The Guardian: Ping Fu's Childhood Tales of China's Cultural Revolution Spark Controversy

Tania Branigan and Ed Pilkington, who had previously reported doubts on Fu Ping's story, published another report on The Guardian on February 13, 2013. This was the first media report on the affair in which the reporters actually sought out experts to exam, and almost unanimously refute, several aspects of the story, including her claimed family history, her episode with student magazine, and so on.

It's also worth noting that Professor Perry Link, who was quoted in this story, is still banned from visiting China by the government there for his pro-democracy involvement decades ago. So, he could be hardly grouped into the conspiracy theory of a Chinese government sponsored "smear campaign."

Top US software entrepreneur faces new contradiction claims over rags-to-riches memoir of personal torment in 60s China 

A successful US entrepreneur faces mounting questions over her widely lauded tale of childhood torment in China's cultural revolution, as fresh contradictions emerge and experts cast doubt on key elements of her story. 

Ping Fu's rags-to-riches memoir Bend Not Break says she was torn away from her parents at eight, brutally abused and sent to work in a factory; then forced to leave China for the US after triggering an international outcry over female infanticide as a student. She went on to found software company Geomagic, currently being acquired by 3D Systems. 

Critics acknowledge the horrors of the cultural revolution, but question Fu's personal account. She has already conceded that a description of Red Guards killing a teacher by tying their victim to four horses was an "emotional memory" and probably wrong. Closer examination of her book and interviews reveal numerous conflicting claims and experts told the Guardian several parts of her story were implausible. 

Fu, 54, said she was traumatised and hurt by the criticism, adding: "I don't know who is behind this, but somebody is." 

One of her most striking claims is that Sun Yat-sen, revered as the father of modern China, "raised my grandfather and granduncle as his own sons" – akin to a Briton being reared by Winston Churchill. Prof John Wong of the University of Sydney, an expert on Sun's life, said he had no knowledge of such wards. 

Fu told the Guardian: "That was what I was told by my family before I left China. I believe this is true. My mother says it's in history books." She then added that Sun was attentive towards them, rather than actually adopting them. 

In a chapter of her book titled Factory Worker, Fu describes labouring in factories for a decade until schools reopened in 1976. She describes working six hours a day, six days a week and told an interviewer she never went to school in 10 years. 

Experts on the cultural revolution told the Guardian schools mostly reopened in 1968 or 1969 and that pupils had lessons in factories to learn skills, but were not used as labour. 

Fu said: "For 10 years I didn't have proper schooling. I was sent to study in the factory, and sometimes in farms." 

A photograph supplied to media by Fu shows her posing with a little red book, Mao badge and armband. Michel Bonnin of Tsinghua University and Prof Yin Hongbiao of Beijing University said it showed she was not disgraced as a "black element" at the time, as she claimed; Fu said it was common for children to be pictured pledging allegiance to Mao, "whether 'black' or 'red'". 

Fu also says she was arrested and criticised by Suzhou University authorities after Deng Xiaoping, then China's paramount leader, met student publishers. She says Deng had seen a daring article from the popular magazine she edited. 

Perry Link, an expert on modern Chinese literature at the University of California at Riverside, said student magazine representatives met in 1979, but added: "I do not believe for a moment that Deng Xiaoping ever came near the group." 

Neither he nor others knows of a representative from Fu's group, Red Maple, attending. Fu said she believed the article was selected for This Generation, the joint publication from the meeting, but Link's copy shows it is not included. 

Yinghong Cheng, now a professor of history at Delaware state university, studied at the same time and in the same building at Suzhou as Fu, and had his own literary group. He told the Guardian: "I am completely unaware of that group [Red Maple] and publication, and if it had been that popular I would have known about it." 

Fu, who supplied a copy of her magazine, said her contemporaries might not have heard of the society because it was underground. She said Deng met the representatives at the same time as Communist Youth League leaders, noting that she was told about the meeting and was not present. 

