Former education minister Chiang Wei-ling (蔣偉寧) hit back at his critics yesterday and said that an international scientific journal has vindicated him in an academic scandal that forced him out of office and scarred his reputation.
“Some people have, without proper knowledge of the truth, recklessly concluded that I have violated academic ethics and was involved in collective fraud with a research team,” he said.
“Those reports have deviated from the truth and have hurt my reputation, and I have to make this statement to clear my name,” Chiang said.
Chiang resigned on Monday over his connections with a local academic who had several dozen research papers retracted from the Journal of Vibration and Control earlier this month because of alleged academic fraud.
Chiang said that the decision to resign was made to uphold his own reputation and avoid unnecessary disruption of the ministry’s operations, given that the incident has ignited a wave of public criticism.
The journal’s publisher said the papers were pulled because they were based on bogus peer reviews and it accused the papers’ main author of creating false accounts to subvert the peer review process.
The papers were contributed by Chen Chen-yuan (陳震遠), also known as Peter Chen, a former associate professor at National Pingtung University of Education, who resigned in February over the scandal. Five of the papers were written by Chen’s twin brother, Chen Chen-wu (陳震武), and bore Chiang’s name as a co-author, and also listed Peter Chen as one of the authors — without Chiang’s knowledge — according to Chen Chen-wu.
Local media said that Chiang was involved in skewing the peer review process, but Chiang defended his innocence by citing an e-mail from the journal received yesterday in which it suggested that the former education minister may not have done anything wrong.
“We cannot comment on the content and quality of the retracted papers, due to the fact that they were not assessed in line with appropriate and correct quality peer review standards,” the e-mail said. “We are able to clarify that we believe there are innocent parties involved and which may include many of those listed as co-authors, such as yourself.”
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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