It cannot read the human heart

A friend in China messaged me on WeChat. ‘What are your thoughts on the plagiarism scandal?’

‘What scandal?’ I asked.

‘How could you not know? It’s all over the internet.’ They meant the Chinese internet: in particular, social media platforms such as WeChat Moments, Weibo, RedNote and Bilibili. They sent me some links.

Since November 2024, a book influencer on RedNote has been publishing posts featuring side-by-side excerpts from works by different authors that contained similar, and in many cases identical, sentences and paragraphs. Among those whose sentences, similes, descriptions, scenes and plotlines appeared to have been copied and pasted were Eileen Chang, Hsien-yung Pai, William Faulkner, Orhan Pamuk, Annie Proulx and Gabriel García Márquez. The perpetrators of the apparent plagiarism were a number of contemporary Chinese authors.

‘Why are so many writers “borrowing” from others’ work?’ my friend asked. ‘Is this some kind of open secret in the literary world?’

I had no answer. In more than twenty years as a writer, I have previously encountered only a couple of incidents of outright literary theft (as opposed to quotation or allusion). Both times, I was baffled by it. Plagiarism, it seems to me, is a humiliating admission of artistic failure.

‘So,’ my friend said. ‘Any thoughts?’

‘I need to find out more about this,’ I said.

The discovery was made possible by AI-powered plagiarism-checking applications, but some people have suggested that the plagiarism itself may have been fostered by the use of large language models. Given the data that AI models are trained on, wasn’t it possible – inevitable, even – that any writer who used AI for prompting or editing would end up copying, inadvertently, the work of others? The trouble is that much of the apparent plagiarism was published in the early 2000s or the 1990s. So unless someone invents a time machine, the theory doesn’t hold.

Other online analysts noted that a number of the authors involved had attended creative writing MFA programmes, which have been a feature of Chinese universities for the last fifteen years or so. ‘So this is how they teach writing in the universities,’ people speculated. ‘They simply get the students to memorise the classics and graft the masters’ sentences into their imitations.’ The opinion echoed a long-running scepticism towards the institutionalisation ­– or, as some would have it, the industrialisation ­– of writing.

Still, these investigations didn’t answer my key question, which wasn’t how but why. Isn’t writing itself the only meaningful, fulfilling – however hard-going – part of being a writer?

‘They were obviously doing it for money,’ another friend said. He was born in the 1960s and found fame as part of the 1980s avant-garde. He made money in the economic boom of the 1990s and then emigrated to the West, to enjoy a quiet, comfortable life in a leafy suburb while working on a new novel. ‘It’s all about money,’ he said. ‘Did you forget how lucrative it is to be a literary writer in China? All the journals there are loaded.’

Every province and every city in China has its own literary journal, and a short story in a state-funded monthly can earn you a thousand pounds or more. ‘You’re not going to be filthy rich,’ my friend said. ‘But if you publish one or two short stories every month, you’ll be in the top 5 per cent income bracket and have a fairly cosy life, so why not just steal from other people’s writing to increase your own yield?’

When I lived in China, I fretted over the fact that I couldn’t write more than a couple of short stories a year, failing to realise that I was missing out on making money unless I broadened my resources.

‘This plagiarism scandal is exposing a structural problem in Chinese literature,’ my friend said. ‘Literature should never be funded by the government. Public financial aid only corrupts artists. A writer needs to find their own way to make a living, or let the market decide if their work is worth the money. The free market is the best place to test the real art.’

Not being a self-made millionaire, I couldn’t be so dismissive of the state’s financial support. Without it, I couldn’t have made a living in China as a literary fiction writer.

The debates on the internet grew progressively more intense; people were baffled and disappointed as the influencer continued to compare excerpts, implicating more and more writers. Most of the accused offered no public response, though a few referred to ‘recent online slander and trolling’, while editors, publishers, critics and other authors remained largely silent.

One angry reader reported a publishing house to the Citizen Service Hotline for printing an author who had allegedly committed plagiarism, demanding that the government investigate the publisher for corruption and shut it down for putting out low-quality content.

‘This is like another Cultural Revolution,’ a friend who works at a literary journal told me. One of their colleagues had had to close all their social media accounts because of the comments that kept piling up. According to one conspiracy theory, editors and writers are in cahoots, cooking up the plagiarised stories together and splitting the publication fees.

‘That’s some wild imagination,’ I said.

‘Those people,’ my friend said, ‘have no idea how many submissions our editors have to go through every month. We read everything so carefully and go through every piece with our authors for so many rounds before anything goes into print. But no one has every sentence of every book ever published stored in their head, and no one would have thought that so many people would just pluck bits and pieces from other people’s writing – what kind of manoeuvre is that? We’re as shocked as everyone else.’

They sent me a string of voice messages:

Some rumours are going around saying people might get fired. You know what, if they want to fire us for this, just go ahead. Then they’ll have to let go of the entire editorial team, because every editor has at least one author who’s been exposed.

We were told today we have to use plagiarism checking software on every submission, as if we were an academic journal. And since you can’t fully trust the machine, we’ll have to then verify every piece manually. All this extra work, for what?

They’re attacking us because they’re all upset, upset about a lot of things. All the trauma from Covid. The economy. The housing market. People getting laid off. They’re frustrated and probably bored because they’ve got nothing else to do. So they lash out at us. Those people online, they think we’re the establishment. But we’re just a literary magazine. We’re so inconsequential, and that’s why we’re now the scapegoat.

One of the more rational online commentators observed that the lack of response from the authors and their collaborators revealed how insulated the Chinese literary world is. Among the implicated authors who had published books, sales figures were often negligible. Most of the literary journals had minimal circulation. Their incomes had never depended on their readership, being largely sustained by government funding. So they felt little obligation to respond to the online accusations, this commentator argued, because their reputations have always been decided by elite literary circles, not grassroots readers.

The friend who first told me about the scandal sent me a screenshot. One fearless author from among the accused had spoken out on social media:

If plagiarism is defined as having sentences flagged as identical by a checker, then so be it. But the software can only scan texts mechanically; it cannot read the human heart … This so-called reader who exposed the identical texts, you are not a reader in any real sense. You just used the software, being too lazy to read anything yourself … You are merely a reader who is not illiterate.

They said that they loved reading and reciting great lines from the classics and would put them down freely on the page when writing. Since they were simply using the words lodged in their mind, not copying them from a physical book, how could it be considered plagiarism? In any case, literature is fundamentally not about words, they argued. Its foundations lie in the author’s unique thoughts and ideas, not in words or sentences, which have always been passed around and repurposed by writers across countries and generations.

The statement provoked another predictable round of online rage. The author has since quit the internet and the literary world, proclaiming they would never publish anything again, at least not under the same pen name.