In recent years, grassroots officials of the Chinese Communist Party have admitted that the mutual copying of official documents has become a tacitly accepted common phenomenon in official circles. Many government notifications or press releases at the local level exhibit high degrees of similarity in content, with only the issuing unit being changed. What is even more absurd is that some supervisors even instruct subordinates to “learn from” official documents from other provinces, leading to frequent incidents of cross-province document plagiarism, exposing the formalism drawbacks in grassroots governance.
Recently, two consecutive incidents of document plagiarism by local governments have sparked public attention. According to a report by “Chinese News Weekly,” in one case, a research report by the county mayor of Wutai County, Xinzhou City, Shanxi Province on July 9th, showed a high degree of resemblance to a research report by the Deputy Secretary of the Party Working Committee of Wutai Mountain Scenic Area on July 5th, with over 320 out of approximately 390 words being repeated verbatim.
In the “Forest Fire Prevention Plan of Pingle County (2023-2030)” released by Pingle County in Guangxi, the hydrological data of Pingle County and the introduction text of Hunan’s Anhua County, over 500 kilometers away, were nearly identical. The town names of Anhua County were not even changed, leading to a scenario of “Pingle guiding Anhua.”
After these incidents came to light, both local governments acknowledged the issue of plagiarism. The office of the Pingle County government issued a notification stating that there were instances of plagiarism in certain paragraphs. On August 5th, the office of Wutai County government mentioned that the County Discipline Inspection Commission had intervened and was conducting an investigation.
Several civil servants have expressed that document copying is quite common at the grassroots level. “The notifications or press releases just issued by our unit can soon be found with almost identical content in other units, just with a changed unit name. The phenomenon is not limited to different levels within the same locality but cross-province document copying is also common,” they said.
What’s even more surprising is that besides the similarity in some content of the documents, some places even copied simple numerical slogans incorrectly.
In some units, “tailoring-style” writing has become the default logic for document production. Lin Nan, a staff member of a business department, revealed that daily materials are roughly divided into external notifications and internal circulation. The former requires higher standards, and newcomers often lack sufficient knowledge, usually resorting to online materials to copy titles, introductions, or some “fancy words,” and then inserting the data and key information of their own unit. As for internal materials like year-end summaries and situation reports, they mainly refer to previous “model essays,” by changing the year and keywords.
A county-level civil servant in a southeastern region stated that sometimes, during leadership inspections, they would only show up to take a few photos, say a few words, and then leave, but would require submit reports of thousands of words. “Without original materials, we can only fabricate.” “The leaders are well aware of this and even instruct us to find templates on websites of other provinces, rather than copying from our own province.”
Regarding the widespread phenomenon of document plagiarism in the Chinese Communist Party at the grassroots level, Professor Bai Zhili from the School of Government Management at Peking University stated that this not only undermines the basic trust of the public in the authority and authenticity of government documents, making policies lack convincing power in implementation, but also exposes the formalism and bureaucratic tendencies of government departments in dealing with current tasks, reflecting distortion in government behavior and a deficiency in capability.
Some of the interviewees mentioned previously expressed that there are evident loopholes in the review and oversight process. In the aftermath of document plagiarism, as long as it does not spark public outrage or significant consequences, those responsible are usually not held accountable. This further fuels the concealment and stubbornness of plagiaristic behaviors.