The entrepreneur claims she was ordered to leave China after exposing female infanticide in the early 80s, writing that in a few months of research she "witnessed with her own eyes" drowned and suffocated female infants. Last month, she told a radio station she watched "hundreds of baby girls being killed in front of my eyes. I saw girls being tossed into the river." 

Therese Hesketh of University College London, an expert on population controls in China, said: "I have never heard stories of this kind. Infanticide did of course occur, but was not commonplace … It certainly was not done in public as even at that time to be caught meant a possible murder charge." 

Fu told the Guardian that she mis-spoke in the live radio interview and should have said "my research was based on hundreds of cases, and I saw baby girls killed right in front of my eyes". 

She added: "If you went to the countryside and to the family planning unit it was going on all the way down the line in every village and every school. Very few people were allowed to go to the poor areas. These kinds of things happened, and China doesn't want people to know it happened." 

The entrepreneur once said Deng personally intervened to free her when she was jailed due to the resulting outcry – a remarkable detail not mentioned in her book. 

Other questions include when Fu left China: she has said variously that it was two weeks or over a year after her release. 

Fu said she had been wrong to call the criticism a smear campaign, adding she had realised the people she thought were attacking her were telling their own stories of the cultural revolution. 

"I hope that this will turn into a more civil discussion about what happened and if any good can come from it I don't mind that people have turned their anger towards me so long as we can heal together," she said. 

Adrian Zackheim, publisher of Penguin's business imprint, Portfolio, said: "Ping Fu wrote in the Author's Note at the front of her book: 'I have tried my best to remember and describe the events and people in my life. Mostly, I have used real names, although some names have been altered to protect privacy. Many details happened more than forty years ago and I've tried as much as possible to verify the facts.' 

"Sometimes, despite everyone's best efforts, minor mistakes appear in nonfiction books. Whenever they are brought to an author's attention they are corrected in future printings. Ping has already acknowledged several of these, and if any additional corrections are required, of course those will be made as well."

The Telegraph: Chinese-American Tech Boss Ping Fu Denies Inventing Cultural Revolution Horrors

The following news report was written by Philip Sherwell and published on The Telegraph on February 10, 2013:

She survived a childhood of persecution and brutality during China's Cultural Revolution to become a US technology high-flyer, award-winning entrepreneur, guest at the White House and adviser to the Obama administration. 

So it was little surprise that when Ping Fu published her memoirs last year, the searing account of how she was seized from her family at eight, gang-raped at 10 and then forced into exile after investigating infanticide of baby girls was acclaimed by critics and readers. 

But Miss Fu is now the target of a vitriolic and sustained onslaught from Chinese Internet users who are accusing her of invention and exaggeration in Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds -- its title drawn from a proverb about the resilience of bamboo in buffeting winds. 

At a time when American news organisations, the internet giant Google and even US government agencies suspect they have been targeted by Chinese computer hackers, Miss Fu has found herself on the vituperative frontline of cyber hostilities between China and the West. 

"I am living the title of the book," the chief executive of Geomagic, a 3-D imaging technology business, told The Sunday Telegraph in an often-tearful interview. 

"I was shell-shocked when the attacks started. I felt I was right back to being the eight-year-old without a voice in a denunciation session, being forced to face public humiliation, being called all sorts of names. 

"But however hurt and sad I am, I realise that I am not eight, I am not in China and that I am speaking out for all those little girls who are abused and still don't have a voice." 

Not the first memoirist to be challenged about the accuracy of a narrative, Miss Fu, 54, a divorced mother of a teenage daughter, has acknowledged some mistakes over dates and one incident she recounted in a media interview. "But I am not writing a history book, I am telling my story and this my life and what shaped it," she said. 

Indeed, some China-watchers believe that she is the subject of a co-ordinated campaign to discredit her by nationalist online activists who have taken her story as a sleight on an entire nation. 

