Broken Fact: Fu Ping's Red Guard Photo

The Original Story:
In Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping provided a photo of her in a group under a big Red Guard flag.

The photo was not mentioned directly in the book itself, but it has the following caption:

When I lived in the dormitories, I spent much of my time with students my age. During our mandatory study sessions, we recited slogans from Mao's Little Red Book. I am second from the right in the bottom row.

The Later Clarification:
After being widely questioned whether the picture shows that Fu Ping was a Red Guard herself, she clarified:

In the Fast Company story image, you and other kids are wearing Red Guard armbands under the Red Guard flag, yet you claim you were not a Red Guard.  

If you zoom into that picture, you only need to look closely to see I have no red band on my arm. The image was taken in front of a Red Guard flag at the school that I attended in the late 70s. I wrote in the book that the situation got better after 1972. Still, I was never a Red Guard. 

The Debunking:
There are several issues, some of which are blatant lies, in her clarification.

First of all, she now admits that she was attending school in the "late 70s". Yet her original caption was insisting that she was in "study sessions," not school. She was spending time with "students my age", implying that she was not a student herself.

She states that the picture was taken at the school, as if the flag was just a coincidental background. That is not true. The background of this picture is not any school, but a famous park in Nanjing. It is obvious that the picture was a record of an organized field trip in which they had brought out the flags and arm bands of the Red Guard to display their revolutionary spirits.

It is not as clear whether Fu Ping was wearing an arm band herself in the picture. She insists that she was not. But some people have taken up her challenge of zooming into that picture. The result may be convincing to some but skeptical to others. It is a case that you have to know what to look for to see it:

What is clear, however, is that most, if not all, other kids in the picture are wearing the Red Guard arm bands. It would be quite odd if Fu Ping was the only one without it and yet was allowed to join the group in their field trip.

In late 1970s, Red Guards was no longer their initial incarnation in 1966 but more or less an honor organization parallel to the Communist Youth League, which later absorbed and disbanded Red Guards altogether. Although no longer radical or violent, Red Guard nonetheless maintained a political standard that excluded "bad elements." Given that Fu Ping was possibly a member of the Red Guard herself, or at least very close to them, her entire story of being prosecuted during the Cultural Revolution has to be in serious doubt.

Update (6/20/2013): Suzhou University disclosed that their records show that Fu Ping had become a member of the Chinese Communist Youth League in 1973, before or when she started high school. The Youth League is the precursor organization for Chinese Communist Party and only very selective few could gain acceptance, unlike the Red Guards which had a much wider membership. It's extremely unlikely Fu Ping could gain acceptance of the Youth League without being a Red Guard earlier in those years.

xgz: Bend, Not Break: A Lie in Two Worlds (Part II)

The following post is published by xgz on The Daily Kos on February 2, 2013:

Many Americans who do not know much about China are puzzled by the outrage displayed by Chinese Americans against the lies of Ms Ping Fu in her book. These Americans are "naive to the point of cute", quoting one commenter on the Amazon website. They seem to think that as long as her message is against something evil, it is ok to lie. What they do not understand is that such lying is adding insult to the injury already suffered by the millions of Chinese. It makes it harder to promote democracy in China, and reinforces the image of American ignorance and arrogance. 

Many of these Americans have accused critics of Ms Fu, including myself, as shills of the Chinese government. This angers me more than the lying by Ms Fu. It is a combination of MccArthyism and racism that any card-carrying liberal should be ashamed of. I have been a kossack for seven years and have a long track record of diaries from which you can judge whether I am a shill of anything. In fact, this kind of personal attack shows me that they have lost the argument. 

In part II here, I will address the questions arising from Ms Fu's clarification to her story. Simply put, she is still lying. 

My previous diary, the first part, is here. The next part, part III, is here. 

In her clarification, she is walking back on essentially all the claims published on Forbes, NPR, Inc, and other media outlets, and putting the blames on "editorial" errors by these media outlets. She claims that the book does not contain most of these errors. 

Here is a summary of her clarification:

1. She was never sent to a labor camp. She lived in a university dorm for 10 years, not a labor camp.
2. She was not a child labor, and did not work in a factory.
3. She was not deprived of an education. Instead, she studied nonstop.
4. She did not enter college in 1977, but entered in 1978. The college she entered was Jiangsu Teacher's College, which was renamed Suzhou University in 1982.
5. She did not witness the execution of a teacher.
6. She was gang-raped.
7. Her thesis on infanticide in China was never published.
8. The newspaper article on infanticide was not authored by her. She only read it. And she is not sure which newspaper it was.
9. She read about UN cutting funding to China while waiting for her passport.
10. She had been planning to attend graduate school in Nanjing to study comparative literature, but was able to because she was prevented from graduating from college.
11. She never studied English in college.
12. She was not a Red Guard. The photo was taken in front of a Red Guard flag at school.

