Fu Ping's Interview with a Chinese Newspaper in USA

On July 3, 2013, Fu Ping was interviewed by Qiaobao, a Chinese language newspaper published in the USA, in which she answered some questions raised by her alma mater Suzhou University. The interview is originally in Chinese.

Qiaobao: Suzhou University accused you for falsifying academic credentials. They displayed your student registration and files at the school and proved that you had dropped out in March, 1982 and did not earn any degree there. Have you ever publicly stated that you have a Bachelor degree in Chinese Language and Literature from Suzhou University? 

Fu Ping: I rarely mentioned Suzhou University because I didn't obtain any degree there. In my social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc., I never included Suzhou University. In fact, in all places I have control, I never mention Suzhou University. 

But there are places that I have no control of. About 10 years ago, our company's marketing department has a girl from Malaysia. I told her that I did not graduate from Suzhou University. So she wrote on our page "post graduate degree." Because she thought "post graduate degree" could also mean "non degree" besides "masters graduate student." We made corrections right away and it was not on our company web site. But recently when our company changed web site, an program that was automatically fetching files made it visible again. I did not discover it in time. 

Right now there are many web sites, including Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, etc., all carried this incorrect information. I found out later that it was because their automated search feature. The real culprit of this academic credentials fraud is the automated search, not me. 

In fact, my business is in computers. I earned BS and MS in computer science in the US. I do not need a degree from Suzhou University for any of my work. It's not like a degree from Harvard, after all. 

Someone said that they obtained information from University of Illinois where I had worked to prove that I had claimed of possessing a degree from Suzhou University. But the information I do possess do not prove that. I have also inquired to University of Illinois. They told me that they have never told anyone that I had a degree from Suzhou University. I feel that those who are attacking me were misled. [Note: we do have evidence indicating otherwise.] 

Another place is a technological paper I wrote as the third author. The author's bio section of this paper stated that I earned a Bachelor of Chinese Language and Literature in 1983. As a matter of fact, I did not write that. I only published a technological paper. The author's bio was added by editors. 

Qiaobao: In your book, you said that in the fall of 1982, you "innocently walked across campus making preparations for graduation, someone sneaked up behind me, jammed a black canvas bag over my head ... escorted into a nearby car." Since you had already dropped out school that March, why were you walking on campus in the fall? 

Fu: This is a typo. If you read the whole passage, all the stories happened in the spring. The fall only occurred in this sentence. It was an error. 

In fact, I have corrected it as soon as I found this mistake. 

Qiaobao: You also mentioned in your memoir that you published a paper while you were in school, on the subject of female infanticide under the one-child policy. You were arrested and deported because of it. But Suzhou University said that all the graduation thesis in the Department of Chinese Literature were about literature or linguistics. They wouldn't be involved in sociology subjects such as infanticide. There were no teacher for this thesis of yours. How do you respond? 

Fu: Before graduation, I wanted to go to graduate school in journalism at Nanjing University. So I intended my thesis to be like a news report. In 1981, the one-child policy was going crazy in China and got my interest. With the permission from my adviser, I started interviewing people and then discovered the female infanticide problem in rural China. 

I heard a lot of stories from rural women and became their sounding board. In order to do this work, I had indeed spent a lot of time and missed a lot of classes. 

Then I wrote them down and showed my teacher. My teacher passed my article to his friend in Shanghai's Wenhui Daily. At that time I did not know where this paper reached, but heard later that it was handed higher and higher in the official hierarchy and reached the Party Central. 

This was not good news for the new leadership. Therefore I was arrested and locked up for 3 days. After the release, the police told me to leave Suzhou University and not tell anyone the reason. That's why my mother and I were insistent in dropping out of the school. 

Qiaobao: Who is the teacher who allowed you to write this article? 

Fu: It's not just one, but I cannot provide names. In fact, the person who approved my work no longer admits that. I don't think it's necessary to expose this. They are all my teachers and classmates. If they want to say I am lying, then let them say that. I know who I am and don't want to explain. 

Qiaobao: In your book you said that you experienced "finger checking" for pregnancy. This was strongly condemned by Suzhou University and your classmates. What happened there? 

Fu:  This is indeed my mistake. I wrote about "finger checking" to illustrate the difference between China's one-child policy and the population policy in the west. In 1981, getting pregnant in China could be illegal. Therefore there was checking with fingers. But the procedure was using one's own fingers to prove period, not allowing other people's fingers to enter. 

I told my coauthor Meimei Fox of this concept. But she did not write accurately. The illegal pregnancy checking was subjecting to those who have already given birth, not all females. It was written in the book as for all women, but not students of Suzhou University. 

But Chinese are not a precise language. It could be interpreted in different ways when viewed from different angles. It read like all female students in Suzhou University must submit to the checking. I discovered it later and corrected it on New York Times.
I feel sorry for this. I did not spot this mistake before the book went to press. Later Fang Zhouzi hyped on it and wrote it in a very dirty way. If this hurt the dignity of students in Suzhou University, I am willing to apologize. 

But the "finger checking" absolutely happened. It was not just me. Other articles have mentioned it too. I wrote it because I hope to raise the outside world's awareness of China's one-child policy. It was not meant to insult female students in Suzhou University. 

Qiaobao: You had participated in a literature organization called Red Maple Society. You said in the book that you were arrested and interrogated because an article published by the society. Suzhou University said that was a lie. What do you think? 

Fu: I had indeed not been taken into custody because of Red Maple Society. But in my book I used the word "arrest," which could mean "taking into custody" or "detain," it could also be understood as "stop." It was not as going into prison, but that they don't allow you to attend classes. They put several of you into a room, make you write confessions and expose each other. 

The Department of Chinese Literature had a student journal called Wu Gou. According to my memory, I was the editor-in-chief (主编) for Wu Gou, but not the ultimate decision maker (总编). Because I was the only girl in the society and the journal, they let me be the editor-in-chief, in charge of printing and logistics. Now some people say I wasn't the editor-in-chief. If they could tell me who was, I would like to correct that.
In January, 1979, Wu Gou published the article "The Confession of a Communist Party Member" by Liu Buchun. The article raised doubts on Communist Party and Communism. 

At that same time, Peking University, Tsinghua University and other 11 colleges co-founded the magazine This Generation. They reprinted an article from Wu Gou. Our journal sent a representative to Beijing to attend a meeting by This Generation. I don't remember who went, but it wasn't me. 

After arriving at Beijing, he didn't attend the meeting but went to the Great Hall of People to watch Deng Xiaoping receiving leaders of the Communist Youth League. There, Deng Xiaoping clearly stated that he wouldn't allow universities publish their underground journals. Afterwords, This Generation and Wu Gou all closed down. The school investigated and interrogated us. The Red Maple Society could not meet any more.

Fu Ping's Speech at the American Library Association

On June 30, 2013, Fu Ping delivered a speech at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Library Association. The following is an advance transcript released by her through the Geomagic web site:

Dear ALA organizers, librarians, authors and fellow book lovers, 

I’d like to say, “thank you.” It’s a great honor to deliver this speech. 

It is very hard for me to put into words what libraries mean to me. 

Living with my Shanghai parents as a child, the library was where Shanghai Papa cultivated in me a lasting appreciation of ideas, which he said, like books, required proper care. 

Later, as a college student – new to our country – libraries large and small became places of refuge. My favorite is the Geisel Library at UCSD, a lantern design building with a strong geometric form and a fabulous Dr. Seuss collection. 

There, I could escape from the world and sit quietly. Surrounded by the 360-degree glass windows, I could go into the world of ideas, of intellectual challenges, of the experiences of others. And, as a scientist, I could immerse myself in the never-ending search for facts and the truth. I could refuse to be diverted either by what one might wish to believe, or by what could have been the beneficial social effects if it were believed.  

All of this is self-evident for Americans, in large part because of the extraordinary work done by the librarians. 

What I’m saying is that libraries made me feel safe: safe to explore new places, wonders, and controversial ideas. Safe to go off-path, safe to question. 

And I have to share with you: There were times before I came to this country when I did not feel safe. There were times when even asking questions was dangerous. 

So I couldn't, as my Shanghai Papa urged, properly care for my independent thoughts.
I was eight when my world changed. 

