The fight against fake-paper factories
Since last January, journals have retracted at least 370 papers that have been publicly linked to ‘paper mills’, an analysis by Nature has found, and many more retractions are expected. Physicians in China are a particular target customer for paper mills — companies that churn out fake scientific manuscripts to order — because of intense pressure to publish combined with long work hours...The effect of such trickery can be very serious, says molecular oncology researcher Jennifer Byrne, who points to suspected fake studies that link genes to particular cancers. “People die from cancer — it is not a game.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00733-5
In the West, academic doctors are also under intense pressure to publish, but the consequences for fakery are so severe, and the benefits are so small, that it isn't widespread. In China the situation is reversed: the benefits are greater and the penalties are less so.
I'm not going to rehash the discussion thus far - interested readers can look back. Watchman Nee got great benefit from copying without attribution the works of others (Jessie Penn-Lewis, and perhaps more), and passing it off as his own, and the penalties when it was discovered, were minimal if any. Witness Lee apparently did the same thing, even going so far as to claim himself as the proprietary source of various 'revelations' that may well not have been his. "Who else has seen this?" he'd ask in meetings (of course, nobody answered the question, for fear of being 'marked').
A lot of people have realized that there's a tidy living to be made from putting out spiritually-oriented words and phrases. Think of Hank Hanegraaf, for one. (Hank also used, without attribute, words and phrases from his 'research associates'). What is outstanding about Nee and Lee is the degree to which they did it using the words of others, and claiming authorship, and then waving it off when the issue was raised. Other authors who lived off the proceeds and public authority of creating published works would find that exposure would be ruinous. But with Nee and Lee the problem was readily dismissed, and there are probably strong, ingrained cultural factors involved. Lee told us China was "virgin soil" for the Lord to move, but it wasn't. Every one of those 370 faked published papers came from China. They're fallen people, like everyone else, and until we begin to deal with the implications of this, we'll suffer the effects.