Gao Qinrong is a Chinese journalist who was imprisoned for eight years on trumped up charges after he reported on an abuse of power in Shanxi: a Potemkin irrigation project that did not irrigate anything but allowed local officials to impress visitors and embezzle money.
Both the Southern Metropolis Daily and Southern Weekend recently published interviews with him. Both articles were translated into English by Roland Song (SMD, SW), while Danwei’s Joel Martinsen followed up with a translation of a relevant article in China Week about how journalists covered corruption in the early years of the People’s Republic (link).
The China Daily website has published one of Soong’s translations and Martinsen’s. The articles are reproduced verbatim, without credit to the translators or their websites.
Should one be happy that the nation’s flagship English newspaper’s website is publishing this kind of edgy stuff, or annoyed by the flagrant plagiarism?
At Danwei, we’ll settle for the former.
Note: The China Daily website is managed rather independently from the newspaper, and frequently publishes articles from other websites which do not usually make it into the print edition.