The attacks are intense. The sales website Amazon has been flooded by one-star reviews (the lowest possible) for her book; some critics have accused her of falsifying her story to win residency illegally in the US; her Wikipedia page entry has been hacked; and insulting emails were sent to a potential business partner. 

Most hurtful were accusations she had invented a gang rape when she was a child by critics who insisted that such attacks do not happen in China. 

"I was being the victimised as the 'broken shoe' again," she said, referring to a term of abuse often used for prostitutes that was applied to her by a particular tormenter in the wake of the brutal sexual assault. 

"Who are they to tell me this never happened, that these things don't happen in China? I have the scars. I know what was done to me." 

The broadsides began after a Forbes magazine interview with Miss Fu suffered some "lost in translation" interpretations when it appeared in Chinese, she said, most notably, that she wrote about children in labour camps -- something that does not appear in her book. 

But Zhouzi Fang, an influential Chinese blogger and campaigner against alleged academic fraud, then began trawling through her book and previous interviews and identified what he said were a series of discrepancies and fabrications. 

Notably, he seized on a radio interview in 2010, the year in which Miss Fu's profile in America reached new heights after she was invited as a guest by First Lady Michelle Obama to attend the president's state of the union speech. 

In that interview, she described witnessing a public quartering during the Cultural Revolution by horsemen dragging their victim apart in four directions. Mr Fang noted that there had been no other claims of such executions being conducted in China. 

Miss Fu now says that she believes that as a young child, she had confused tales told to her of barbarity in old China with the brutality she witnessed and experienced after the Cultural Revolution was unleashed by Mao's Red Guards in 1966. 

But Mr Fang and his online followers have also scorned the plausibility of Miss Fu's account of how she came to move to America penniless in 1984. 

As a child, she said, her father, a university professor, and her mother, an accountant, were sent to the countryside for "re-education", leaving her to care for herself, raise her younger sister and spend eight years working in a factory. 

She then describes how she was forced apart from her family a second time when she was forced out by the regime as punishment for writing a college paper, during what she had thought was a time of post-Mao liberalisation, about the one-child policy which effectively led to girl infanticide in rural areas where some parents killed their first-borns if they were not boys. 

Miss Fu said he was arrested on campus, bundled into the back of a police car with a black bag over her head, and later told she must leave the country without making a fuss. The essay, she said she later discovered, was passed by tutor to a Chinese newspaper which wrote an editorial calling for greater gender equality on the basis of its contents. 

Amid all the controversy and casting of doubt, the reality of course is that this era in China was one where public records are minimal. But not even her fiercest critics can dispute her stellar academic and professional career since she arrived in the US aged 26 in 1984 for a college course arranged through family connections. 

After working for Bell Labs and at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications, she and her then husband set up Geomagic in 1997. She was named by Inc magazine in 2005 as its entrepreneur of the year and she joined the National Advisory Council on innovation and entrepreneurship in 2010. 

So successful was this career that Miss Fu as initially commissioned to write a business book, but she said that when she started on the project, she realised that she could not describe how she makes decisions now without explaining the importance of her past on her life. 

Adrian Zackheim, the head of Portfolio Penguin, the book's publisher, told The Sunday Telegraph that the company was standing whole-heartedly by Miss Fu and her memoir. 

"It is a wonderful book and she is an admirable person and I am very proud to be her publisher," he said. "This is a memoir, it is her story, it is not investigative journalism. 

"Memoirs are often least reliable when they cover the early years of childhood, but I have no doubt of its overall credibility." 

For Miss Fu, there is no little irony that she has exposed herself to these tirades after writing a story that even her own mother wished she had left untold. "Gang-rape is still a taboo in China," she said. "I am a single mother and my mother said to me: 'Don't you want to marry again? Why do you need to tell this?'" 

But Miss Fu said she had no regrets that she had chosen to tell her story. "In the end, I wanted to show how love, compassion and generosity can lead to a better life. 

"This is not an attack on China. Just as a mass shooting does not define America, my history does not define China. 