My beloved parents were university educated, but in the Cultural Revolution, learning was a crime. As a result, the government cracked down on teachers, professors and intellectuals. Like many other educated Chinese, my parents were sent to the countryside for hard labor camp.  

Suddenly, I was stripped of my afternoons in the library. And I was a long way from the happy kitchen in which my Shanghai Mama taught me the five essential elements of cooking: aroma, color, texture, taste and love. Although only a small child, I was placed in a one-room dormitory with my younger sister, Hong, under the vigilant watch of the Red Guards.  

I was supposed to be in first grade, but schools were closed and books were forbidden. My days were spent studying the works of Chairman Mao, working at factory to build radios, and following the Communist party’s strict code of obedience. 

There were no libraries for my sister and me, or for anyone.  

I was so young and the mind works in ways to protect us from our worst experiences. 

Today is not the time to relive those struggles, but I want you to know that although it was 47 years ago, I can still feel the trauma as my memories flutter like butterflies at the edges of my consciousness. By no means is it impossible, however, for an unexpected trigger to bring the trauma from the periphery to the center so that I actually relive it. 

Those memories have faded into my dreams and my dreams into my memories, but I know for sure the only thing that kept me going was the responsibility for my younger sister and trying to reach a safe place. Fortunately, even in the most vulnerable moment, I can always regain my strength in a good piece of writing. 

You see, life has been messy for me, as it has for most everyone. But we put ourselves back together, don't we? We continue on, toward our journey. 

We heal, leaving small fissures and cracks behind, but these imperfections are okay because it is through these cracks that our authenticity shines.  

We develop compassion, which is emotion shared.  

And it is by revealing these cracks that we can learn to see and be seen deeply. The power of resilience is in all of us, in body and soul. 

When I first arrived in US, like many first-generation immigrants, I had no money or support system. I could not study comparative literature, my previously chosen field, because my English was too poor.  

Talk about being stuck and feeling hopeless!  

But I went forward, going off the beaten path. 

I gained remarkable support from faculty and new friends. And I found those safe places, those libraries, where I could read what I wanted, think independently, and let my mind and spirit venture into new worlds. 

While the study of English was difficult, I found – in science libraries – the language of computer science, which opened to me a whole new world. Instead of writing essays on Montaigne, I was coding for a future that was not yet imagined, a breakthrough that switched the trajectory of my life, both personally and professionally. 

I began working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), which was on the vanguard of innovation. There we took on the “grand challenges of science.” We worked on analyzing protein folding, predicting earthquakes, and revealing the nuances of quantum mechanics.  

Every day I had fun, was challenged, and felt happy!  

We were fortunate. We had few budget constraints and no limits set on our imaginations. We wrote history in scraps of software and tossed much of it into the public domain. We took the work of theoretical scientists and gave it dimension, color and transparency. 

As a child, I had always sought out beauty. This had been a critical part of my survival strategy.  

Now, I had found beauty in the most unlikely place as creating beautiful objects from computer programs was an integral part of my everyday life. For the first time I felt a sense of space and time evaporate as I lost myself deep within my work – the experience of being “in the flow.” 

I believe that innovation is imagination applied. And my imagination and confidence that I could overcome life hurdles didn't allow me to stand idle. I had to innovate. In 1996, I saw a demo from Chuck Hull, the inventor of 3D printing. I was mesmerized. From my factory work in China, I knew the milling machine and casting process. But this was different. Just as a regular printer lays down ink on a blank page in order to form words and pictures, this machine laid down materials – plastic, metal, or ceramic – a layer at a time in order to make parts and products. 

These 3D printers depended on 3D computer models for which I wrote software at NCSA. This was my Aha! moment. Just like how Adobe and Microsoft reinvented desktop publishing, with this technology, we could reinvent desktop manufacturing. This is the Internet of things. This is not about display and sharing data, this is about using data to make stuff. The product is in the software code. My head spun with possibilities. 

It was those possibilities that led Prof. Herbert Edelsbrunner and I to start Geomagic in 1997, a software company to create 3D content for design, print and more. 

When I was growing up, I dreamt of being an astronaut. 

I couldn’t have imagined that the technology we created would be installed on a NASA space shuttle to guarantee the safe return of astronauts. 

Our software has also been used to preserve world heritage sites, such as statue of liberty, and to create beautiful smiles with Invisalign. 

This has been my journey, a circle connected by resilience, compassion and safe places along the way. I was once that broken child. Today, I am the chief strategy officer of a trend-setting public company, 3D Systems. I am an advisor to president Obama on innovation and entrepreneurship, and above all, I am a proud mother of a wonderful daughter. 

And I have a voice now. 

“Bend, Not Break” is a memoir. It is a book, and today it sits on the shelves of libraries around the world. 

I wrote my story – my memoir – in the voice of a mother talking to her daughter, not just any daughter, of course, but my own lovely daughter. 

And I wrote for all the other daughters, too. 

I want to think that in the years to come, a young girl, long after we here are all gone, will reach up and take “Bend, Not Break” from the shelf of a library where she can immerse herself in the words of wisdom. 

And pull it down. 

And turn the pages one by one. 

And say to herself, "I can do this thing, this thing we call life that is sometimes so hard, I can push back the painful dreams and memories and experiences, I can go on.”
“And I will not break...” 

Thank you very much.
 

Questionable Fact: Deng Xiaoping's Help in Fu Ping's Release

The Original Story:
This is not in the book of Bend, Not Break, but Fu Ping told an amazing story of her release from arrest in an interview at Authors at Google:

At the time, Deng Xiaoping has already taken over China. Cultural Revolution was over. So this was embarrassment for the new government and I got into trouble and was thrown in jail. But it was only 3 days. I was lucky that Deng Xiaoping has asked what happened to the reporter. They said, "Well, we threw her in jail." And he said, "Why? This is not Cultural Revolution any more." But he didn't give any other instructions so nobody knew what to do with me. I was let out. 

The Debunking:
This one is actually difficult to debunk as we cannot verify it with Deng Xiaoping himself. Given that this is already the author's second close encounter with that supreme leader of China, one has to wonder why she did not include this fascinating story in her book itself. Could it be that it's simply too good to be true, even for herself?

Broken Fact: Fu Ping's First Political Trouble in College

The Original Story:
On Pages 252-253 of Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping details the political trouble she endured at Suzhou University in the fallout of her magazine being criticized by Deng Xiaoping:

So when the news came back to Suzhou University of what Deng Xiaoping had said about our magazine, the authorities interpreted it as very bad news and took a preemptive strike against us. 

The Red Maple Society was deemed an illegal underground society responsible for publishing anti-Communist propaganda. University officials arrested and interrogated all the students who belonged to our magazine group. For weeks, they pressed us to confess our counterrevolutionary activities. As the editor in chief, I was held most responsible for the trouble. For punishment, I was given a black mark in my personal file... 

For the rest of the semester, I endured relentless criticism by Communist Party officials and never-ending confession sessions. I sank into a deep depression.

The Debunking:
Now we know that Deng Xiaoping was not even aware of Fu Ping's magazine, the entire premise of the above passage falls apart. Shall we category it as her fantasy, nightmare, or simply "emotional memory"?

Update (6/20/2013): Suzhou University confirmed the existence of Red Maple Society in their school at the time. But no members of that organization had experienced political trouble. Two of its key members were selected to become professors at the school, considered prestige position for its graduates.

Update (7/5/2013): In an interview with Qiaobao on July 3, 2013, Fu Ping reinterpreted the meaning of word "arrest" in this story:

I had indeed not been taken into custody because of Red Maple Society. But in my book I used the word "arrest," which could mean "taking into custody" or "detain," it could also be understood as "stop." It was not as going into prison, but that they don't allow you to attend classes. They put several of you into a room, make you write confessions and expose each other.  

Bent Fact: Fu Ping's Early Work in Countryside

The Original Story:
Compared to factory works, Fu Ping spent much less time talking about her doing child-labor in farming in Bend, Not Break. The only significant mention is on Pages 142-143:

After just six months making speedometers, I was sent on rotation to the countryside outside of Nanjing for half a year. I found similar situation there -- the farmers were decent people. We black elements had to work hard and do our share without complaining about our aching bodies or the bloodsucking leeches that attached themselves to our legs in the rice fields... 

