Chengdu Evening News
July 16, 2009

Huang Qing, vice president of Southwest Jiaotong University, was found guilty of plagiarism and stripped of his doctoral degree, reports the Chengdu Evening News. Huang, 53, received the degree in management from SWJTU in 2000.

As early as 2007, the university received reports accusing Huang of plagiarism. After reviewing his doctorate dissertation, an academic commission reached the verdict yesterday that a fair amount of the work was lifted without citation from Nobel nominated economist Yang Xiaokai's Principles of Economics.

Huang refused to accept the result, insisting that if there was cheating to be found, it was on the part of other people who plagiarized him.

Academic scandals have been turning up in the media fairly frequently. Not long ago, netizens discovered that a research paper authored by Zhou Senfeng, a young government official who graduated from Tsinghua University, had been plagiarized. However, there were those who wrote to defend Zhou by pointing out that Zhou's advisor, Liu Hongyu, was too busy engaging in various business activites to spend any time on his students.

In other news of wrongdoing, Chen Tonghai, former president of China Petroleum & Chemical Corp (Sinopec), was sentenced to death with two years' reprieve at his first trial yesterday.

Chen, 60, was convicted of taking 196 million yuan in bribes. According to the report, Chen’s sentence was suspended only because he returned the illegal proceeds, admitted his crimes, and provided information about the offenses of others.