"I'm human, not perfect, if I mixed up some dates, I will correct them. I would appreciate instructive feedback, but this is not that. 

"You don't have to believe me or like it or read it. But this is my story, my life, and who are these people to bully me while they hide behind the Internet?"

Shanghailist: Chinese Readers Annoyed that Ping Fu's Memoir is (Allegedly) Full of Lies

The following post was written by James Griffiths and posted on Shanghailist on February 5, 2013:

Chinese entrepreneur and author Ping Fu is having to defend herself from claims that her memoir Bend Not Break, is (allegedly) complete bullshit after readers highlighted a number of lies inconsistencies. 

Readers and critics have taken Fu to task for her horrifying claim that during the Cultural Revolution she was sent to a reeducation camp aged ten where she was gang-raped. Fu herself has admitted that a 2010 account she gave to NPR of being forced to watch Red Guards executing a teacher by using horses to tear him apart was an "emotional memory" or, in regular parlance, made up.

"When I was young, these are the stories being told to us and in my nightmares they come back again and again. That time was so traumatic. I was taken away from my parents," she said. 

But she now accepts that her imagination may have played tricks. "Somehow in my mind I always thought I saw it, but now I'm not sure my memory served me right. I probably saw it in a movie or something, and I acknowledge that's a problem."

Fu's account of leaving China has also been questioned. In Bend Not Break she talks of being "deported" at age 25 due to anger from the government over her university thesis on female infanticide. Fu claims that a Shanghai newspaper learned of her "groundbreaking research" and called for an "end to the madness" of the one child policy, a commentary that was subsequently picked up by the People's Daily, except, of course, it wasn't.

After [Fang Zhouzi, a blogger who focuses on Chinese academia] said he found no trace of the commentary, Fu responded in a column in the Huffington Post: "I remember reading an editorial in a newspaper in 1982 that called for gender equality. It was not a news article and not written by me, and I didn't know it had anything to do with my research. When writing the book, I did not name the paper, since I wasn't certain. However, I think that is where I read the editorial because it was the most popular and official newspaper."

That is some fantastic fucking fact checking by Ping Fu and her publisher, Portfolio books.

“We are proud of the book, and of Ping, and of her perseverance,” Zackheim [of Portfolio] added. “Ping worked hard to get her facts right, but it’s her memory that she’s offering…it’s a personal memoir that’s written with candor.”

While memoirists should be subject to less stringent factual requirements than journalists, if they're going to make such outlandish claims as Red Guards using a form of execution that went out with the Renaissance, or that their graduate thesis was so groundbreaking that the CPC didn't dare let them stay in the country anymore, they should at least be able to back up those claims even a tiny bit (since when does the CPC deport rather than lock up dissidents anyway? It took Chen Guangcheng the personal intervention of Hillary Clinton to get out of China). 

Katie Baker at The Daily Beast offers an embarrassing defence of Fu, in which she surmises that the author's troubles are because of nasty Chinese communist keyboard warriors attacking a fearless truth seeker:

The Amazon attack bears elements of the type of Internet bullying—known by the ominous phrase “Human Flesh Search”—that is increasingly common among Chinese bloggers. 

Indeed, many of Ping’s critics seem to take offense at the book’s airing of China’s dirty laundry—namely, of the traumas of the Cultural Revolution—to non-Chinese readers. Others seem to resent Ping for having escaped China to resettle into a successful life in the United States. As one blogger wrote, “I think the most important point that outrages Chinese is that Ping…lived a better-than-average life.” [Emphasis added]

Baker might want to check the reviews pages of Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 (4/5 stars), or Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (4.5/5 stars), two books that really air China's dirty Cultural Revolution laundry to non-Chinese readers. 

Just as James Frey and Greg Mortensen were exposed for the embellishments they made in their own 'factual' memoirs, Ping Fu shouldn't escape proper criticism and investigation of her outlandish claims just because China is kind of far away.

