We just can’t make this stuff up.
On May 12, the Chinese government confessed that one of the country’s top computer scientists, Chen Jin, is a fraud.
He had received national honors for creating one of country’s first digital signal processing computer chips, a microprocessor chip that processes digital data for electronics like digital cameras. Apparently, he didn’t actually create the chip himself, but stole the design from a foreign company. And now the country feels it has been shamed.
However, these latest developments come after several months of allegations of fraud and plagiarism in the Chinese scientific community. Only a few days earlier, on May 8, 120 Chinese scientists, who are mostly based in the U.S., sent the Chinese science minister a letter urging the government to set up a process to check on scientific misconduct.
Excuse us, but hasn’t anyone told the Chinese that half of the country’s exploding GDP comes from pirating foreign companies’ products and pawning them off as original?
China is a major source of counterfeit prescription drugs, movies, music; you name it, China counterfeits it.
A reporter for The Dallas Morning News wrote a story several months ago describing his recent trip to China. He was surprised to find that everywhere he turned, he ran into counterfeit products. Even the Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG wristbands, whose profits fund anti-cancer efforts, were counterfeit. Pay 50 cents—half the price it sells for in the U.S.—and you can have one of the counterfeit wristbands, albeit a little off color. Oh, and none of the money goes to charity.
The problem is so bad that when China’s president visited the U.S. in April, he had to make assurances that the country was trying to get the counterfeiting under control.
Maybe, but we would be more encouraged to see the kind of changes that are going on in India, where the country appears to have gotten serious about intellectual property reform.
It is probably good that China is feeling nationwide shame about a scientist who has been exposed as a fraud. But where’s the sense of shame over the fact that counterfeiting is one of the country’s major economic sectors?