CHINA:Plagiarism is rampant in China, from academics stealing research to musicians lifting songs, and encouraging innovation is regularly listed as one of the key challenges facing China.
But Zhang Shaocang, the former Communist Party chief of state-owned power company Anhui Province Energy Group, took things to a new level when he copied a weepy apology letter during his corruption trial in Fuyang, Anhui province.
According to a Procuratorial Daily report, Mr Zhang won plaudits for his tearful self-criticism during the trial. However, his noble and honourable sentiments of remorse were subsequently found to be strikingly similar to those of another corrupt official, Zhu Fuzhong.
One of the tenets of Confucian philosophy is that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but academics and party officials say plagiarism is undermining efforts by China to win an international reputation.
An apology letter by Mr Zhu, disgraced former party chief of Tongan village in southwestern Sichuan province, had been printed in the Procuratorial Daily less than two weeks before the trail.
"Before working, I never gave much thought to money and regarded achievement as the starting point and end result of my work," both speeches ran, according to the newspaper.
"I gradually lost my bearings and the scope of my position," Mr Zhang said at his trial, in what was an exact copy of Mr Zhu's wording.
China is waging a campaign to weed out corrupt cadres within the Communist Party who have taken advantage of the country's growing wealth to enrich themselves and their families and to take on mistresses.
Plagiarism is an acknowledged issue in China. Chinese companies have been accused of stealing ideas from their western joint-venture partners and ideas are routinely copied in the clothing and music businesses.
It is a problem for academia too: last year, Tongji University in Shanghai sacked dean of biology Yang Jie for faking a ground-breaking paper on lung cancer. Chen Jin, a professor at another top Shanghai university, Jiaotong, was fired for falsely claiming to have invented a new kind of computer chip, a Chinese "superchip" called the Hanxin, widely heralded as competition for Intel and other international manufacturers.
The Procuratorial Daily believes Mr Zhang read the apology in its own pages when the paper was left lying around at a "place of supervision" where corrupt officials are questioned. Mr Zhang saw the apology and thought he could use the sentiments therein to win the court around. However, his apology was dismissed.