The Telegraph: Doubts over Chinese Author Lauded by Michelle Obama

The following "Book News" was written by Felicity Capon and published on The Telegraph on February 5, 2013:

Ping Fu's descriptions of a tormented childhood growing up during China's cultural revolution fiercely criticised 

Doubts have arisen over the veracity of an autobiography written by the executive of a major US technology firm. 

In Bend Not Break, Ping Fu describes the horrors of growing up during China’s Cultural Revolution and her remarkable rags-to-riches tale that saw her become the chief executive and co-founder of the 3D software company Geomagic. She was named Inc. Magazine Entrepreneur of the Year in 2005 and was invited by Michelle Obama to the White House after the 2010 State of the Union address. 

The book describes how Fu was forcibly removed from her family by the Red Guards and sent to a re-education camp where she was starved, tortured and gang-raped, forced into child labour and deprived of an education. 

But her claims are now being challenged by several readers and Chinese critics who suggest her version of events may be exaggerated or fabricated. 

In one interview, Fu has described how she was forced to watch a teacher torn apart by four horses. 

But the influential Chinese blogger Fang Zhouzi claims that there is no evidence to suggest that such a barbaric act ever took place and considers it an unlikely practice at that time in China’s history. No witnesses have come forward to corroborate the claims. 

Indeed, Fu has now accepted that this detail could have been an “emotional memory”, confessing that her nightmares have blended into her memories: “Somehow in my mind I always thought I saw it, but now I’m not sure my memory served me right. I probably saw it in a movie or something, and I acknowledge that’s a problem.” 

Other questions have arisen in relation to her alleged deportation from China to the US. According to the book, Fu was forced to leave because of her thesis on female infanticide, which was published by the People’s Daily. This subsequently led to an international outcry and her detention. 

Yet the likelihood that the newspaper would ever have published such a piece has attracted widespread doubt. 

“In fact anyone with a bit of political common sense knows that People's Daily at that time was full of nothing but glorious and wonderful news and it's impossible anything affecting China's image as much as this would've received coverage,” commented Fang. 

Fu has attempted to defend herself against the allegations in a blog post for the Huffington Post: “I remember reading an editorial in a newspaper in 1982 that called for gender equality. It was not a news article and not written by me, and I didn’t know it had anything to do with my research…People who have not read the book made assumptions that I submitted the research to the newspaper, or I published the thesis, but that was not how I described it in the book.” 

As a result of the negative publicity surrounding the book, ratings on Amazon.com have plummeted, gaining a meagre 1.6 star rating. Vitriolic responses from Amazon users have flooded in, accusing Fu of being a liar, which has led some news outlets to suggest that critics are simply unhappy about the book's "airing of China's dirty laundry". One comment read “ It is too bad that innocent American people have to learn about China, Cultural Revolution and Chinese people through this kind of lies” – a statement widely echoed across the book’s webpage. 

Adrian Zackhein, the president of her publisher, Porfolio, commented: “We are proud of the book, and of Ping, and of her perseverance. Ping worked hard to get her facts right, but it’s her memory that she’s offering…it’s a personal memoir that’s written with candor.”

The Daily Beast: Ping Fu Defends "Bend, Not Break" Memoir against Online Chinese Attack

On February 4, 2013, The Daily Beast published the following report by Katie Baker. Amid the growing controversy, this report is decidedly one-sided in Fu Ping's favor. It not only accuses Fu Ping's book critics as "Chinese Attacks", "vitriol", and "Internet bullying", it also seeks to connect it with the alleged hacking incident of New York Times, without providing a single thread of evidence.

It also appears that Katie Baker has deliberately chose some of the unfavorable user comments from Amazon forum while ignoring many with more substantial material. (For a sample of the latter, see here.) Furthermore, she gravely misquoted one of them, twisting its meaning.

Furious at the airing of China’s dirty laundry in Ping Fu’s new memoir, Chinese commenters have kicked off an online assault. The tech entrepreneur tells Katie Baker the vitriol feels like the public shame sessions of her youth. 

