As criticism of Jia Pingwa over alleged plagiarism continues to spread online, one essay suddenly stood out: a piece titled “I Firmly Support Jia Pingwa.” That headline alone was enough to make people pause and wonder who was stepping forward at a moment like this.
The author turned out to be the poet You Tianjie. Anyone curious can look up his name on WeChat; his own connection to the word “plagiarism” is not exactly nonexistent. That aside, his reason for backing Jia Pingwa is fairly direct: he argues that Jia’s work does not amount to plagiarism. His evidence is that in his own 2017 book On the Small Town, he openly stated that he used techniques such as editing, collage, and adaptation in his writing.
That argument, however, seems weak both conceptually and logically.
First, methods like editing and collage are not inherently tied to literary innovation. Chinese writers were playing with similar forms a very long time ago. There is even a well-established tradition for it: jiju shi, or “assembled-line poetry,” in which lines from earlier writers are artfully combined into a new and coherent work, or a few borrowed lines are reworked and embedded into one’s own poem. Wang Anshi, Su Shi, and Xin Qiji all left many examples of this kind of writing. In that sense, You Tianjie is neither some pioneering experimenter nor the final word on the legitimacy of such techniques.
Second, there is a fundamental difference between openly disclosing one’s method and passing off reworded material as original work. In You Tianjie’s case, he explicitly explained his compositional approach in his own book. That is not the same thing as the kind of “washed manuscript” plagiarism Jia Pingwa has been accused of—taking someone else’s text and swapping out a few synonyms.
Whether in academic writing or literature, the distinction is basic: when a source is identified, it is quotation or reference; when it is not, it is plagiarism. That should not be controversial. Jia Pingwa has published extensively, and judging from the materials exposed by figures such as Shuqing de Senlin and others, the plagiarism allegations against him are hard to dismiss.
