Broken Accusation: Human Flesh Search

The Accusation:
When Fu Ping's book started to face a public backlash from the Chinese and Chinese-American community, some in the west media characterized the phenomenon as an operation of "human flesh search".

On February 4, 2013, Katie Baker wrote on The Daily Beast:

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. 

Joe Nocera was even more blunt in his New York Times piece in late June, 2013:

In other words, Fu is the classic immigrant success story. You’d think that would be a source of pride for Chinese immigrants. Instead, she has been subjected to what they call in China a “human flesh search” — an Internet vigilante campaign designed to bring shame on its target. 

The Debunking:
In the eyes of Katie Baker and Joe Nocera, the scarily named "human flesh search" must be some sort of evil reincarnation. However, people who are more familiar with China tend to have a different viewpoint. Indeed, Wikipedia's entry puts the term in a much neutral and even positive light:

Human flesh search engine (Chinese: 人肉搜索; pinyin: Rénròu Sōusuǒ) is a primarily Chinese internet phenomenon of massive researching using Internet media such as blogs and forums. It has generally been stigmatized as being for the purpose of identifying and exposing individuals to public humiliation, sometimes out of vigilantism, nationalist or patriotic sentiments, or to break the Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China.[1][2] More recent analyses, however, have shown that it is also used for a number of other reasons, including exposing government corruption, identifying hit and run drivers, and exposing scientific fraud, as well as for more "entertainment" related items such as identifying people seen in pictures. A categorization of hundreds of HFS episodes can be found in the 2010 IEEE Computer paper A Study of the Human Flesh Search Engine: Crowd-Powered Expansion of Online Knowledge.[3] 

The system is based on massive human collaboration. The name refers both to the use of knowledge contributed by human beings through social networking, as well as the fact that the searches are usually dedicated to finding the identity of a human being who has committed some sort of offense or social breach online.[4] People conducting such research are commonly referred to collectively as "Human Flesh Search Engines".

If this human flesh search engine were employed in Fu Ping's affair, it would have been a good use case of exposing fraud.


But sadly, Katie Baker and Joe Nocera were not even correct in invoking this term. As the wiki entry explained, the primary purpose of the "flesh search" is to identify anonymous individuals who had committed offense or breach. Fu Ping qualifies for the latter characteristics, but she is definitely not anonymous. There was never any need to launch a massive search for her identity.

It is of course perceivable that the "flesh search" could be employed to identify some of the key characters in Fu Ping's life, such as her cousins in Shanghai and the mysterious "Uncle W", who could shed a lot more light in validating her story. It did not happen. To this day, these people have stayed anonymous with their privacy intact, a fact that speaks volumes to the decency of those being accused by Baker, Nocera, and the like.


On the other hand, Katie Baker and Joe Nocera should be more familiar with another derogatory-sounding term: Muckraker, a fine and proud tradition of their chosen profession.

Quite substantial amount of investigative work have indeed been carried out and are continuing in verifying Fu Ping's story. So far, indisputable evidences have been recovered that she had falsified her resumes multiple times ever since the early 1990s, if not earlier. She has exaggerated her role in NCSA and the development of Mosaic browser. These are on tops of the multiple lies she had told in her book and interviews.

Fu Ping is not a simple private citizen. She is a close adviser to President Obama with influence to the national policy in technology and innovation. She was proclaimed by the USCIC as an exemplary citizen by choice while the circumstances of her getting a green card was questionable at best.

But the mainstream western media has stayed silent. They have ignored their duty and responsibility of due diligence as they happily and blindly played the role of cheerleader. That in itself may be understandable. But when a large group of volunteers who decided to take up the role of citizen journalists and rake up more and more muck under the covers of Fu Ping, they were labeled as "attackers" and "vigilantes" by the professionals like Baker and Nocera.


Now, that is injustice.

Broken Accusation: Chinese Hacker Attack

The Accusation:
From the beginning of the controversy, Fu Ping sought to link the criticism of her book with the story of "Chinese hacker attack" on western governments and media. During the question and answer session after a speech in March, 2013, Fu Ping said:

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

Katie Baker made the same linkage on The Daily Beast:

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. 

The Debunking:
The "Chinese hacker attack" story was a media sensation for a while, until the more recent disclosure of American government's own hacking activities severely dampened the enthusiasm. No matter what really happened at New York Times and other media sites, neither Fu Ping nor Katie Baker has produced any evidence that Chinese government sponsored hacker attack could be at work in the wave of public opinion against Fu Ping's book.

It is an attempt at guilt by association, pure and simple.

If Fu Ping truly believes that the 2000 hate mail she allegedly had received is an "attack to democracy," she should have turned them over to FBI for a thorough investigation already.