All in all, working in factories and on farms proved far better for me than my first two years of existence under the tyranny of the Red Guard. I wasn't being abused any more, and I had a tribe to belong to.

The Changing Story:
After her tale of forced labor being widely criticized, Fu Ping issued the following "clarification" on March 6, 2013:

Why did you say you were in a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution? 
I did not say or write that I was in a labor camp; I stated that I lived for 10 years in a university dormitory on the NUAA campus. Chinese children don't get put in labor camps. I also did not say I was a factory worker. I said Mao wanted us to study and learn from farmers, soldiers and workers.  

The Debunking:
According to her book, this happened after she "built radios for almost a year" when she started that at 10. So one and half a year later, when she was around 12, she was supposed to be sent "outside of Nanjing for half a year."

Presumably that, at that time, her little sister who at 8 was old enough to take care of herself, a little detail Fu Ping forgot to mention in her book.

Mao wanted all the children to "learn from farmers, soldiers, and workers," not just those "bad elements". It was part of the normal education at the time, not a punishment. It might go as long as a couple of weeks but it was unimaginable to last for six months for kids that age.

Broken Fact: Fu Ping's Early Factory Jobs

The Original Story:
In Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping chronicled her experiences of working in factories throughout her early youth years. On Pages 137-149, she detailed her factory working from the age of 10 to 18:

When I was ten, several months after the attack on the soccer field and two years prior to the appearance of Uncle W and Nanjing Mother, I received my first factory assignment. A local Communist organization, in accordance with Mao's teachings, made arrangements for all the children of black elements in our area to be reeducated by workers. I was assigned to a stie about an hour's walk away from the NUAA dormitory. I would work there six days a week for six hours a day, with a two-hour break each day for a study session of Mao's teachings with other children.
...
I built radios for almost a year, completing on average forty to fifty a day... The following year, Wang was transferred to another department of the factory, where he would be making speedometers for cars. I went with him; it seemed we had become a team.
...
I went back to factory work in 1971 at age thirteen, after having spent some time completing mandatory military service.
...
From age fifteen to eighteen, I worked on and off at a factory that made car parts.

On Pages 88-92, she said (when she was about 12):

I had recently been assigned to a job at a nearby factory, and the next morning I rose early to walk to work. Hong went to a study session with kids her own age.
...
For the next several days, we followed the same pattern. In the morning, I would go to my factory job and Hong would go to her study session.
...
From then on, Uncle W and corresponded regularly, swapping letters several times each month. I wrote him about daily life, my factory job, and Hong when she got into trouble or amazed me by quickly picking up new skills.

Then, on Page 128, when she was 14:

I still had no life outside of caring for my family and working at factories, but political pressure against black elements lessened.

And finally, in 1976 as a grown woman, she was working in a factory when Cultural Revolution ended (Page 225):

I notfified my factory boss that I was heading off for two weeks, and he gave his approval.

For all this work, she accomplished quite a lot really early on (Page 84):

My life took another turn for the better shortly after my twelfth birthday. By then, I knew how to forage, grow, and cook my own vegetables, raise chicken, spin silk thread, build radios, march in military formation, remove leeches, operate milling machines, harvest rice, navigate cities without a map, and survive in wildness.

She also recounted the child labor years in several of her media interviews. For example, on Leopard Lopate Show on Jaunary 14, 2013:

Lopate: And then at 10 you were sent to work in a factory?
Fu: I started factory pretty early, I think even at 8. Soon after. A few months after.
Lopate: Were you getting any schooling at this time?
Fu: Not official, not the academic study. I did learn a lot by doing things.
Lopate: Well, what kind of factories were you working in?
Fu: When I was 8, I was there peeling plastic covers to separate them and then I started to build radios around 10.

The Changing Story:

After her tale of forced labor being widely criticized, Fu Ping issued the following "clarification" on March 6, 2013:

Why did you say you were in a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution? 
I did not say or write that I was in a labor camp; I stated that I lived for 10 years in a university dormitory on the NUAA campus. Chinese children don't get put in labor camps. I also did not say I was a factory worker. I said Mao wanted us to study and learn from farmers, soldiers and workers. 

The Debunking:
There is really no need to debunk this one. Either she was lying throughout her book and her interviews, or she was lying in her clarification with "I also did not say I was a factory worker".

Chinese children "don't get put in labor camps", they don't work in factories when they were 8 or 10 years old either, Jay Leno's frequent jokes notwithstanding. Did Fu Ping actually work in factories? The answer is yes, after she had graduated from high school. But that's another interesting fact that deserves a separate post of its own.

Broken Fact: Fu Ping's Years during Cultural Revolution

The Original Story:
Besides the various physical and mental abuses, including a grusome gang-rape, Fu Ping claimed to have suffered during the Cultural Revolution, in Bend, Not Break as well as numerous media interviews, Fu Ping maintained two main "facts" of her life in that terrible decade:

1. that she never received any formal education as in regular (the equivalent of K-12) schools
2. that she had been forced to work in factories, farms, and even be a "child soldier" in military camps

A couple of earlier media profiles of Fu Ping went so far as to claim that Fu Ping was sent to "concentration camp", "collective farm", or "labor camp", including the original title of the Forbes article that helped to start the controversy.

The Earlier Story:

There were no such claim in her earlier book Drifting Bottle. (This could be understandable since that book was published in China although it has been free and open to talk about sufferings during Cultural Revolution in China as well.) There were several casual mentions of regular education in China in that book, including this little sentence on Page 66:

I remember when I graduated from high school, all I wanted is to leave the warm cocoon of my parents. As if that as soon as I passed my 18th birthday, my wings became so strong that I had to fly. All the friends close to me were talking enthusiastically of how to fly freely. If not for an occasional hesitation at the time, I would have volunteered with a group of my classmates to go to Inner Mongolia for farming work.
记得高中毕业时，一心向往飞离父母的暖巢。仿佛一过十八岁，翅膀就硬得不飞不行了。而我身边的朋友，也都很起劲地商讨着如何去自由地飞翔。如果不是当时有一念之差，我就会跟着一群同学自愿去内蒙古垦荒了。

The Changing Story:

After her tale of forced labor being widely criticized, Fu Ping issued the following "clarification" on March 6, 2013:

Why did you say you were in a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution? 
I did not say or write that I was in a labor camp; I stated that I lived for 10 years in a university dormitory on the NUAA campus. Chinese children don't get put in labor camps. I also did not say I was a factory worker. I said Mao wanted us to study and learn from farmers, soldiers and workers. 

The Debunking:

The above clarification by Fu Ping is clearly a lie as there are many instances in her book that she stated she was a factory worker. Although the phrase "labor camp" did not appear in her book or recorded interviews, one might be able to forgive Forbe's Jenna Goudreau for acquiring that mistaken impression from the tales she had been telling. We will get through that in more detail in separate posts following this one.

There are also evidences as well as hints in her book that she had actually attended regular schools in those years just as every other kid in China did, except for the first couple of years of the Cultural Revolution. The Drifting Bottle paragraph shows that she graduated from high school and had close friends and classmates, a much more reasonable tale than that she is telling today.

Fu Ping's clarification is actually a big hint in itself. It is true that Mao wanted school pupils to "learn from farmers, soldiers, and workers" (学工学农学军) during the Cultural Revolution and a large portion of the school curriculum at the time was devoted to such activities instead of classroom teaching. It is also a fact, however, that all such activities were organized by schools. For Fu Ping to have participated in these learning-through-labor experiences, she would have been in regular schools at the time.

Fu Ping's Speech at the Downtown Speaker Series

On March 1, 2013, Fu Ping gave a speech at the Downtown Speaker Series at Las Vegas. In the speech, she made a couple of subtle changes to her story. For example, she now says that she tool the Pan Am flight to US instead of United and it was not a direct flight. Instead of baby girls being killed with plastic bags, it is now pillow cases. She didn't mention the more outlandish claims surrounding her infanticide research (not even mention newspaper any more) or kidnapping.

More significantly, she used the opportunity of answering a question from the audience at the end to once again claim the "attack" she received on Amazon is a smear campaign originated from China, elevating its status to an "attack to democracy."

The speech can be viewed in its entirety here. Below is a partial transcript. Thanks to Jean and Z. Wang for helping out the transcript work.

