The Daily Beast: The Persecution of Ping Fu

On February 11, 2013, The Daily Beast published the following report authored by Sir Harold Evans, who had previously interviewed Fu Ping on behalf of the Reuters.

Although the article was published under "World News," it reads more like an opinion piece than objective reporting. Indeed, it is as strongly opinionated as it is biased. Evans attacked Fu Ping's critics with outlandish name-callings and even singled out the "lin" at Amazon and attacked her personally.

She was one among the millions of victims of Red Guard cruelty in Mao’s Cultural Revolution. She came to America as a penniless exile—and dared to succeed. Now, for telling her story, writes Harold Evans, she's once more the target of a mob. 

“Do not read this book if you reject kindness, humility, and ingenuity.” So wrote Sally Rosenthal, the television producer, in her early appraisal of Bend, Not Break by Ping Fu, a memoir of 50 years of her life in two worlds, China and America. 

Serious reviewers have acclaimed the book ("she tells her story with intelligence, verve and a candor that is often heart-rending," wrote Melanie Kirkpatrick in the Wall Street Journal). Yet rejection of the values Rosenthal identified in the book is the central feature of a vituperative campaign against Ping Fu led by an army of Chinese bloggers.

Now 54, Ping Fu came to America, alone and unwillingly, when she was 25, having upset the Chinese government by describing what she’d seen in the countryside, the murder of female babies at birth in pursuit of the one-child policy. She was penniless, with only a few words of English, and haunted by memories of a brutal separation from her adoptive family. She cleaned houses, waited on tables, learned English, fell in love with computers (and a computational scientist she married), discovered an aptitude for programming. In 1997 she cofounded Geomagic, a software imaging company whose modeling systems afford precise replication of complex shapes—the custom cranial plate for the skull of ABC’s Bob Woodruff, blown up in Iraq; heat tiles for the shuttle; prosthetic limbs of hitherto unimaginable precision. In 2010 she was appointed to President Obama’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. 

The cyberwarriors attacking her are not interested in any of that. They are consumed by bitter resentment of her portrayal of China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. She lied, they assert, about being gang-raped at 10: “the Red Guard were ‘revolutionists, not street thugs or rapists.’” The countryside infanticide due to the one-child policy she wrote about in an essay, which led to her arrest and solitary confinement, couldn’t have happened when she said it did if at all, they assert; nor was her subsequent departure due to an order for deportation. 

I say “army” of assailants, but how many there are and where they are is one of the tantalizing unknowns in Internet warfare conducted anonymously. Two user names—20, a hundred—may conceal a single identity. The Wizard of Oz syndrome has been powerfully amplified, in this case, by the openness, some would say naiveté, of Amazon. It’s a brilliant company, but its book review site is not designed to repel boarders. Anyone with multiple email addresses and user names can click that many times on the invitations to write a customer review or say which other reviews they found helpful. Some 500 have clicked on the low one-star rating for Bend, Not Break, and 100 on the five-star—but this, too, is deceptive, since some five-star reviews are bogus, infiltrating more poison than praise. Second, the hostile ratings can be boosted by a tongue-in-cheek click: “I found this [nasty] review helpful.” 

Take the industrious "Lin." Male, female, or hermaphrodite. Lin has led the customer review section with a five-star but hostile review of January 22 that was pages long. Amazon justified this, it seems, by the statement that “1,301 of 1,379 found the following review helpful.” Lin was still leading the reviews on February 9. How was this achieved when other genuine reviews of merit had appeared and the legend was unchanged that 1,301 of 1,379 “found the following review helpful?” Amazon has a button to enable readers to alert the site to abuse. It doesn’t seem to have much effect. 

We don’t know how much of the hate campaign is organized by Chinese-Americans, proud of their country of origin, or by bloggers in China, acting on their own or encouraged by party and government. It is perhaps worth noting that putting the name Fu first is the Chinese way of ordering her name. 

The dissident artist Ai Weiwei (New Statesman, October 17, 2012) has exposed the systematic way these things are organized in China by relating the confessions of one of the commentators hired by the Chinese government or Communist Party to steer a discussion away from anti-party content. They’re said to be paid 50 cents for every post on an Internet message board. 

“I cannot make my name public. I’m 26. I have too many user names. If I want to use one, I just register it ... Almost every morning at 9 a.m. I receive an email from my superiors, on which directions to guide netizens’ thoughts, to blur their focus. This requires a lot of skill. You can’t write in a very official manner, you must conceal your identity ... You want to create illusions to attract the attention and comments of netizens ... The tone of speech, identity and stance of speech must look as if it is an unsuspecting member of public, only then can it resonate with netizens.” 

The anti-Ping bloggers on Amazon are not just a random assortment of individuals who seek to correct lapses of memory. That is fair enough, indeed desirable; it would be surprising if there were not errors in remembrance. It’s the substance of the reviews that matter and the intent of the critic, and here the intent is less literary than political. The purpose seems to be to undermine the author’s credibility about her privations at the hands of the Red Guards when she was torn from her home at age 8 with The Little Red Book for her education. 

But not just that. The campaign has morphed into a vindictive effort to destroy her life, to have her honors and awards withdrawn, the pending sale of Geomagic disrupted. Ping Fu groups have been formed, character assassination tasks assigned, and Amazon reviewers created a Google group to take their conversation offline. Here’s an entry from one of them under the rubric “Do not like liers [sic].” 

“I am thinking about launching a petition on the White House website demanding the government to look into FU’s green card application case for possible lying under oath (it only takes 150 signatures for the petition to be displayed on the website.” 

To which Lanlan Wang responds, “good idea, can someone provide a link.” 

The apparent leader of the Google group writes: “Collect Ping’s book (it hurts to say this but yeah we need facts).” 

“Draft an open letter to Chinese living in North America, call for action” 

Here’s a contributor to the Facebook group: “Please join this group, It is time to stay together and give this blatant fraud a final strike. We will discuss this, dig out more lies. Write a petition to UCIS NBC, PBS, to expose her lies.” 

Prof. Erica Brindley, a historian of Asia at Penn, ventured into the forum to say that Ping’s account of the Cultural Revolution was sound. At once she was subjected to lacerating personal attacks, known in China as “the human-flesh search.” So, too, Van Harris in the Google group, who protested the tactics of harassment and personal abuse. “H Chen” told him he must be a paid troll for Ping, a stupid American, a very, very lousy lawyer who should see a psychiatrist. 

And Ping Fu? No doubt she is remembering the counsel of her Shanghai Papa that has fortified her all her life. “Bamboo is flexible, bending with the wind but never breaking, capable of adapting to any circumstance ... Your ability to thrive depends, in the end, on your attitude to your life circumstances. Take everything in stride with grace, putting forth energy when it is needed, yet always staying calm inwardly.”

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?"

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.”