TY - JOUR

T1 - Chinese attitudes to plagiarism

T2 - a genre analysis of editorial statements on plagiarism cases (1950s-1960s)

AU - Li, Y.

AU - Flowerdew, J.

PY - 2023/9/30

Y1 - 2023/9/30

N2 - It has been assumed sometimes that plagiarism is traditionally accepted in Confucian-heritage cultures such as China. In this paper we provide evidence to counter such a view. Focusing on a corpus of editorial statements on plagiarism cases published in Chinese journals in the decade of the early 1950s-the early 1960s, we present an integrated genre analysis and discourse analysis of this data. We illuminate 12 rhetorical move types in the focal genre and intertextual links between the genre and two related genres (readers’ disclosure reports and plagiarizers’ apologies) and demonstrate how plagiarism is construed as a transgressive practice and is imbued with the post-revolutionary Communist discourse of its historical period. The implications of the study apply to the academic community in terms of teaching and learning, on the one hand, and publication practices, on the other. We end the paper by emphasizing the importance of employing a contextualized approach to the study of plagiarism and the power of a triangulated genre and discourse analytic approach in the case of both the present research and the investigation of language use in the real-world more generally.

AB - It has been assumed sometimes that plagiarism is traditionally accepted in Confucian-heritage cultures such as China. In this paper we provide evidence to counter such a view. Focusing on a corpus of editorial statements on plagiarism cases published in Chinese journals in the decade of the early 1950s-the early 1960s, we present an integrated genre analysis and discourse analysis of this data. We illuminate 12 rhetorical move types in the focal genre and intertextual links between the genre and two related genres (readers’ disclosure reports and plagiarizers’ apologies) and demonstrate how plagiarism is construed as a transgressive practice and is imbued with the post-revolutionary Communist discourse of its historical period. The implications of the study apply to the academic community in terms of teaching and learning, on the one hand, and publication practices, on the other. We end the paper by emphasizing the importance of employing a contextualized approach to the study of plagiarism and the power of a triangulated genre and discourse analytic approach in the case of both the present research and the investigation of language use in the real-world more generally.

KW - criticism and self-criticism

KW - discourse and social change

KW - editorial statements on plagiarism

KW - genre analysis

KW - Plagiarism

KW - article

KW - discourse analysis

KW - human

KW - human experiment

KW - language

KW - learning

KW - plagiarism

KW - social change

KW - teaching

U2 - 10.1080/10508422.2022.2111307

DO - 10.1080/10508422.2022.2111307

M3 - Journal article

VL - 33

SP - 579

EP - 596

JO - Ethics and Behavior

JF - Ethics and Behavior

SN - 1050-8422

IS - 7

ER -