I'm going to break this talk into three components. The first one I'll talk a little bit about
my life, which most of them are in the book. Then, I'll talk a little bit about my
entrepreneurial journey. And the third part will be what will be the future for 3D printing, sensors, and the digital world.  

So let me take you back almost 40 years, to 1966. At the dawn of Cultural Revolution, I was 8  years old. I was living with a loving family. My Shanghai papa and mama had 5 children and I was the youngest of the 6, the youngest one. i didn't know when I was little that they were not my biological parents. They were the only parents I knew. And they were incredibly loving and it's a normal family. 

When the Cultural Revolution started, I was taken away from them. That day when Red Guards came to my family to taken me away, to send me to Nanjing, which is a
city about 300 miles north of Shanghai to stay with my biological parents. That was when I was told that they were not my parents. I went to Nanjing in a very crowded train on myself and arrived only a little too late. My biological parents were put on a truck being sent away to exile also. And I was then placed in a dormitory room in a college where my dad used to be professor. It was there I found my little sister. She was 4 years old. And then for the next 10 years, I lived in a dormitory room, and taking care of my younger sister. My father was away for 11 years. I almost never seen him. My mother came back when i was 13. Life was very confusing at that time. One day I lost the parents who raised me, the parents who born me, and I became the surrogate mother to my sister. 

The first two years of the Cultural Revolution, the entire country turned upside down. Family, educated family been sent away, households are confiscated. I was out there to witness much of the atrocity scene, watching teacher being killed. Been sent to struggle sessions which I would be put on stage denouncing myself. Screaming very loud that I was nobody. That I wasn't worth the dirt beneath their feet. That was the very beginning of my education. I was supposed to be in the 1st grade. The schools were closed. I didn't have any academic education. 

But rather Chairman Mao, who was the head of communist party said that we need to study from farmers, workers, and soldiers. So I was working in the factory, many years, and also worked in the country side, planting rice, and doing some farming. Then when I was a little older, I also went to military camp to be trained on long march, shooting. So in the essence, although I didn’t have much in formal education, I learned how to make things with my hands, I built radios when I was 9 years old, I built speedometers, and later televisions, I put the lights up so on and so forth. 

When I was 10 years old, I also experienced a very dramatic event. I was gang-raped by a group of teenagers, and i was left on the soccer field to die. I had cuts on my body, probably more than 40 stitches because of a knife   It was not just the physical abuse that was hurtful. it was the emotional abuse that followed. I was called broken shoes. at 10, I was a broken woman. 

Fast forward 10 years, Culture Revolution was over, China re-opened university. Given that I have not had much formal education. I really wanted to go to college. I studied like mad. I was called the girl whose lights never turned off. I took the first college exam i didn't pass, the 2nd year i took it again. in 1978, I past the national exam and went to college. I really wanted to be an astronaut, but i didn't really have much choice. My father was a professor at Nanjing Aeronautics and Astronautics University before he was sent away. So when I grew up, my playground was airplanes and the slider was airplane wings. I have seen a lot of planes on the field.  But i was assigned to study Chinese literature. My mother said, oh please, don’t go study literature. A writer has no future in China. but i wasn't going to listen. I really wanted to go to school.  

So I was admitted to Suzhou University, majoring Chinese literature. I absolutely loved it. I couldn't believe that reading a novel, going to see a play or see a movie, and call that study. It was really fascinating time and China is completely changing its ideology and very open at the time. 

In my senior year, I decided I wanted to pursue graduate school. I wanted to be a journalist. I chose infanticide as my thesis topic, and i went to research the phenomenon of killing baby girls in the country side due to one child policy. In 1979, Chinese government decided that people can only have one child and they enforced one-child policy quite severally. In many countries, people, farmers, or families favor boys over girls. It's not a unique thing for China. But in China, what's unique at that time was the one-child policy. There was this policy called illegal pregnancy. You can be illegal to be pregnant for a second child if it is within 4 years of having the first child. The policy was enforced by local communities, the neighborhood communities. A lot of time, those enforcements are very cruel. 

When I went to the countryside to look at that, I saw baby girls are being killed and I saw babies being thrown into river when their embryological cords are still fresh. I saw baby girls being suffocation in pillow cases and being thrown into garbage dumpsters. What I saw broke my heart. 

Even though I was punished for missing schools and not return to college dormitories, I was possessed to do those research. So I went to many remote areas and interviewed hundreds of women. I heard many stories. I put my research in paper and gave them to my teacher. I haven't written my thesis yet. I just gave the teacher my raw material. 

Unbeknownst to me, she turned those material to the press and the material was apparently passed up and got the attention of the Chinese government. For that I was kicked out of the school. Actually I was put in jail briefly for 3 days. I thought I was going to die. They wouldn't tell me why I was arrested and I didn't know it was because of the infanticide research. I was just put in jail. There was no interrogation, no telling why I was there. 

But fortunately I was let out 3 days later. I was told to go home and wait to be told what I should do. Then I was told that I have two choices.  

One is to leave China and never talk about this again, just quietly leave. I was told to be careful what I say because my sister and family is still in China. This is fairly common in Chinese history back then, probably today also, that the threat to you is not yourself but your family. Or, I will be put in a place remote in China. I thought leaving was a better idea. 

So, it took me a year and half actually for me to get a passport to leave China. My family helped me to pull all the strings and eventually I was able to obtain visa and passport to leave China. I applied to many countries but the US was the easiest to get a student visa so I ended up coming  to the United States. How lucky I am. 

In 1984, January, I stepped on a Pan Am airline and flew from Shanghai to San Francisco, stop by Tokyo. I landed in San Francisco. I had 80 dollars traveler's check and only a few words of English. I tried to learn English when I was in China when I knew I was going to come to the United States. I tried to memorize them but somehow by the time I landed in San Francisco I only remembered 3 words. That was "help", "thank you", and... there was another word that I can't remember. 

Anyway, so I was in San Francisco. I have a traveler's check. Back then, Chinese dollar was not exchangeable with dollar so you should go to a bank, give them RMB and they issue you a traveler's check. For me to go from San Francisco to New Mexico where I got a student visa. The ticket price changed. It become 85 dollars and I only had an 80 dollar traveler's check. Because in China, it's a Communist society that the price doesn't change. I didn't know what to do. 

Of course, blessing San Francisco, there was a lot of Chinese-speaking people so one of the agents was able to explain to me the price changed. There was an American man standing behind me who gave 5 dollars to the counter so I can get my ticket. That was my first impression of an American. That taught me a lesson: when in doubt, always error on the side of generocity.  

To this day, I still haven't found that person who helped me. I was hoping someone who read to book would say, hey, that was me. Five dollars may not have meant much to me but it meant the whole world to me. 

So that's how I landed in United States and went to New Mexico. 

I enrolled in English as Second Language and I thought I was going to study comparative literature. I quickly realized that I didn't have enough English to do that. Also, my teacher who has a Ph. D. in literature couldn't find a job.  I was told to leave China and never to come back again so I don't have the luxury of studying something I couldn't find a job with. So I have to very quickly find something that's marketable. But I didn't have formal K-12 education so I couldn't quite go to study science. 

I asked around what I could study. Someone said why don't you go study computer science. It's a new field. I never heard about computer science so I asked what is that. The student said that is a man-made language used to make stuff. I was like, great, I am good with language and I know how to make stuff. That's what I am going to study. So, that's how I got into computer science. I was very lucky that it's a new field. 

Computer science of course at that time, and maybe today also, has a lot of group projects. It's not always individual projects. I wasn't the best programmer. Programming wasn't really a strong suite of mine but I quickly realized that I was a pretty good software designer. Being trained in literature, in structure, compositions, flow, I found software design to be very easy. So I end up with always having the best programmer in my group because, being a good software designer, our project always get the high scores from the professors. So that's how I got through my computer science career. 

I worked for a start up company and then I went to work for Bell Labs and then I went to work for University of Illinois at their supercomputing center. I went to the supercomputing center because they were doing graphics and visualization and I totally fall in love with that field. It's like art meeting science. 

At the supercomputing center I hired a student, his name is Marc Andreessen. Marc didn't quite like the match and geometry I was doing and decided to work on a browser. So Marc and severl other students wrote the NCSA Mosiac that became Netscape and was also licensed to Microsoft and became Internet Explorer. So he went to start Netscape and the rest was history. 