Fang Zhouzi: American Media's Arrogance, Prejudice, and Falsification in the Fu Ping Affair

On February 8, 2013, Fang Zhouzi published this post on his blog. As the title stated, his focus in this post is to expose the unfairness of the American media in their reporting of this affair, especially the biased article by Katie Baker on The Daily Beast, in which she committed the journalist fraud in blatantly misquote a user's comment.

　　傅苹自传造假一事，对美国社会来说，有没有新闻价值呢？当然有。傅苹并不是普通的美籍华人，而是美国公众人物。她是奥巴马政府商业部下一个国家咨询委员的委员，算是“奥巴马智囊”，去年刚被国土安全部移民局授予“杰出归化美国人”称号，其新书上了《纽约时报》畅销书榜单，她频频接受各大媒体访谈推销自己和书，所有这一切，都与其中美两重天的“人生传奇”分不开。现在其在中国的“人生传奇”被众多华人指出是捏造、虚构的，该公众人物的诚信遭到质疑，不值得报道出来让美国公众知道吗？ 

　　但是我给十来个曾经采访过我的美国记者写信让他们关注一下此事，只有一个回复说会留意一下。他们未必觉得此事没有新闻价值，很可能是觉得报道它属于政治“不正确”，有替中国说话之嫌——设想一下，如果是一本美化中国的畅销书被发现充斥谎言，美国媒体恐怕早就一哄而上了。倒是有欧洲和澳洲的媒体主动来联系我要做有关报道。英国两家主要报纸《卫报》和《每日电讯报》已较为中立地报道此事。 

　　到现在为止，只有一家美国英文媒体——和《新闻周刊》（Newsweek）同属一家公司的新闻网站《野兽日报》（The Daily Beast）在2月4日报道了傅苹自传遭到质疑一事。但是这完全就是傅苹及其出版商的公关稿（傅苹自传的代笔人Meimei Fox曾在facebook上说过找媒体反击对傅苹的攻击），从其标题就可看出：《傅苹反击网上中国人对其〈宁弯不折〉回忆录的攻击》（Ping Fu Defends ‘Bend, Not Break’ Memoir Against Online Chinese Attack），通篇报道只有傅苹一方的一面之词，并巧妙地裁剪材料甚至断章取义来为之作证。 

　　傅苹新书原来在亚马逊得到的书评都是最高的5星评分，在我揭露其造假后，几百名华人都跑去给它打最低1星的评分，使其平均分很快降到不到2星。傅苹团队（包括《野兽日报》）把原因归结为两点： 

　　一、一个“著名中国学者”（指我）和其他互联网用户根据《福布斯》错误的报道指责傅苹造假，虽然《福布斯》和傅苹后来做了澄清，但仍然未能平息事态，给傅苹自传负面评价的人都没有看过她的书，而是受到蛊惑。这是个谎言。我此前已经说过，虽然《福布斯》的报道引起了我对傅苹造假的注意，但是我从第一篇批评文章起，就不只是根据《福布斯》的报道，而是根据傅苹此前接受的各种采访和其新书供免费阅读的前两章。所以即便《福布斯》报道有误，也不妨碍我对傅苹的批评。虽然批评傅苹的人中很多并没有看过其回忆录，但是写出最有份量的英文书评的lin和xgz都是看过的。而且我们并不仅指针对她书中的谎言，还针对她在书出版前后接受各种访谈中的谎言，以及美国移民局关于其事迹的错误介绍。 

　　二、中国政府雇佣的有组织的抹黑傅苹的行动。这也是一个谎言。虽然负面评价是突然之间大量出现的，但是那是读者在看了我的揭露文章后自发去贴的，并没有人组织。说是中国政府雇佣，更可笑。在亚马逊写英文书评的人大部分是在美国的华人（英文亚马逊网站与中文亚马逊网站的账户并不通用），有很多已经加入美国国籍，中国政府指挥得了吗？中国政府为什么要费劲针对傅苹搞一场抹黑行动？说是因为傅苹回忆录中对文革惨状的描写有损中国形象。亚马逊上关于文革惨状的回忆多了，比如郑念的《上海生死劫》，得到了几乎一致的赞扬，怎么就没有华人去攻击她撒谎？人们不满的不是傅苹写了文革惨状，不满的是她捏造事实。 

　　亚马逊上三百多篇一星书评中，有的是摆事实讲道理的，有的则难免用了情绪化语言，《野兽日报》报道故意只摘录那些情绪化的评论。写负面书评的人英文程度有高有低，有的写一手漂亮的英文，有的则有很多语法错误。《野兽日报》故意摘录那些充斥语法错误的书评。如此精心裁剪，都是为了给读者这么个印象：这是中国政府组织一批在中国的人搞的抹黑行动。难怪有美国人惊呼，中国政府的政治宣传做到亚马逊上面来了。 