“It’s like I’m living the book title,” says Ping Fu, author of the new memoir Bend, Not Break. Over the past week, the Geomagic CEO and her book have become the targets of a virulent attack by China’s Internet vigilantes, who have slammed her account of the country’s Mao-era troubles and lampooned the book on Amazon with a flood of one-star reviews. But to her critics and bullies, Ping has a simple reply: “I will stay strong, and I will not break.” 

The bloggers began their Amazon blitz after Forbes China published an interview with Ping late last month in which several aspects of her story, including the use of the term “labor camps,” apparently got lost in translation. The memoir, which was released last month, tracks Ping’s tumultuous childhood during the Cultural Revolution, when she was forcibly orphaned and left to raise her younger sister alone, through her immigration to the United States and her years as an entrepreneur of Geomagic, which consults on 3-D technologies. Critics have questioned the timeline of Ping’s account, along with some of the more gruesome details of the story, including a childhood rape and the public quartering of a “black element” by the Red Guards. When Forbes followed up to correct the details in its interview after a prominent Chinese academic and other Internet users cried foul, the site was deluged with commenters calling the author a liar and a fake, and accusing her of fabricating everything from her knowledge of English to her account of public executions by the Red Guard. (In addition to the Forbes follow-up, Ping clarified many of the facts in a separate article over the weekend.)

Meanwhile, over on Amazon.com, the book’s ratings began to plummet. As of press time, it rated 1.6 out of 5 stars, with 315 out of 377 reviewers giving it the lowest possible one star, often under such headlines as “Absolutely a liar” and “A good book only on April 1st.” Under Amazon’s reviewing system, most of the critics were able to weigh in under a pen name—but many appeared to be non-native English speakers with a knowledge of Chinese history. “Only those cant [sic] read chinese and not familiar with modern chinese history will believe the story,” wrote one. “She had [sic] talked this fake story too many times,” added another. “Her father and my father worked together in the university since 50s until they retired … Ping Fu was also a Red Guard herself!” blasted a third. 

Both Ping and her publishers say they were caught off guard by the vitriol. “We’ve never had an experience like this before,” says Adrian Zackheim, publisher and president of Portfolio, which released the book last month. “It’s not clear that any of the comments are based on an actual reading of the book itself, which is also a cause of some concern … The barrage of negative comments mostly seem to be based on the blog and Internet comments.” (The book is not yet available in China.) 

“We are proud of the book, and of Ping, and of her perseverance,” Zackheim added. “Ping worked hard to get her facts right, but it’s her memory that she’s offering … it’s a personal memoir that’s written with candor.”

While Ping says she expected a certain amount of backlash inside China, she was shocked at the firestorm her book touched off. “I have never seen an attack of this scale,” she says. “It was really a surprise … they just suddenly all appeared, and they appeared like armies.”
After her initial replies to her critics, Ping expected the furor to die down—but her responses seem to have added fuel to the fire. “We looked at some comments, and I thought if I were to just make a public answer to some of them, some of the questions and issues that I thought were triggered by the Forbes translation into Chinese…it would be fine,” she says. “But it just comes more and more.” 

“It makes me feel like I’m living my youth again. Like everybody just screaming at me with all these names,” she says. “It makes me feel like I went right back to when I was 8 years old”—when, as Ping writes in the book, she was labeled a “black element” and forced to undergo public shame sessions. “Most of those [behind] the anonymous attacks are trying to reflect their own experience over mine. But everybody’s life is different,” she says. 

“The other thing I respect is that if there are editorial mistakes, which every book has, here, we just point it out and then we correct it. I already corrected some information I was going to correct in the second print,” she adds. “If they could help me make it more accurate, I’d be more than happy to do that … [but] this organized attack is not constructive.” 