The university started to push me to start a business. They said, Ping, everything you touched turning into gold. I had no idea how to start a business. At university we have really good jobs. I love my job and also my daughter was 3 years old at the time. But one day my boss Joe Harding said, "All this talk and nobody is doing anything. I am really frustrated." So I said, okay, I will do it. So that's how I started Geomagic. 

[Talk about Geomagic and 3D technology...]

Q:  How is China like you now? What’s the potential of technology like this to solve the humanitarian crisis that factory in so many countries like China poses?

A: I certainly is on the attack by the Chinese at this point. The day after New York Time had a story broke on Chinese hacking on New York Time, I woke up with 2000 hate mail in my email. And I’m still on the attack by the Chinese. If you go on Amazon and look for Bend not Break Ping Fu, and you will see the full scale of the attack on me. They completely bombarded my book site, and if you saw the titles of five hundred comments, doesn't matter it is one-star or five-stars, they are all smear. 

You can’t see any good comments because it will... if you put a good comment, hundreds of them are gonna come and say this is not helpful. And if they call me a liar, fat liar, bitch, traitor, whatever, you will get one thousand five hundred people will say that is helpful.  

In comparison, the most helpful comment review on Harry Potter in its entire life is five hundred. And in twenty second, a smear comment on amazon will get three times more comments on this is helpful. How does that happen? It happens in twenty seconds! So someone is writing a program... notify something there. You can just go there to see it. It is incredible. 

So I look at it. My book is not available in China. None of those reviewers have read my book and they even say they have never read my book. So there are three things they really don't like me. They don't like me write about “gang rape,” “No, China has no rape.” That’s one. And they don't like I wrote about “infanticide.” “No, China didn’t kill baby girls.” It didn't matter the statistics says thirty million girls were missing. “It didn’t happen.” And of course I’m a traitor because I’m talking about bring job to United States. Actually i was talking about bring job locally ,distributed. And it is not just bring back to United States. For China, I talked about China should make product that carries Chinese Culture. And China has 1.3 billion people there, it is a huge market. It is good for China also. 

But it didn't matter, because, you know, that’s the attack. 

It is interesting, because I love Amazon, don’t get me wrong. I love Jeff. He is probably one of the most respected entrepreneur ever in my life. He is my hero. 

But I always believe failure and success go in hand in hand. Ironically a long time ago, I help to create Internet or the browsers. Today I become the victim of that technology. So the question is to the technologists here, what can we do to prevent this happen. Because those people hiding behind internet with fake ids are so cruel. The attack is so vicious and I don’t understand that phenomenon. And I don’t understand why we allow that happen. And it is more vicious to women than to men in general. It is not Chinese or American, cruelty has no nationality. But allow people to hide behind Internet to be cruel is something we should solve. Because that shouldn't happen to anyone. 

They are not just attack me, my family, my colleagues, but anyone who go voice something authentic get attacked. This is attack to democracy.

Engineering and Technology's Interview with Fu Ping

The following interview with Fu Ping was written by Nick Smith and published in Engineering and Technology Magazine on March 11, 2013. In the interview, Fu Ping was quoted as saying "I was living in a concentration camp" despite her recent denial of having never said anything like that. The interview mentioned the controversy in passing but dismissed it as a "smear campaign."

CEO and founder of Geomagic, Ping Fu discusses her extraordinary journey from the concentration camps of China's Cultural Revolution to becoming one of America's most influential women in reality capture technology. 

Ping Fu and I are sitting in the London headquarters of her UK publisher, Penguin, in the Strand. The CEO of the US software modelling company Geomagic has a hectic schedule promoting her new book, and simply getting to be in the same room as her has been something of a logistical nightmare. At the time, neither of us could have known that the book would bring her to the centre of a firestorm of controversy. But as we sit in a conference room with a copy of 'Bend, Not Break' between us she is calm and attentive. 

The book is an autobiography tracing Fu's journey from China's forced-labour camps during Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution to becoming the driving force behind a company that was to bring her recognition as one of America's most influential technologists. 

In her mid-50s, well dressed and perhaps suffering from meeting fatigue, Fu tells me how she wrote a book that she had misgivings about starting. "Shortly after I was named Entrepreneur of the Year in 2006, I had the idea for the book. But, going through the research material at the time, I found that it was going to be difficult. My daughter was an early teenager then and I wanted to protect her from a story that she might not be able to take. But in 2012 she turned 18, and I met my co-author MeiMei Fox. It was a case of all things coming together." 

Fu kept a diary in China as a 12-year-old, an activity forbidden by the Red Guard, who ceremonially burned it before her eyes. "I couldn't pick up my pen again. And so to write now was a way to conquer the fear." 

To make the transformation from a 'Black Element' in Communist China to a leading light of the western digital world is unusual, a fact reflected in our conversation continually drifting from one world to the other. Her book is subtitled 'a life in two worlds', and it is clear that the two don't separate easily. One minute Fu is busily describing Geomagic as a "leader in reality capture", and the next reminiscing on a background infected by fear and isolation, where conventional norms of childhood are stripped away by the state. 

Reality capture could so easily be a term to describe day-to-day life in a concentration camp. But for Fu it is a technical term "about taking everything in real life and recreating it in a digital environment. Today, I think our physical environment and our digital selves are no longer separate. If you look at the publishing industry, we no longer think about the distinction between digital and physical. Publishing a magazine on paper or for a digital reader is now one and the same. I wanted to do this for products in healthcare and not just publishing." 

In the early 1980s Fu worked in imaging software publishing, which led to her developing ideas for combining Internet technology with manufacturing "so that instead of desktop publishing we could have desktop manufacturing. That was my thought in starting Geomagic. I also decided some time ago that I wanted to have a technology company that is an enabler rather than being self-contained. We helped many companies in the orthodontic market as well as the hearing-aid industry, which we transformed from a manual process to becoming all 3D printed. Today, we are working with UNESCO. We want to scan 500 Heritage Sites to preserve those old treasures, which is the human collective memory. I think we owe this to future generations." 

Today 3D modelling is more important than ever says Fu, because "given the economic climate it has now become a political issue rather than just a socio-economic issue. We are losing manufacturing jobs to the cheaper labour countries, and so this is how we can bring employment back to the US or the UK. If you fabricate things locally then you bring jobs in all spectrums of society: not just the thinkers, but also the doers. It is no longer efficient to produce a design locally, ship it overseas to make it and then ship it back." 

Earlier this year Geomagic was acquired by 3D Systems, which will "combine the force of design and manufacturing in the digital space. Which is very exciting. That's why I started the company in the first place." In an official statement released by Geomagic, Fu said: "Joining 3D Systems provides us with the scale, resources and strategic platform to realise our shared vision of delivering functional, affordable and extensible 3D authoring solutions for the benefit of professional designers and engineers, as well as the exciting maker's movement." 

Encounters with engineering
Fu's earliest encounters with engineering were to set her on the road to finding a meaning to her life outside of her imprisonment. "My first assignment was the factory. I was living in a concentration camp. Because I was of the younger generation I wasn't sent from the ghetto to the countryside to be a farm labourer. I wasn't immediately sent to the military camp, either. I was sent to the factory." 

She remembers this as being "actually quite a good experience", partly because the workers were adults who tended to treat the young girl kindly, unlike the Red Guards, predominantly teenagers who went "around the country beating people. I had a supervisor who was very kind to me." 

Her first job was building radios. "This gave me a great sense of accomplishment. I had been conditioned to think that I was useless. But to be able to make something with my hands made me feel I could contribute something. The radio is also such a common object. Back then it was just for Communist broadcasting. But I do remember that if you could get an antenna big enough you could pick up Voice of America. It wasn't easy, but at night we tried. It was a treat." 

She could hardly have known at the time, but these early communications with the other side of the world were to become part of a chain of events that would lead to her eventual defection to America. With only rudimentary English and a few dollars, she took whatever work she could. At first this meant bussing tables in a Chinese restaurant, little more than a cliché in the Land of Opportunity. 

Fu is keen to stress that at this point "I was running for my life. I didn't know anything about America. Everything I thought about the place seemed to be wrong. But at the time the unknown was better than a bad life." 

