Mass Retraction of unethical Chinese Forensic Genetics Papers

Which is to say, if you care about advancing science in the long term rather than merely in the short term, you must care about ethics. Accusing others of naivete here is a bad look.

That’s where the interrelation with following standards regarding honesty, transparency, etc. You can fall afoul of these out of inability to follow the rules rather than duplicity - there are standards for record keeping, statistical rigor, etc, which are prescriptive and fairly inconvenient. If you can’t follow the ethics rules because you find them inconvenient per your cost benefit analysis, what about rigorous record keeping? Not ignoring inconvenient outliers? What calculus do you use that lets you choose which inconvenient rule you won’t follow? As someone who doesn’t know your standards, how do I trust you’re making well informed decisions that don’t skew results in your favor in your convenience calculus?

A simpler way is hold a standard and rules and when you vary you assume variance exists everywhere.

This is science, not business. Science isn’t just about discovering results, it’s about conveying your results in a rigorous and believable way following high standards that build confidence others can build ontop of your work. Cutting corners damages your reputation on all dimensions.

I would also note these standards come about for a real reason it’s not just a bunch of anti progress bureaucrats devising ways to make everything expensive from a “western” culture perspective. These are best practices derived from observations of real and genuine horrors. They are absolutely restrictive. But when the rules don’t exist, some jackass somewhere does something inhuman and gets rewarded for it. Maybe it creates progress, but it leaves real victims whose lives are destroyed. This being unacceptable isn’t a western culture thing. It’s a human thing. No one wants to be the victim, and most people agree it’s not ok to exploit and harm people for your benefit. The difference is some societies (not cultures) have weak systems that protect the individual over profit, power, and greed. One could make the argument that the current society in China doesn’t prioritize human rights very highly, but I think it’s wrong to say Chinese culture doesn’t. There’s a difference between a people and their government.

Most Chinese speakers can understand (written) Mandarin, but all the spoken languages can be written in theory. Mandarin was just the first one to have been popularly written and it was the official dialect, so it became the de-facto standard (before it became de jure).

People in Hong Kong for example have been writing Cantonese for decades, albeit more often recently than before. But if you looked you'd find published works written in Cantonese 100+ years ago. That said, if you only knew Mandarin it will probably only take you a couple days to get the hang of reading Cantonese since it's not that different when written.

At least eg. Hannas - far from an impartial voice on the subject, mind - clearly distinguishes the written standard as a separate language from dialect speakers' native ones:

"By the same token, the 'unity' that Chinese characters allegedly impart to the language by allowing speakers of different 'dialects' to read a common written language turns out to be an illusion. These so-called Chinese dialects have less in common than the Romance languages of Europe, meaning that speakers of nonstandard Chinese (some 30 percent of the Han population) are not reading their own language or even a common language, but what is to them a Mandarin-based second language written in Chinese characters. Granted the characters allow non-Mandarin speak- ers to read segments of written Mandarin in their own regional pronuncia- tions. But, far from unifying Chinese, this practice only perpetuates differences that would have been leveled out long ago under the influence of a phonetic script."

— Hannas, Asia's Orthographic Dilemma, Ch.8, Appropriateness to East Asian Languages

In a US lab, for instance, I would expect that a similar genetic study would have hard-copy signed consent forms from every participant in the study with 3-6 year retention requirements, and this could be audited by their institution's IRB if there were concerns. (Ultimately I think there is an accountability chain all the way to the US federal government, though I'm not familiar with how the institutional IRBs are monitored). I don't know what equivalent institutions might exist in China, and whether the journals got/requested any verification of consents from them.

Though for papers like these where co-authors have affiliations with police departments or academies, I'm not sure how trustworthy it would be even if the police did claim they had evidence of consent for the data in these papers. (Given that Chinese police are known to be collecting genetic samples without consent in some documented cases.)