OK, it's getting weird now. I thought this would be much less common in top 10s.

There's a simple path here: tell them plagiarized papers are not going to get published, or will be retracted in the future, and this will hinder their graduation & will create trouble for their advisor (+ advisor would lose face) if they insist on submitting such papers.

When your students (and everyone else) care only about the "pragmatic", give them "pragmatic" reasons! Chinese people generally do not like creating trouble/making others lose face, so that's a good path.

Convincing them that plagiarism is morally incorrect and not right would be harder, and students would likely not buy into that. But the pragmatic path gets the job done :-)

From the situation you described, I infer two things about your situation. Correct me if I am wrong:

1. The university you're at is likely not top-tier. I would be surprised if even the researchers at Tsinghua or Jiaoda (Shanghai Jiaotong University) engage in academically dishonest conduct frequently. I suppose you're likely at a local (provincial) university.

2. Your colleagues/students are mainly targeting domestic conferences/journals (and likely not the top ones). Otherwise they will surely know that academically dishonest practices will get their papers rejected.

If both are true, I'm afraid little could be done. You could try very hard to at least make your students not plagiarize, but this will probably have a very negative impact on future recruitment, and even your students are not going to 100% listen to you. The best option at hand is trying to move to another university (preferably in another country) if this bothers you (it would bother me for sure).

The ranty part: I decided to delete this, but just keep two key points.

1. Plagiarism is not dealt with seriously enough and people let it happen. Awareness of what constitutes plagiarism is low, but for reasonably experienced researchers this should be obvious. So, as you see, the problem is not that people don't know it is plagiarism; they likely do know, but they have no reason to care.

2. The quality of most domestic journals & conferences are questionable, so the problem is even more serious at this level (because not even the editors care).