The most alienating thing about America was its boundless freedom. "In China everything was completely suppressed. In America, everything is a choice and there is nobody there to help you make that choice. That was scary because, although in China you might get assigned a bad job, or be sent to a bad area, in America you have to find a job for yourself. If you can't find a job then you can't live. Initially I did not think that this was the land of opportunity. Very quickly I discovered that if I was to have a future then I had to make it for myself." 

Realising that her lack of formal education would make it virtually impossible for her to follow her longed-for path into either literature or engineering at university level, she was at a loss. But she was quickly introduced to, and excited by, the idea of computer science. "Here was a manmade language I could learn. I thought it was great that I could make stuff and study a marketable skill." A chance encounter with start-up software company guru Len Sherman gave Fu an introduction to entrepreneurship, of which she admits "I had no idea how hard that could be." This would eventually open the door to career progression to Bell Labs, where she could simultaneously work and pursue her PhD programme. To be paid a salary and have her tuition fees paid "was like a fairy tale". 

At Bell Labs Fu was primarily involved with networking, but it was computer graphics that really fired her imagination. "This was because it was the in-between space between art and science." Eventually she became director of visualisation at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where she "initiated and managed the NCSA Mosaic software project that led to Netscape and Internet Explorer." Working on global warming models led to the idea of founding Geomagic. 

As her career progressed Fu became more influential outside the immediate sphere of software development. She was recognised by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services as an Outstanding American By Choice. Since 2010, she has served as a member of the National Council on Women in Technology in the US, and the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship board at the White House, where she has been photographed standing between President Barack Obama and the First Lady. 

Fu accepts that it is unusual for women to reach the level of influence that she has done in the engineering community, especially if they are from an ethnic background. "But I believe women will be the fastest emerging labour force for the 21st century. Unfortunately, whether you look at Hollywood movies or the Internet, Technology Woman has this image of being nerdy, which is something that a young girl doesn't want to be." 

This is an image she wants to correct, and one of the reasons she is helping encourage young girls to follow a career in technology. "Once you are dealing with adults it's almost a hopeless situation. I asked my daughter what I needed to do or say to help girls, and she said that it is not what you say, but who you are. So I talk to women in technology and I tell them that it is up to us. If girls don't have an ambition to be like us, they will not choose a career in technology. I don't try to be a man. I try to show that being Technology Woman is really, really cool. You get a great job, you get paid well and we are not all nerds." 

"Sad but not broken"
Since the publication of 'Bend, Not Break' (and the conversation that forms the basis of this article), Ping Fu has been subjected to a highly vocal and at times personally abusive smear campaign questioning the accuracy of her memoir that has left her "shocked, heartbroken and deeply saddened". Anyone who has read her book (many of her critics haven't) will recognise that the first half, which concentrates on her formative years in China, is the writing of someone traumatised by their past. While she has publicly admitted to minor inaccuracies in her text, it is clear that she endured suffering and privation under the Cultural Revolution that is hard for westerners to fully appreciate. There are certainly times when her story pushes credulity. But, as she told me, the reason she wrote the book is precisely that her story is so extraordinary. As she says: "It is a story about a life lived in two worlds: China and America. It tells of one person's journey from nobody to somebody. It reflects how my past experiences influenced who I am today and how I make decisions as an entrepreneur."

Fu Ping's BBC HARDtalk Interview

On January 29, 2013, Fu Ping was the guest of BBC's HARDtalk, hosted by Stephen Sackur. The interview is also available on YouTube. The following is a transcript:

Sackur: My guest today is fast becoming one of America's most celebrated female entrepreneurs. It is not just because the company she founded is revolutionizing manufacturing in the digital age, but also because her own life story represents a triumph over long odds. Ping Fu was just eight years old when her life was turned upside-down by Mao's Cultural Revolution. She endured years of abuse before being thrown out of China. Three decades later, she is an adviser to President Obama on innovation. What lessons lie behind this extraordinary journey?  

Sackur: Ping Fu, welcome to HARDtalk. You grew up in Mao's China. Your life was turned upside-down by the Cultural Revolution. I wonder if the sort of disruption you experienced in your childhood in a sense prepared you to thrive in a business sector, the tech industry, which is constantly being disrupted, where the roles are constantly changing.  

Fu: When I grow up, with the life journey that I had, I had a lot of practice in self-learning
 adaptability to change, and also the endurance of resilience in difficult times. Those were the skill sets that I needed for entrepreneurship. I just happen to have a lot of practices. 

Sackur: I suppose it gives you an awful lot of perspective when you have had such a very difficult upbringing.  

Fu: That's right. My life had been turned upside down, from a loving family with a nice big house in Shanghai, to a ghetto in Nanjing and lose both sets of my parents: the parents who raise me and the parents who born me. In one day, I became a surrogate mother to my little sister. She was only 4 years old. 

Suckur: We're talking about the early 1960s. In essence  you were grabbed by Red Guards who were obviously working for Mao's party, working for the Cultural Revolution. Because your family was regarded as intellectual, they were relatively privileged. You had to be taken away and reeducated, reprogrammed.  

Fu: Mao said we don't need formal education. We needed to be educated by workers, farmers and soldiers. We had to work in factories, farm rice or learning how to march in the military during K to 12, basically. 

Suckur: You have described how in the early days there was a lot of hate in the souls of the young guards looking after you in the military-style barracks. You were forced to eat animal dung. You were brought close to death at times.  

Fu: Yeah, we were fed bitter meals and, at age of 10, I was gang-raped by a dozen of teenage boys and left on a soccer field to die. It was very hard. 

Suckur: It was a long time ago. You are in a very different place. But, does the power of the memories you have still live with you?  

Fu: It does from time to time. It will catch up with me. I learned for a long time to put it away by writing the book that just came out. I learnt how to heal those wounds.  

Suckur: Your birth parents were not the lady and gentleman who raised you. You had two sets of parents. Was there any way in which either your birth parents or those who nurtured you were able to reach you at this terrible time when you and your sister were living the most dreadful and hard life?  

Fu: Not during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution. My birth mother came back when I was 13. She was put away when I was eight. Otherwise all of the other parents were sent to remote areas of China.  

Suckur: What was it that you found within yourself that allowed you, enabled you, to cope with what you went through?  

Fu: My Shanghai papa was very wise. He anticipated the trouble coming to my life. So he taught me the "three friends of winter". Before I was taken away from the family, he told me, Ping, you need to be bamboo, bend with the prevailing wind and never breaking. That is kind of a mental symbol that stayed in my mind.  

Suckur: It is interesting that idea of bending and never breaking? Looking back on it, do you think you ever came close to actually breaking?  

Fu: Several times. When my journal was burned when I was 12 years old. I think I thought about dying. I wanted to jump into the fire.  

Suckur: That's where you had written your innermost thoughts and kept a sense of yourself?  

Fu: I did not have anyone to talk to. I didn't even know where to send letters to my parents. So I kept a journal on the backside of the Communist propaganda for years. That was the only place I could express my innermost thoughts and emotions. 

Suckur: It amazes me in a way that you were so resilient. I guess it was partly of being young as you were. You're so resilient that when the Cultural Revolution, this very hard-line phase of it, came to an end you were actually able to resume studies. You made contacts with your family and you ended up going to a university and studying journalism.  

Fu: That is right.  

Suckur: But it was not the end of your problems, was it?  

Fu: No. Right before I graduated from college I was doing my thesis research. I thought I was picking a humanitarian topic, which is infanticide. I heard that the one-child policy in China caused farmers to kill baby girls because they wanted boys. I did not realize how widespread the killing was. When I went to do the research, in my bare eyes I saw babies being tossed into river with their umbilical cords still fresh. It broke my heart. I was a mother since I was eight.  

Suckur: You mean since you raised your little sister? 

Fu: Right.  

Suckur: It strikes me in a way, looking forward and back, knowing what happened to you, that you made it to the States and made it into business, I am beginning to feel that there was something about you that refuses to bow down to authority. You refuse to accept the received wisdom. Otherwise you would not have embarked on this challenging university dissertation about the terrible impact of the one-child policy.  

Fu: That is quite insightful. I think when I was looking back, I realized that even though I was brainwashed that I was nobody, I never really believed it subconsciously. I always wanted to be somebody. It was not specific. I never knew how to stop it. I kept travelling and wanting to be somebody.  