The Amazon attack bears elements of the type of Internet bullying—known by the ominous phrase “human flesh search”—that is increasingly common among Chinese bloggers. “Coordinated Netizen action against an individual is not at all unusual in China,” says Emily Parker, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and an expert on the Internet and democracy. (Parker cautions that she is unfamiliar with Ping’s case and therefore cannot speculate on who might be behind the attacks.) 

While the human flesh search phenomenon has helped expose injustice, it also has been trained on individuals to humiliate them publicly or to punish those who do not align with a strongly nationalist viewpoint. Indeed, recent hacking attacks on prominent American media outlets seem to have been aimed at publications deemed critical of China’s leaders. 

In Ping’s case, the most intimate details of her life story have become fodder for the bloggers’ mockery and their conspiracy theories—including her account of a brutal gang rape as a child. “Why can I say [the rape] is a lie with 100% confidence?” wrote one commentator. “Because, had anybody in the US dare [sic] to claim that she was gang raped by 10 teen boy [sic] in broad daylight on Pennsylvania ave without providing any evidence, everybody would know that is a LIE!!!” 

Ping says she knew writing about the rape might be risky. “My mother and my sister were very much against it,” she says. “They don’t understand why I would want to air the dirty laundry. To them, for me to write about the rape is unbelievable.” But Ping says she knew that keeping silent about the assault would perpetuate the trauma and the cycle of injustice. “During the writing process, I found this piece was an important thing [to address] because it was such a traumatic moment in my life. And not writing it feels like hiding with fear. I was trying to confront my own fear, so that I can heal and move forward.” 

Indeed, many of Ping’s critics seem to take offense at the book’s airing of China’s dirty laundry—namely, of the traumas of the Cultural Revolution—to non-Chinese readers. Others seem to resent Ping for having escaped China to resettle into a successful life in the United States. As one blogger wrote, “I think the most important point that outrages Chinese is that Ping … lived a better-than-average life.” 

Of her critics, Ping says, “I sympathize in some way, because we are in a generation where most of us, whether a ‘black element’ or Red Guard, we have all gone through a period where I feel we all have been victims in life. I’m lucky that I came to the United States and made a better life, and many people over there did not. And they may be angry.” 

Still, she notes, “there are so many people in the world, there are so many women in developing countries [who] have no voice,” she adds. “Like that little girl who was lonely and scared, they have no voice. But I have a voice now, today. And I need to talk about it and write what happened.” 

Another point of contention for the Internet attackers has been Ping’s account of a paper she wrote as a college student on China’s one-child policy and the practice of forced abortions taking place in the countryside. According to her book, Ping was one of the first people to report openly on the infanticides and forced abortions, and the paper eventually got her into trouble with the Chinese government, which asked her to leave the country. 

The furor over the details of the college paper dovetail with a heated debate inside China at the moment about the possibility of abolishing the one-child policy, amid concerns over China’s falling birth rate and the country’s gender imbalance, the result of the preference for boys among Chinese families. With the policy now “at the top of national consciousness,” Ping says, “my story … may have just triggered some people.” 

Regardless of the online attacks—and her worries about visiting China (“You worry about fanatics,” she says)—Ping and her publishers remain undaunted, and the book just landed on The New York Times extended bestseller list. As the controversy has gained steam, the author also has received support from fans and colleagues near—the CEO of 3D Systems, which is set to acquire Geomagic, comes from a family of Holocaust survivors and has encouraged her to “be strong”—and far. One Twitter follower told her, “I read the Forbes article about you, my parents … went through the same.” These small acts of kindness are right in line with the philosophy espoused by Ping’s title. “This is not a book about bashing China,” she says. “I hope [the attackers] understand that I have come to peace with what happened in the past … I try to use my story in a small way to show people that there’s hope, and you can make it.” 

“The thing is, this is my story. This is a memoir, not a history book. This is not a researched biography of somebody else. This is my life, this is my memory, this is my experience,” she says. “I was trying to show people how generosity, love, and compassion can lead to a better life. It’s not about anger.”

