The American state of Kansas, located near the center of North America in the Great Plains region, is normally a quiet, provincial place. But recently an incident at a high school in a small town there turnedsintosa nationwide controversy reported on both CNN and the front page of the The New York Times.

　　The subject of the controversy was plagiarism. Plagiarism means using someone else's words or ideas without giving credit to that person. For example, if I write a book containing the phrase,“blustery winters with little snow, when the country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron,”that would be plagiarism, as the phrase is copied from the American author Willa Cather.

　　But now suppose I write this: In her novel My Antonia, Willa Cather writes of“blustery winters with little snow, when the country is stripped bare and grey as sheet-iron.”That would not be plagiarism, because I have given Cather proper credit for her words.

　　In December 2001, biology teacher Christine Pelton of Piper High School in Piper, Kansas, discovered that 28 sophomores had committed plagiarism in writing their reports for a botany project. The students all received grades of zero for the reports,which is a typical punishment for plagiarism in the American educational system. Several of the students' parents, however, believed that the punishment was too harsh. They complained to the school board, the electedsgroupsof local citizens governing the Piper public schools. The parents claimed that the 15-year-old students had not fully understand the rules prohibiting plagiarism and had not intentionally violated them. The school board, responding to the parents' demands, ordered Mrs Pelton to raise the plagiarists' grades. Mrs Pelton resigned in protest. The school board held public hearings at which many local residents sharply criticized the school board's decision to force Mrs Pelton to raise the students' grades.

　　The news media discovered the story, and it soon became a nationwide controversy, with the tide of public opinion running overwhelmingly in favor of Mrs Pelton. According to an article in The New York Times, in the days after the story became news she received dozens of phone calls every day offering not only support but also new employment.

　　The Piper High School controversy is one of several recent plagiarism scandals in the United States. In the last several months, both Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, two of America's best-known popular historians, were accused of plagiarizing from other authors in their books. The allegations were extensively reported in the news media and seriously damaged both writers' reputations. Goodwin admitted copying but claimed that it was done accidentally. Ambrose acknowledged that there were“omissions”in his use of quotation marks and said he was“sorry”. Both authors promised to correct future editions of their books.

　　Last year, when I was a visiting professor of law at Peking University, I was amazed when I read my students' papers and discovered that virtually all had committed plagiarism. In fact, some had plagiarized from the textbook we used in class, thus making it inevitable that they would be caught. Had this been an American university, the students probably would have been given zero grades for their papers and possibly faced additional disciplinary action as well. But I did not react so harshly, for I had learned that plagiarism is treated less strictly in China than in the US. The students were allowed to rewrite their papers so that they gave full credit to the authors they quoted from, and then the papers were re-graded as if the plagiarism had never occurred.

　　Why is plagiarism such a serious offense in the United States but not in China? I think the reason is that the American educational system prizes individuality and creativity, while the Chinese educational system emphasizes imitating and thereby learning from the masterpieces of the past. In American schools, students spend very little time memorizing classic poems or recopying famous writings. In all my years of schooling, I can recall only one time when I was asked to memorize a famous literary passage (in my case it was Mark Antony's funeral oration in Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar). Instead of memorizing and copying what others have written, American students are urged from a young age to write their own thoughts in their own words -or at least to use fresh language in explaining other people's thoughts.They are also invited to create original artwork, not to imitate models. Discussion, experimentation and independent thinking are encouraged. Because creativity and originality are so central to Western culture,“borrowing”someone else's work (whether phrases or a fully worked-out idea, it doesn't matter)and passing it off as your own is regarded as a very serious offense, a sort of intellectual larceny.