountability system for reviewing official documents.

“Every data point and expression in official documents can affect the allocation of public resources and the safety of people’s lives and property. There is no room for carelessness,” said the commentary.

Editor: Marianne Gunnarsson.

(Header image: VCG)