Central South University of China has issued a notice announcing that an investigation has been launched into allegations of plagiarism in a graduate’s master's thesis.
The Graduate School of Central South University, a 'Double First-Class' university located in Changsha, Hunan, announced via its WeChat public account on Saturday night (July 25) that it had recently received reports alleging that the master's thesis of a 2002 graduate with the surname Fei from the Business School, who completed the degree through equivalent academic ability, was suspected of plagiarism. The university has established an investigation team to conduct a comprehensive review.
The notice emphasized that the university always strictly upholds academic integrity, maintains academic standards, and will never tolerate academic misconduct.
Pengpai News reported on Friday (24th) that it had received information from netizens stating that a 2002 master's thesis from the Management Science and Engineering major of the Central South University Business School shares 13 pages of highly similar content with a 2001 published paper in the Journal of Beijing Economic Management Institute, raising suspicions of plagiarism.
The thesis in question is titled "A Study on the Formulation Model of Accounting Standards in China" by a Central South University graduate with the surname Fei, supervised by a professor with the surname Liang, completed in 2002, and published in the 2003 Issue 1 of the electronic journal for master's theses.
The suspected source of the plagiarized content is a paper titled "A Brief Discussion on Several Issues in the Application of Accounting Standards by Listed Companies," authored by Zhao Guozhong from the Beijing Economic Management Institute and published in the June 2001 issue.
The graduate school’s academic misconduct report hotline staff at Central South University responded on Friday that such reports would be handled specifically by the Business School, but that currently, due to the summer break, there are no specific staff members available to address the matter. After the end of the summer vacation and the resumption of office hours, the report will be formally processed. This response has triggered online controversy, as many netizens questioned whether 'academic misconduct is divided into "holidays" and "working days"', and urged the university to immediately initiate a thorough verification.