Several senior Chinese officials have apparently copied portions of their university thesis from other authors without citation, an FT analysis has found, highlighting how an “academic arms race” among the political elite may be fuelling plagiarism.
China’s politicians are on paper among the world’s best educated: the elite politburo, composed of the 25 most senior Communist party officials, boasts seven doctoral graduates including Xi Jinping, the president, who obtained a law doctorate from Beijing’s Tsinghua University in 2002.
But the doctoral dissertation by Chen Quanguo, a politburo member and head of the Communist party in the northwestern Xinjiang region, features dozens of paragraphs identical to earlier works that are not cited.