The government of Pingle county in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region said on Tuesday that it had detected plagiarism in “a limited number of paragraphs” in its 2023-2030 forest fire prevention plan.
Authorities checked the document after media reports of suspected plagiarism and found the claim was “essentially true”, the county government said on its official social media page.
“We’ll promptly correct and reissue the document, strengthening review of official documentation,” the county said.
Web users reported the suspected plagiarism after finding that descriptions and data used in a Pingle hydrology report were nearly identical to those for Anhua county about 400km (250 miles) away in neighbouring Hunan province, according to official news platform Jiupai News.
The Pingle bureau collaborated with a third-party company to prepare the document, and the hydrological data involved was provided by the contractor, Jiupai News reported, citing an unidentified county official involved in producing the plan.
“[The data from Anhua] may have been used as a reference but not modified [when writing the Pingle document]. If there are errors, they must be corrected. The third party was careless,” the official was quoted as saying.
