Chinese Thesis Ghostwriting Scandal Reveals Huge Gray Market
My stance on that: ex-bloc countries have that¸ I tell you as one who did part of my high school in Russia. Weak students cheat, strong students cheat, and only few cranky principled oddballs reject the system and shout &quot;Hey you, ex university prof, throw whatever you want at me, I&#x27;ll solve it and shred it to pieces&quot; - those being universally hated for &quot;making life harder for everybody&quot;<p>My mom once had fun listening to shitty talks from parents of other students along the lines &quot;hey, can you tell your boy to quiet down a bit, he raises the plank to high for the rest of the class&quot;<p>You can understand weak students&#x27; reasons: they simply can&#x27;t do it otherwise. But why do strong ones cheat? That what dazzled me about Russians, and Russia in general. What that was is the gigantic, monstrous, totally pathological fear of failure that permeates country&#x27;s &quot;socially endowed classes.&quot;<p>And secondary to that is the element of social pact: when pupils with excellent marks begin cheating and copying from one another, they begin to embrace the &quot;omerta&quot; created by this, sealing their social contract with their peers.<p>Most rich, powerful people in Russia teach their children very intentionally to behave along the lines - get close and sycophantic with others privileged people. And you know, to infirm young minds, the reasoning that any privilege one gets in life is through joining some &quot;exclusive social clubs&quot; of other privileged people, is hard to challenge, especially when this comes from their parents.<p>And after some time, their children become completely accustomed to not to taking upon any challenge straight, because they genuinely believe that even simplest things in life are not doable without tricks, cheats, and favours from other power powerful people. This is the culture in which social elites in Russia grow up.<p>After being around mainlanders for 11 years while working in electronics, I feel it is very much the same for them. For both of above reasons, people from both nations are extremely afraid of challenge, and more so when you deal with people higher up on the social ladder.