The Guardian: Chinese Cast Doubt over Executive's Rags to Riches Tale

The following report, by Tania Branigan and Ed Pilkington, was published on The Guardian, on February 4, 2013:

Her story is an incredible tale of triumph over tragedy: a tormented childhood during China's Cultural Revolution, detention and forced exile after exposing female infanticide – then glittering success as the head of a major US technology firm. 

"It sounds too unbelievable for fiction, but this is the true story of a life in two worlds," enthuses the website for Ping Fu's autobiography, Bend Not Break. In one interview to promote the book, the entrepreneur related how Michelle Obama had invited her back to the White House for a nightcap after the 2010 State of the Union address. 

But after Chinese readers flagged up a series of inconsistencies and improbabilities in interviews she has given, Fu has been forced to defend her book from accusations that some of it is exaggerated or untrue. "I am shocked and saddened by the things that have been said," Fu told the Guardian. "It is very, very hurtful because it brings me right back to what happened to me when I was eight years old." 

Fu is chief executive and cofounder of the 3D software company Geomagic, whose laser scanning technology has been used by Hollywood film studios, car designers and historians making a precise replica of the Statue of Liberty. She arrived in the US aged 25, passing through college and spells as a babysitter, cleaner and waitress before rising to her current position as a prominent business executive and board member of the White House advisory panel, the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. 

Many of the questions swirling around Bend Not Break relate to the 54-year-old's horrifying account of being wrenched from her parents when the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, and sent to a re-education camp where she was gang-raped at the age of 10. An estimated 36 million people were persecuted during the turmoil of that time and numerous families were torn apart. 

But sceptics, including Fang Zhouzi, an influential blogger who scrutinises Chinese academia, say much of Fu's story does not ring true. Fu has now acknowledged that her 2010 account to NPR radio of being forced to watch Red Guards executing a teacher by using four horses to tear the victim apart was an "emotional memory" and probably wrong. 

"When I was young, these are the stories being told to us and in my nightmares they come back again and again. That time was so traumatic. I was taken away from my parents," she said. 

But she now accepts that her imagination may have played tricks. "Somehow in my mind I always thought I saw it, but now I'm not sure my memory served me right. I probably saw it in a movie or something, and I acknowledge that's a problem." 

There are also queries about the circumstances surrounding her departure from China. The opening line of the book reads: "When I was 25 years old, the Chinese government quietly deported me." Sceptics point out that usually only prominent dissidents go into exile by arrangement. 

Fu said she hadn't used "deported" in the draft of her memoir. The word was suggested as an amendment by her co-author and editors as a way to "attract readers". 

But she added that by the dictionary definition it was accurate to say she had been deported. "If you are asked to leave your country and it is not voluntary, that is a form of deportation." 

According to Fu's book, she was forced to leave because of her university thesis on female infanticide prompted by the one-child policy. A Shanghai newspaper learned of her groundbreaking research and "called for an end to the madness" in an editorial comment subsequently republished by the People's Daily – in what would have been an astonishing move for the staid official Communist party newspaper. That sparked an international outcry and her detention, she wrote. 

After Fang said he found no trace of the commentary, Fu responded in a column in the Huffington Post: "I remember reading an editorial in a newspaper in 1982 that called for gender equality. It was not a news article and not written by me, and I didn't know it had anything to do with my research. When writing the book, I did not name the paper, since I wasn't certain. However, I think that is where I read the editorial because it was the most popular and official newspaper." 

Adrian Zackheim, publisher of Portfolio books, Penguin's business imprint, said he stood by Bend Not Break, adding that he had "absolute confidence" in Fu and her memoir. "I have no doubts that the book is substantially correct and that attempts to pick apart elements of it are political attacks." 

Zackheim said Portfolio had no plans to look into the veracity of the book. "This is a memoir of a woman's life, it's not a work of journalism. Are there errors in the book? I can't say, but if there are they are errors of memory."