Although she pretty much retracted most of her incredible story, she made more lies in these answers. I will focus on three of them, those highlighted above. 

She read about UN cutting funding to China while waiting for her passport.
Her text of clarification:

A: I heard about the sanctions in China while awaiting my passport. I was told that the UN was unhappy about this issue. A quick web search shows that the American-based journalist Steven W. Mosher wrote about female infanticide in China in 1981. His book, called Broken Earth, was published in 1984 -- the same year I was waiting for my passport. Knowing this, it makes sense that I was asked to leave quietly. Anything else would have drawn more attention to the issue. According to the Los Angeles Times, Mosher successfully lobbied George W. Bush to cut UN funding for China. His story and the timeline are consistent with my experience.

George W. Bush did not become president until 2001, by then Ping Fu was already a US citizen. Did GW travel back in time to cut UN funding for China in 1984? 

In fact, the only thing that an US president can do is to withhold the US contribution to the UN agency, in this case UNFPA. The controversy regarding China's birth control program with UN was not over infanticide, but with forced abortion and coerced sterilization. Japan and EU decided to fill in the gap left by the US withholding the funds, so there was no impact on China's program. So neither the story nor the timeline are consistent with what Ms Fu is claiming. 

She never studied English in college.
Her text:

In college, English language classes were offered, but not required. I did not study English ever. I had "level zero" English, just like most Americans know a few words of Spanish or French. I tried to learn more English when I knew I was going to the U.S., but when I arrived, I only remembered a few.

This is a blatant lie. English language class in Chinese colleges since 1978 has been mandatory for all freshmen and sophomores. In addition, one also has to pass English language test in order to be admitted for graduate school. 

I originally had been planning to go to graduate school to study comparative literature in Nanjing, but that could not happen due to the circumstances.

She could not make this plan if she did not study English. 

She was not a Red Guard. The photo was taken in front of a Red Guard flag at school.
Her text:

If you zoom into that picture, you only need to look closely to see I have no red band on my arm. The image was taken in front of a Red Guard flag at the school that I attended in the late 70s. I wrote in the book that the situation got better after 1972. Still, I was never a Red Guard.

This is another lie. Look at the photo. She was proudly displaying her left arm, like all others in the front row of the photo. Because of the shadow, it is hard to see what is on her left arm. Notice everyone in the front row was wearing the armband. If she was the only person not wearing it, why would she put her arm forward like that to show it? 

This was not at school either. This was a park in Nanjing. Notice the two towers in the background? It is this place, called Linggu Temple. It is believed to be the best Buddhist temple in the world, and is surrounded by a park. This picture was a picture of a field trip by the Red Guards. 

There are other lies in her clarification. We may need more diaries to analyze them.

xgz: Bend, Not Break: A Lie in Two Worlds (Part I)

On January 31, 2013, "xgz" at The Daily Kos published the first of his several blogs questioning Fu Ping's book:

I was listening to the NPR news in the morning last week as I drove to work, and heard the promotion of a book by Ping Fu titled "Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds." It was an amazing story of someone who suffered through the Cultural Revolution in China, then succeeded in getting herself an education and made a fortune in the US. Truly amazing. 

I was simply amazed when I heard the story. When I got home in the evening, I searched for more details about the story, wanting to know more because this story was simply too good. As I learned more details, some minor inconsistencies began to creep up. I explained them away by convincing myself that either the author remembered wrong, or the reporters who reported the story got the details wrong. 

But as I found out about more and more details, the story made less and less sense. Finally, I saw the criticism by the Chinese freelance writer Fang Zhouzi (who just received the combined Nature and Sense About Science inaugural John Maddox Prize for standing up for science). His analysis convinced me that the whole story was made up. 

I was a young child at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. My home and those of my close relatives were all ransacked by the Red Guards. They took away almost everything from us. For a brief period afterwards, my parents were away from home and I was taken care of by one of my cousins who was the middle school age. When she walked me to the kindergarten before going to school herself, the other kids in the neighborhood would spit on her. This period was so brief that I have no memory of it. My parents came back very soon and we had a basically "normal" life, considering the circumstances. 