　　《野兽日报》记者Katie Baker为了抹黑批评傅苹的人，还故意断章取义： 

　　“的确，傅苹的批评者有很多看来是反感于该书向非中国读者宣扬中国丑事——即文革的创伤。其他的批评者看来是忌恨傅苹逃离中国在美国重新安置并过上了成功的生活。正如一个博客作者写道，‘我想最重要的一点是，激怒中国人的是傅苹……过上了比一般人更好的生活。”（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.”http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/04/ping-fu-defends-bend-not-break-memoir-against-online-chinese-attack.html ） 

　　《野兽日报》引用的是Normad在福布斯网站的留言： 

　　http://www.forbes.com/sites/russellflannery/2013/01/31/one-bold-and-controversial-lady-bend-not-break-author-ping-fu/?commentId=comment_blogAndPostId/blog/comment/958-5217-6375 

　　I think the most important point that outrages Chinese is that Ping was not prosecuted in China. She lived a better than average life. 

　　She was a member of the Red Guard that prosecuted others. She did not get chased out of China because of her imaginary senior project. On the contrary, she received a college education, which only a fraction of percentage of Chinese students were privileged enough to receive at that time, and which definitely required “red” family, three generations of firm followers of the Party. 

　　很显然，Normad说的是傅苹在中国的生活比普通中国人过得好，并未受迫害，却把自己打扮成受害者，这才激怒了中国人。而Katie Baker却割裂上下文关系，甚至删掉句子中间的话，拼凑出一句引言来作为中国人嫉妒傅苹在美国的美好生活而抹黑她的证据。这种断章取义歪曲原意的引用，是违反新闻基本道德的。我向《野兽日报》主编写信反映其记者Katie Baker这一违反新闻职业道德的做法，却既没有回音也不见其更正，说明《野兽日报》根本不在乎什么新闻道德。 

The Daily Beast, you are the shame of American journalism!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

xgz: Racism against Chinese Americans on Clear Display in Ping Fu Affair

The following post was published by xgz on his The Daily Kos blog on February 5, 2013:

When Ping Fu's book, Bend, not Break: A Life in Two Worlds, went on sale with much media fanfare, almost every major media outlet reported her story. I heard it on NPR. It was then that Chinese Americans found out how Ping Fu was inventing her experience in China to profit from it. We were outraged and spoke out strongly against the book. 

The American (and Western) media, instead of examining the inconsistencies in her book and accepting that they made a big mistake, started to attack her critics as "shills" of the Chinese government. The Chinese American community were insulted first by Ping Fu's lies, then abused by the media. It is a spectacular display of the ignorance and arrogance of the mainstream American culture. The undercurrent of racism against everything Chinese that most people dared not to express openly, has finally found an outlet. 

This makes me very angry. We will not give up. We will fight this battle to the end.

To see a description of the Ping Fu affair, please read my previous diaries Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV. 

The despicable display of ignorance, prejudice, journalistic irresponsibility, and deep-rooted racism can be seen clearly in the report of the reaction in this Guardian article:

Chinese cast doubt over executive's rags to riches tale 

Author of book describing her path from cultural revolution to head of US technology firm accuses critics of smear campaign

Oh my fucking god, a "smear campaign"! First of all, I am one of the strongest critics of Ping Fu, and I am an American! And to use one side's words in the title of article clearly displays where the prejudice of the journalist is. The whole article is trying to gloss over the problems in her book, and just repeats the lines used by Ping Fu herself to defend her lies. 

And this journalist must be a shill for Ping Fu, if we judge by her standards:

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.

No, she did not have any public shame sessions during her youth. She made all of them up. Now she has brought shame onto her by her own lies. 

And the display of racism in the comments is even worse. Here is just a random sample:

CharlesLiu
30 minutes ago 

You got your propaganda wrong, Katie. Most commenters are ex-pat like Fu who knew her story was Mike Daisey-esq. Also the Chinese myth buster who debunked Fu's claims is a well known academic in China. 

X
21 minutes ago 

Another Chinese Blogger aka propagandist. 

CharlesLiu
18 minutes ago 

@X What a bigoted comment. I ain't from mainland China, ain't never been citizen of the PRC a day in my life. I live in Seattle, name the place we can settle this in person if you like. #McCarthyism 

X
15 minutes ago 

Like they say in China, keep on blogg'n 

X
9 minutes ago 

I just checked the phone book, and you are not listed.  Did you mean Seattle, China.

There are numerous such attacks on us on the review page of Ping Fu's book on Amazon. They are too painful for me to read. 

My heart aches. Why aren't we treated as Americans? Why whenever there is a debate or disagreement, are we considered Chinese, not American? Why? Can any Kossacks help me understand? What is wrong with America? 

On further reflection, I may have overreacted myself. It is possible that those attacks are the works of Fu's PR team to exploit the weaknesses in us. So perhaps even the racist tones were part of the lies. I hope that is the case.

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.”