Beijing, March 29: China’s communist party stands accused of many things and the latest is a crime worthy of the 21st century ? plagiarism.

Since President Hu Jintao took power here three years ago the party’s main political mantra has been the goal of creating a “harmonious society” in which western notions such as human rights, rule of law and representative government would be seamlessly incorporated into China’s one-party framework.

Originally, the credit for devising this approach went to Zhou Ye Zhong, a communist party member and professor at the elite Wuhan University in central Hubei province, who has often put out as the ideal 21st century party member.

But now Wang Tiancheng, a former Peking University professor, who was jailed for five years during the early 1990s for trying to form an independent political party, says Zhou and the communist party stole the entire idea from his book, The Constitutional Interpretation of Republicanism.

Wang recently told the press that entire sections of book had been plagiarised by Zhou “word by word” and he has launched an Internet campaign to try and shame the party and Zhou into acknowledging this.

But he’s unlikely to make much headway. Apart from the uneven power equation between a shamed political dissident and a blue-eyed boy of the communist party, the fact is that plagiarism is widespread and seldom punished in China and Chinese universities.

“Chinese students virtually learn to plagiarise from their first years in school,” said Peter Hereford, who teaches journalism at the Cheung Kong School of Journalism and Communication at Shantou University in southern Guangdong province.

“Later on, many students are encouraged to plagiarise by professors who want them to get the best possible test scores in this test-happy nation.”

Last December, Shantou University made a crack in this system by sacking one of its professors, Hu Xingrong, for plagiarising the work of Zhang Zhian, a doctoral student from Fudan University .

“There wasn’t any difficulty at all” about deciding what to do, said Chan Yuen-Ying, the director of the Cheung Kong Institute who is also director of the Hong Kong University Journalism and Media Studies Centre.

But Chan’s decision, which spawned waves of debate about plagiarism on local Internet chat groups, was largely seen as the result of her Hong Kong values.

Most mainland Chinese universities and their administrators remain loath to take action against offending students and professors, said Cui Fu-zhai, director of the Biomaterials Laboratory at the School of Materials Science & Engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

“The schools want to protect their own reputation,” said Cui.

Jin Han Que, 19, a freshman engineering student at Tsinghua said plagiarism was common among students.