Suckur: You talk about brainwashing. What do you really mean by that? It is a phrase that is easily used, but in what way were you actually brainwashed through your youth?  

Fu: We did not study anything in the normal academic field. We always studied Communist propaganda or Mao's Little Red Book. That's all we have. I was told that I was nobody, my parents were criminals. I was born with black blood. 

Suckur: You're in a black file, weren't you? You were a black element. I wonder that you, in turn, having been dismissed by the party, by the system, were you angry with the party? Even before you left China, had you decided that communism was deeply, deeply damaging to your Country?  

Fu: I believed some of the concept of what communists taught me, about helping others and being good. Yet at the same time, I did not believe much of what they said, like rather to grow Communist weed rather than capitalist rice. When we didn't have anything to eat, weed doesn't sound very good. 

Suckur: In the end, you were forced out of the country. Some people listening to your story might wonder how come, in a sense, you had the great fortune to be allowed to leave China and make your way to the United States when So many other people who were described as black elements, put on blacklists ended up either in the most hard and difficult provinces working in fields or worse than that, imprisoned or even killed. How come you were allowed out?  

Fu: I was kicked out. I did not speak any English, I had no idea what American life is like. At the time I was running from trouble. I thought anything is better than death or being exile to a remote area. I knew I did not have a future in China. The future was unknown to me when I came to the United States. Back then, I did not know it was going to be a good future. I was just asked to leave and never come back again. 

Suckur: You had no family in the US, and you had never been on a plane before. There you were, a girl in her mid-20s, on a plane from Shanghai to California and then onto New Mexico. It must have been phenomenally daunting.  

Fu: It was very scary. No family, no friends, I did not speak the language, I did not know what life was ahead of me. At that time, the unknown was better then trouble.  

Suckur: I supposed so. Yet when I picture you as a young woman in New Mexico, with no language, no money and no contacts, then I think about how quickly you got on. Within a few years you were becoming a specialist in computing and software. What was it within you that allowed you to get on so quickly? 

Fu: One part of it is that America is a wonderful place for immigrants. Many people helped me when I first landed in the US. The other part is that I've always learn how to do things by myself. When I grow up there were no teachers or parents around. I had to learn cooking very quickly. When I was at a factory, I learned how to put lights in the factory, how to build radios. I had this ability to learn. I never thought I could not do anything. Life just throw  at me with many things that wasn't supposed to be when I was at that age. Coming to the United States was not as hard as the life I had from 8 to 18.  

Suckur: You were arriving and studying science at a time when the digital era was just beginning. The era of computing was taking off. What drew you to that?  

Fu: First I wanted to study comparative literature. I could not do it because it did not have English skills. I asked somebody what I could study since I did not have a math, science background. Somebody told me to look a computer science. I said what is that. He told me it was a man-made language that is used to make stuff. I thought to myself, I'm good with language and know how to make stuff. So I just picked that up. The interesting thing is, even this experience teach me that behind every closed door there is an open space. Every time life slams the door at me -- in this case that I didn't have the language skills, I end up picking up a skill set that is very beneficial in my later life. 

Suckur: You say that with a degree of understatement. As it happens, by the mid-to-late Nineties, you had alighted upon an area of software development and computer technology which frankly over the last ten years has become the absolute cutting edge of where many people think the next phase of the digital revolution is going. Perhaps we should in simple terms explain to people that your interest in 3D printing, in a sense shaping things by computer and then turning those shapes into actual products in a new way, it's potentially revolutionary, isn't it?  

Fu: That's the next big thing. It's as big as steam engine, Henry Ford, assembly line, or the Internet.  

Suckur: That's a big claim, can you justified it for me?  

Fu: When I was at Supercomputing Center I hired a student whose name is Marc Andreessen. We started the Mosaic that became internet Explorer and Netscape. After that success I went out to start my own company called Geomagic. That was 15 years ago. I thought about combining the internet with manufacturing to create the internet of things. That was of course way ahead of its time. I went out and I saw this machine, which is a 3D Printer from 3D systems, and I was just totally amazed by this machine. It can literally print a 3D product from a machine. Not just paper. 

Suckur: Out of this machine comes a tangible product?  

Fu: Yes. It prints layer by layer. If you print on paper you just grinned one layer. Imagine you add a layer up... 

Suckur: The best way we can make sense of this at least visually is to look at your shoes.  You have come in today to the studio with a pair of shoes that were printed.  

Fu: That's right, this is the 3D design and 3D printed shoes that is made to mold to the shape of my feet. So I think, in the future, the product design will be in the software code. The product fabrication can be locally next to you. The product will be built start with the person. We call it mass customization of personal factories. 

Suckur: If you think of a shoe company that wants to make big profits by producing millions of pairs of shoes for the mass market, they can't use this technology, can they? Aren't you talking about something very local, very small scale and will never in terms of cost be able to compete with the traditional production line?  

Fu: It's actually not true because the traditional shoe, the most cost is not in the material and the making of the shoes. It is the inventory, shipping across the sea, retail shops and shoes that made nobody wants. 90% of the cost is in that. Less than 10% of the cost is the material in making the shoe. In this case the material and the making of the shoe is not more expensive because the machine is making it. You can make it locally so you don't have to ship across the sea, which is not only cheaper but less foot print.  

Suckur: In a sense it is the end of globalisation, the end of making something that has to  be originated in some place like China and have it shipped to the United States. It is bringing manufacturing back home? 

Fu: Absolutely. In 2006 When Thomas Friedman wrote the book, "The World Is Flat". I went on the stage and said, no the world is 3D. We were sharing a stage. I talked about globalisation is passing, it is now about localisation. We live on one earth, we watched one moon, we inhale the same air. Localisation is very interesting. 

Suckur: We will get to that but I want to stick with the shoes are a little bit more. The material, what are they made of?  

Fu: In this case it is a linen, a natural fiber.  

Suckur: Linen shoes?  

Fu: Yes.  

Suckur: The idea of 3D printing, would it be applicable to other materials? Could you make things out of metal?  

Fu: Yes.  

Suckur: Obviously plastic could be quite amenable?  

Fu: Yes, plastic, metal, rubber, linen, ceramic. There's more than 100 materials. 

Suckur: Could you make a mix of materials? Let's be ambitious, could you make a car via a printer?  

Fu: Not today, yet some of the car parts can be made via a printer, and even better, because you can design geometry inside of the metal to make it lighter, stronger on impact, and you can use material to make new material, which is very interesting.  

Suckur: The what-ifs that apply to this technology seemed to run in different directions, one is a dangerous direction. We have already seen the notion of a Wiki weapon aired on the internet, and there's one particular student and some associates of his in Texas who are determined to use 3D printing to make a home-made gun. All you need is the software and a 3D Printer and he believes you can make all the necessary components for a working weapon. It does raise real questions about where this idea of home made assembly and production ends up, doesn't it?  

Fu: Yes, but I always believe in our human history it always good against evil. The gun doesn't shoot itself, it is the human that takes the gun to shoot. Technology itself is not evil. Right?  

Suckur: But technology can play to our worst instincts. One of the things that seems to me a danger with the spread of 3D printing is that it enabled piracy, copyright infringement, to become even easier.  

Fu: Maybe. But it could generate more innovation. If you make one of a kind, not one in a million, why would you care about piracy?  

Suckur: You care about piracy and Copyright for lots of reasons. The one story that intrigued me, a German man saw a picture of a Dutch policemen carrying his handcuffs. He took a picture of those handcuffs, blew it up, looked at it in great detail, scan it, and he was able to make a key through a 3D Printer to fit the handcuffs. It sounds extraordinary but apparently is true. That's the sort of danger that you could never anticipate that might come with your technology?  

Fu: That's true. But innovation is also going to create so many more solutions that counter those bad intentions. It's interesting, in human history, when good against evil, there's always more good and evil otherwise we would have been erased from Earth already. The reason we evolve is that we are always able to make solution.  

Suckur: That's a very optimistic view. I want to reflect again on your background in China, you've been appointed to the US National Advisory Council on entrepreneurship and innovation, but there are voices in the US saying that they are losing their innovative edge, especially compared with China. You have got a unique insight into both cultures, is there some merit to that argument?  