The reason I told my own experience during the Cultural Revolution is to provide the background for my criticism of Fu's book. I did not read her book itself, but read the story told in the book from the Chinese version of the Forbes article and other reports on the book, including the NPR story. 

The first incredible detail in the book is the claim that Fu was taken to the labor camp at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution while she was eight years old. She stayed at the labor camp for ten years. She also said that she had to take care of her four year old sister. This means that the labor camp had children as young as four years old. Of all the people who went through the labor camps before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution, there had not been a single person who reported seeing young children in a labor camp. 

A photography of her from that period provided by herself in fact contradicts her story. The photo shows her with a group of children posing in front of a flag. The Chinese characters on the flag read "Red Guard Brigade". All of the children in the photo wore armbands indicating that they were members of the Red Guard. I remember these armbands because many children were not allowed to wear them due to their "bad" family background. The photo shows that they were in a park. In fact, this was a park in the city of Nanjing. This was probably a photo taken when this group of Red Guard toured the park, perhaps on a weekend trip. It is clear that instead of being sent to a labor camp, Ms Fu was a member of the Red Guard herself. 

The second incredible detail was how she got into college. She said that she entered Suzhou University in 1977. This was incredible in two ways. First, Suzhou University did not even exist until 1982. Although it was first built in 1900, it was split into several colleges in 1952 after communists took over China. The main part of it became Jiangsu Teacher's College. In 1982 it was merged with some other colleges to form Suzhou University again. Let us be charitable here and assume that she entered Jiangsu Teacher's College in 1977. But then there is a bigger problem. In 1977 entrance into a college was a privilege reserved for the political elite. It required going through a political evaluation. People who had questionable political backgrounds were not allowed into college. If as she said that she spent ten years in a labor camp, that would definitely disqualify her from any college. Conversely, if she indeed entered college in 1977, it would mean that she was a member of the politically privileged during the Cultural Revolution. This would also be consistent with the possibility that she was a member of the Red Guard. 

But let us be charitable again and assume that she remembered wrong again. She would actually take the first national college entrance exam after the Cultural Revolution in 1977, and entered college in 1978. But even then it would not be consistent with her story. There was still the problem of political evaluation which was still used in 1977 but dropped in the subsequent years. There was also a problem of how she was able to study for the exam. In 1977 because it was the first exam in more than ten years, there were many times more people who took the exam than what would be on average. The competition was fierce, and the admission percentage was extremely low (about 4.8%). It would be highly unlikely that someone without any formal education would have been able to pass the exam. I had several cousins who took this exam, and none of them passed. 

The biggest question was how she came to the US. She claimed that she wrote an article about infanticide in China while she was in college. This article was said to be published on the People's Daily in 1981. Its publication led to an UN sanction against China's one-child policy. As a result, Fu was jailed for a few months, then was exiled to the US. This was just not something that could happen in China in the early 1980's. First of all, People's Daily would never publish such an article. Indeed, no one has been able to find such an article during the time she claimed.  Second, the UN never imposed any sanctions on China for its brutal birth control policies, as much as many people wished that it would. Third, exiling dissidents to the US was not a practice by the Chinese government in the early 1980's. A famous dissident of that period, Wei Jingsheng, was not exiled to the US until 1997, after spending 18 years in various Chinese prisons. 

In the early 1980s, it was very hard for anyone in China to be able to get permission to leave China and study in the US. That Fu was able to do this would indicate again that she was from the privileged class, not persecuted as she claimed in her book. 

Let me end by quoting a review by a reader Farside Z on Amazon: 

There is a very logical explanation of the two extremely opposite reviews of this book. It's what your mother tells you - If something looks too good to be true, it ain't.

Taken at face value, the book is truly inspirational. The author's life experience is a triumph of human spirit in spite of overwhelming odds and adversities against her. It is simply out of this world. 

The sad truth is - it is. The stories are more than perfect because the author is not inconvenienced by fact or historic accuracy. She made up most, if not all, her stories for sensationalism and personal gain. China was brutally dark and oppressive during the culture revolution, but what the author described plainly had no credibility with people who had lived through the period. 

This is why people are speaking out and where the lowest ratings come from. Tragedy and suffering are not pretense for personal agenda, especially when they are false. Sympathy and admiration are to be earned, not manipulated. 

People are rightfully outraged because the author's insincerity undermines the genuine catastrophe of the culture revolution. She takes advantage of people's trust and makes a mockery of their compassion. 

By now, the author should have realized her stories have backfired. It's time to face your conscience and apologize to the people that are lied to.