Questionable Fact: Fu Ping's Passport Story

The Original Story:
After supposedly told of "government orders" to leave China, Fu Ping found herself in a quagmire, as she described in Pages 258-260 of Bend, Not Break:

I was happy to learn that my family had begun to make arrangements for me to live overseas. However, one major obstacle still remained: I needed to obtain an official passport from the Nanjing provincial government in order to leave the country. Chinese officials did not always communicate with one another or conduct thorough background checks unless an event triggered it. I was sure that when the Nanjing provincial passport office inevitably checked my personal record, they would discover the black mark from my Red Maple Society activities at Suzhou University. That might very well be enough reason for them to deny me a passport.

Her story after that is too long to be reproduced here. In summary:

1. She went to "the police station" and volunteered her "black mark" to "a beautiful young policewoman" and asked for help.
2. The policewoman is moved by her story of investigating infanticide.
3. A week later, Fu Ping found a handwritten note under the door at her home in Nanjing, telling her "to be at the Five Dragon Bridge at two p.m."
4. The policewoman met her at the bridge. "With a glance over her shoulder to be sure that no one was watching, she pulled several dozen sheets of paper out of a thick brown envelop" and gave them to Fu Ping.
5. The policewoman took the rest of the file and left. Four hours later, she came back with a grin, got the sheets from Fu Ping and returned them to the envelop.
6. A few weeks later, Fu Ping got her passport in the mail.

The Debunking:

Most reasonable people in Fu Ping's situation would probably have not gone through the trouble. If the government was going to deport her, why not let the government worry about the passport issue? Why would a deportee-to-be worry about being denied a passport at all?

What Fu Ping described the "personal file" and "envelop" is a very important document in China called "档案". It follows a person from job to job but is never, never visible to the said person. It's unusual enough for Fu Ping to get a direct touch of her file. But that's not even the real problem in this story.

As Fu Ping acknowledged in the book, for the policewoman to do her such a favor, she would be risking her  own life. In such a dangerous endeavor, was there any point for the policewoman to bring the file out in the open, get Fu Ping involved in the public, and operate in such a clandestine manner? She could not just extract those sheets in the security of her own home without anyone, including Fu Ping herself, knowing about it?

(A side note is that, typically, provincial governments did not inspect personal files when issuing passports. They relied on the applicant's work unit, which held the person's file, to investigate and issue an official approval letter. This might not be the case in 1982 when private passport applications were still rare. Also, at that point, Fu Ping had already left Suzhou University either by graduation or dropping out. It is not sure if she had a formal work unit at that time -- a point we will address a little later.)

Broken Fact: Fu Ping's Passport Timeline

The Original Story:
In Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping told a very convoluted story of how she managed to obtain a passport to travel abroad (which we will debunk later). On Pages 255-260, she had a rough timeline for the process:

1. "One day in the fall of 1982," she was supposedly arrested by kidnapping
2. 3 days later, she was released. Then, "I stayed inside for weeks as my family tried to figure out some way of helping me..."
3. "A few weeks after the house arrest begain..." she was told to leave the country
4. "A week later," she received an offer of clandestine help from a police
5. "A few weeks later, my passport arrived in the mail."

The Changing Story:

In several interviews, however, Fu Ping told a different story. That she was given a passport "two weeks" after her arrest. This was reported in the Inc. profile, initial story on Forbes. 

And also in her very own words, for example, At Authors at Google on January 7, 2013:

But he didn't give any other instructions so nobody knew what to do with me. I was let out. Two weeks later, I was given a passport and told to leave the country and never to come back again.

When Jenna Goudreau of the Forbes questioned the conflicting timeline, Fu Ping, through her publicist, could not produce a satisfying answer:

Late last night, Fu’s publicist emailed me that they “confirmed that Ping started school in 1978 and left school in the fall of 1982 after being held by the government. She arrived in the U.S. on January 14, 1984.” So she was at home for over year before the police asked her to leave China? “The government asked Ping to leave a couple of weeks after her release,” the publicist wrote me. “However, getting a passport was very difficult, if not impossible, at that time. Even though Ping was asked to leave China, she had to wait for an official passport to be issued.”

The Debunking:

Getting a passport to leave China could indeed be very difficult in the early 1980s -- for ordinary citizens. One would presume that, if the government had decided to deport someone, all would be arranged.

The timeline in her book itself is a little fuzzy, of course. But it is reasonable to deduct that all the events happened within months of "fall of 1982" and that she spent weeks if not months obtaining the passport. Yet then she waited till the January of 1984 to actually leave the country. What a leisure way of getting "deported" into exile!

The alternative "two weeks" timeline would be a lot more consistent with the "deportation" claim. (Although, in practice, Chinese government typically only handed out the passport at the airport just as the deportee was escorted onto an airplane, after they started the practice in the mid-1990s.) Alas, it did not fit her timeline.

With her clarification to Forbes, we know for certain that she had lied to several reporters with the "two weeks" claim, including the instance that was recorded on videotape on Authors at Google.