On November 29, 2025, it was reported that the Development and Reform Bureau of Zhongxiang City, Hubei Province, was exposed for directly copying and pasting relevant documents from other places with a high textual duplication rate of up to 98%. Analysis suggests that such a situation has become increasingly common in recent years, reflecting a widespread state of inertia in officialdom.
According to a report in the “Hubei Daily” on November 28, Hubei Province recently addressed the issue of “reducing burdens at the grassroots level”. It was mentioned that on March 5, 2024, the Development and Reform Bureau of Zhongxiang City publicly released the “Implementation Plan for Convenient Installation of Charging Piles in Residential Quarters of Zhongxiang City” on the city government’s official website, which was almost identical to a document from the Development and Reform Bureau of Jingshan City dated April 25, 2023, with a duplication rate of 98% and highly similar content.
On November 27, Hubei officials claimed that they needed to prevent and rectify issues such as quick-fix attitudes, blind decision-making, and low-quality results, as well as prevent the proliferation of “mountains of documents and seas of meetings”.
Current affairs commentator Li Linyi pointed out that official documents in the Chinese Communist Party system are full of empty rhetoric and clichés, known as the “party language”. These documents often start by expressing loyalty to the Party leader, and are essentially public instances of plagiarism. As many officials are in a state of inertia and lack of motivation to think, they resort to copying and pasting. The repeated rectification efforts by authorities have been ineffective due to widespread corruption within the bureaucracy.
Similar anomalies have been occurring in various parts of China in recent years.
In July 2025, it was revealed that the forest fire prevention plan in Pingle County, Guangxi, was copied from documents in Anhua County, Hunan, with nearly 100% identical data and descriptions.
Pingle County in Guangxi and Anhua County in Hunan are over 400 kilometers apart. However, the hydrological texts in the aforementioned documents from both counties are almost exactly the same, with only the names of the counties being different. Even townships like Pingkou and Xiaoyan that do not exist in Pingle County were included in the copied plan.
On August 27, 2015, the People’s Daily, a Chinese Communist Party organ, posted a Weibo post titled “The Most Beautiful China Awards 2015: The Most Beautiful Scenery in China is Here”. A microblog post from the magazine “Museum”, a subsidiary of the Chinese National Geographic, pointed out that the content of the People’s Daily Weibo post was entirely copied from an article titled “Selecting the Most Beautiful China” in the October 2005 issue of the Chinese National Geographic magazine. The People’s Daily later deleted the relevant content, but did not respond to the accusations made by the magazine “Museum”.