If your peers in online classes are cheating and you’re not, you’re at a material disadvantage when it comes to grading. Unless the teacher decides to start reporting your peers for academic integrity violations [1].

Same goes for academia I suppose. When incentives for academia are aligned towards publishing, and if there is minimal or no enforcement of cheating at an organizational level, you’re at a disadvantage if you don’t cheat.

I don’t think Chinese academic institutions have robust academic integrity and enforcement policies and unless that changes, you’re likely to see Chinese academics stuck in a Nash Equilibrium.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31544634

In grad school I had to do a term paper; my three partners were Chinese. Two of them approached me and asked what we were going to do when the third one cheated/plagiarized his part of the paper. Apparently, cheating is a phenomenon specific to subcultures in China — and this one student belonged to that culture.

When we got his part of the paper it had just been copied wholesale from academic sources; the professor had already been prewarned. We all got an "F", and the one student was put on probation, and lost his funding. It really sucked. The rest of us were given a chance to rewrite the term paper.

> the professor had already been prewarned

> We all got an "F"

> The rest of us were given a chance to rewrite the term paper.

That seems really unfair. Why didn't the rest of you just get a grade based on the quality of the rest of the paper?

There is a strong prejudice against the Fujianese. Cheating is an endemic problem throughout China due to extreme competitive pressure and lax oversight, but when someone from Fuijian is found to be cheating the explanation will of course be that they are Fujianese.

Cheating on this scale doesn't (usually) happen because a thousand people independently come up with this idea. Something about this environment makes it possible for prolific cheaters to scale farther than they do elsewhere. There's a deep dive that could be done here, but at a high level, it comes out to: there's money in it, incentive structures drive money here. Follow the money.

this is a good place to start: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C47&q=aca...

e.g. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1178415

which describes cultural differences in cheaters

Assuming this is actually true, my guess would be the social pressure.