Even words aren’t safe from counterfeiting
Posted: Tuesday, July 10, 2007 9:40 AM
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Beijing, China
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
The headline in the Beijing Times this morning gave some of us here pause for thought. An investigative report carried by the paper found that up to half of the city's water coolers could contain fake branded water.
But Josh Gartner was busy pondering another type of counterfeiting.
He was searching for information online about a little-known music group from northwestern China called Sharizhad when he came across an article he'd penned for his website, chinaexpat.com .
The problem was that the piece wasn't on his site.
It was Confucius Institute Online, which is part of the Confucius Institute overseen by the Office of Chinese Language Council International. ( The organization is a bit like the Chinese equivalent of USAID or the British Council -- a government agency that seeks to enhance China's standing through "soft power," or cultural-educational exchange.)
So it would appear not even words escape counterfeiting in China.
Wholesale copying
"It was a freak thing," said Gartner, a Brooklyn native who recently moved back to China to run China Expat as the site's managing editor.
"I started poking around the site," he said, and quickly discovered that several pages, each listing dozens of articles, were taken directly from China Expat, a site that guides the expatriate community on culture and travel around the country.
That was when Gartner stopped counting the number of pieces. "I was somewhat dumbfounded to find every article I had written completely hijacked," he said. He added that no one from the Confucius Institute has been in touch with him for permission to run the articles.
Only three of the several dozen articles credited China Expat. "They inadvertently included our information when they cut and paste everything," said Gartner. The rest were lifted directly from the site without attribution.
Gartner, who spent three years teaching and studying in Chengdu and Dalian, said he was "almost not that surprised" to see this happen. As a teacher, he said he witnessed early on a tendency among some of his Chinese students to plagiarize.
But this was different, Gartner noted. "It's the scale of it. They just don't seem to care."
Gartner has sent the Confucius Institute an email requesting an explanation. "We want to hear what they have to say," he said. "But obviously I want all that content to come down. We can talk about putting some of that material up, but we're really not at that stage."
No one could be reached at the Confucius Institute when NBC News called for a comment on the matter.