Fu: The US has been a very inventive society. We invented many, many technologies that have been adopted by other countries. Innovation is about invention made real. Our US or developed Western countries have this issue of not adopting our own invention. We need to look at that more.  

Suckur When Peter Thiel, I don't know if you have met him, he is the founder of Paypal, he said innovation in America is somewhere between dire Straits and dead. You don't share that view?  

Fu: I'm not that pessimistic. I think the United States is still quite an innovative country. I don't share that. 

Suckur: Particularly in your field, information technology, and other economists, Robert Gordon, he said the benefits of information technology have largely run their course, which suggests he is not quite as thrilled with 3D printing as you are.  

Fu: Let's wait for ten years and see what happens. I think he would have a lot of 3D printed things at his home. 

Suckur: Do you ever go back to China and perhaps think about launching your business, that's done so well in the US, in China as well?  

Fu: I do have a subsidiary in China that sells products we made in the USA. I don't think China needs to be a dumping ground. China has 1.3 billion people, would-be consumers. I think the competition between the US and China or the rest of the world is healthy. I hope we will all get together and live as one world. 

Suckur: Ping Fu, we have to end that. But fascinating stuff. Thank you very much for being on our HARDtalk.

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."

xgz: Ping Fu's Time Travel Machine

The following post was published by xgz on his The Daily Kos blog on February 4, 2013:

Ping Fu's new book, Bend, not Break: A Life in Two Worlds, stirred a huge controversy because of its conflicting and sometimes nonsensical description of her life in China. In the face of mounting criticism, she has insisted that all of the inconsistencies were the faults of the reporters and news media who used the words such as "labor camp" and "child soldier" which distorted the meaning of her book. She urged people to read her book to see that she did not lie about her life in China. 

So now I am going to read for you a few excerpts from her book and let you see for your own eyes what a liar she is.

What characterizes Fu's autobiography is the incredible out of place, out of time feeling one gets for anyone who had experienced China during the periods covered in her book. In other words, what Fu described in her book is a China that no Chinese would recognize. She transplanted stories from other places or other time periods into her story. She must have a time travel machine. 

Let us look at her college years to begin our analysis. 

She stated that towards the end of her second year in college, which would be the end of 1979, she joined a student club called "Red Maple Society" which published something that got into trouble with Deng Xiaoping himself (an incredible story already, but let's suspend our disbelief for now and see what happened). On page 251:

The government decided at the last minute to ban the gathering of the ten universities, deeming it illegal. Instead, it was announced that china's de facto leader, Deng Xiaoping, would receive the representatives for a private meeting. 

This was when things went terribly wrong.

After the unsuccessful meeting in Beijing, news went to Suzhou, and her club and herself got punished by university officials (page 252):

The Red maple society was deemed an illegal underground society responsible for publishing anti-Communist propaganda. University officials arrested and interrogated all the students who belonged to our magazine group. For weeks, they pressed us to confess our counterrevolutionary activities.

After going through all the repercussions of the this unfortunate turn of event, Fu continued on page 253:

For the rest of the semester, I endured relentless criticism by Communist Party officials and never-ending confession sessions.

What's wrong with this scene? Well, this was 1980 by now. And 1980's China was not like this at all. What Fu is describing is more like 1970 than 1980. 1980 was the year that Deng finally took control of the power in China, squeezing out the former party boss Hua Guofeng. Deng did this with the help of democratic forces in China. Although by 1979 he already started to crackdown on the democratic advocates and arrested Wei Jingsheng, he still left college campuses largely alone. And that year he rewarded the democratic forces with the first and only (partially) democratic election in China. I know because I was there. I was on the campus of Peking University in 1980, and was really excited to see people like Hu Ping and Wang Juntao (both are now dissidents living in New York) to campaign openly on campus against party endorsed candidates. At the end Hu Ping won the election in our district. (For a detailed analysis of the 1980 election in China, see B Womack 1982, "The 1980 County-Level Elections in China: Experiment in Democratic Modernization."  Asian Survey 22:3 (March), pp. 261-277.) In my view, the election of 1980 was the biggest thing that happened in China during my college years. Yet during this period Ms. Fu was having a 1970's flashback at Suzhou University. 

Then her story went from strange to bizarre. She talked about how university officials would check all female students to see whether they had their periods to make sure that they were not pregnant (page 254):

At our school, officials would confirm that all female students were menstruating each month by checking their sanitary napkins. When they discovered that some women were cheating by bringing in their friends' soiled pads, the officials began inserting their fingers into our vaginas to check for blood.

In a culture that viewed women's virginity before marriage as paramount, any official who dared to do this would immediately lose her job. In reality, the way the university officials controlled students at that time, was by not allowing marriage, sex, or even any contacts between male and female students at all. We lived in separate dorm buildings. The dorm buildings for female students always had ugly old ladies as guards. The gates were locked during the night. They did not need to check for pregnancies because they already controlled everything else. Ping Fu did not seem to have lived in China in the 1980s. 

Then there was this kidnapping that came right out of a 007 spy movie (page 255):

One day in the fall of 1982, as I innocently walked across campus making preparations for graduation, someone sneaked up behind me, jammed a black canvas bag over my head, and bounded my wrists together tightly. "Don't scream," a menacing male voice whispered as I was escorted into a nearby car.

There are so many things wrong with this scene it is comical. First of all, there was really no need for the police in 1982 to make secret arrests in this dramatic manner. If they wanted someone to quietly go with them, all they had to do was to show their id and say "come with me". No one would have resisted. Kidnapping would actually draw more attention. Second, the police in 1982 was not that rich. They could not afford to give their potential captives a car ride. They would have used a military style jeep. In fact, in her interview with Reuters, Fu did say it was a jeep. It is a mystery why she changed it into a car in the book. Third, the time of the year was not consistent. She took the college entrance exam in 1977. The school started in Feb of 1978. Since at that time all of Chinese universities had four year programs, she should have graduated by the spring of 1982. So it made absolutely no sense for her to think about graduation in the fall of 1982. She must have had another time travel. 

Then, after this kidnapping episode, she went home to Nanjing and declared (page 258),

"I want to leave the university, claiming a nervous breakdown."

So this was how she quit the university without graduation. And she was forced to exile to the US. But there is this one big problem. She did graduate from Suzhou University with a BA degree in Chinese Literature. I contacted University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Ping Fu got her MS degree, for her degree information, and this was their reply,

We had a student by that name graduate with an MS from UIUC May 1990 and her Advisor was Jane Liu.  She also obtained a BA in Computer Science & Economics from the University of CA, San Diego in 1988 and a BA in Literature from Suzhou University-China in 1982.  Her original application file indicated she attended the University of New Mexico from 1984 to 1986, but no degree was awarded.

She had a BA degree from Suzhou University in 1982 as indicated in her application form. Did Ping Fu the author of Bend, not Break live in a parallel universe? 

Finally, let me end with a couple of jewels in the book. First, page 3:

The farthest I had been from Nanjing, the city of my birth, was Suzhou University, where I had studied journalism and literature.

This is what happens when you tell too many lies. You cannot keep track of all the lies that you have told, and somewhere you let it slip the reality, which conflicts with everything else you say. Here Ms. Fu finally told a truth. The truth was, that she never went further than Suzhou before leaving for the US in 1984. The distance between Shanghai (where Fu was supposedly living before the Cultural Revolution) and Nanjing (her birthplace) is about 350 kilometers, but the distance between Suzhou and Nanjing is about 220 kilometers. In fact, if you take a train from Nanjing to Shanghai, there is a stop in between for Suzhou. This sentence on page 3 may have let the truth slip through the web of lies weaved by Fu. It tells us that the story in Shanghai before the Cultural Revolution may have been a tale. She lived in Nanjing all along. 

The second little jewel is also on page 3:

I landed in San Francisco fourteen hours later, jet-lagged and emotionally drained.

That was a direct, nonstop flight from Shanghai to San Francisco, on Jan 14, 1984, the date she arrived in the US. And on the flight there were American flight attendants, who did not speak Chinese. United Airlines was the only US airline that has direct nonstop flights from Shanghai to San Francisco, when it was started in 1999. Did Ping Fu travel forward in time to catch the United flight? 

This book should be categorized as a science fiction.