Broken Accusation: Internet Harrassment and Terrorism

The Accusation
A "smear campaign". This is Fu Ping's first response to the wide spread criticism on the factual accuracy of his memoir. In an interview with International Herald and Tribute in February, 2013, she told Didi Kirsten Tatlow that,

They smear my name, they try to get my daughter’s name on the Internet, they sent people to Shanghai to surround my family and to Nanjing to harass my neighbors.

A few weeks later, she raised the bar and claimed "this is Internet Terrorism."

The Debunking
None of the above accusations are true.

First of all, Fu Ping included her daughter's name in the "Acknowledgement" part of her book. It was also included in some of the earlier profiles on her success. For example, an article from her alma mater or an interview with WNYC.

The mystery of the Shanghai Villa where her family grew up has already been documented. Indeed, curious and diligent people have walked the streets in Shanghai tried to locate it but none have succeeded so far. It is therefore impossible to "surround" it.

Furthermore, members of Fu Ping's own family, including her mother, are all living abroad in USA. Her relatives in Shanghai have so far stayed outside of public controversy. Nobody has stepped up to validate her story. As a consequence, they are enjoying their privacy and could not have been "surrounded" by outsiders.

The only possibility is about her (former) neighbors in Nanjing. A couple of them did step up to provide information that refuted her story of her childhood. Unfortunately, most of these could not be substantiated either, for the lack of evidence and their choice of staying anonymous. However, there has been no complains about being harassed either.

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."

News&Observer: Geomagic Founder Ping Fu Says Chinese Bloggers are Tormenting her over Memoir

The following news was published by the News & Observer on February 23, 2013, which includes an interview with Fu Ping in which she accused her critics as "Internet terrorism":

The way Ping Fu tells the story, she spent years trying not to write a book. 

It was friends and editors who prevailed up on her to tell her life story as a survivor of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In her life they saw an inspiring Horatio Alger tale of a near-penniless exile who arrived in the United States in 1984 to become Inc. magazine’s 2005 entrepreneur of the year. 

Today Fu’s name may be better known outside the Triangle than locally. As a founder of Morrisville-based Geomagic, a 3D software imaging company, she was named by President Barack Obama in 2010 to the White House National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. 

Then came her book, “Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds,” published Dec. 31 by Penguin. It chronicles Fu’s forced separation from her family, her decade spent in a re-education center, her experience being gang-raped at 10, and her witness to Red Guards having a teacher drawn-and-quartered by horses. 

The book received favorable reviews in this country, but the reaction in China was unexpected.  

Fu’s memoir was attacked online as a blatant fabrication by a Chinese blogger, Fang Zhouzi, who mobilized legions of sympathetic followers to torpedo Fu’s reputation. He alleged that Fu was no victim but a member of the privileged elite who is exploiting Western ignorance and gullibility. 

The attacks on Fu’s credibility took place in the midst of Geomagic’s pending acquisition by 3D Systems. She says the online offensive is ongoing and could continue for years, based on the attacker’s established pattern. 

Still, in an age of faked memoirs, accusations of fakery can’t be dismissed out of hand. Fu, 54, has been forced to defend herself and validate her account. She has acknowledged that her book contains some typos and errors, but she stands by the integrity of her writing as a personal memoir. 

In a personal plea in the Huffington Post, Fu wrote that the ferocity of the barrage has caused her to relive the emotional abuse of the Cultural Revolution. “This smear campaign reveals the dark side of China,” she wrote. 

In recent months her name has circulated in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The New York Times and other media outlets in a swirling debate about memory, history, victimization and self-reinvention. Last week the Times concluded, indecisively, that “it’s difficult to establish the truth” about Fu’s account as long as China is shackled by censorship and keeps closed its historical archives. 

The Daily Beast, an online news site, decided in Fu’s favor. The news site concluded she is the victim of an organized “hate campaign” being carried out by “an army of Chinese bloggers” who may be abetted by the party and government. “The campaign has morphed into a vindictive effort to destroy her life, to have her honors and awards withdrawn, the pending sale of Geomagic disrupted.” 

Ping Fu spoke to N&O reporter John Murawski last week about her new memoir and the controversy surrounding it. Responses have been edited for length and clarity. 

Q: Where did the idea to write a book come from? 

I talked in the book that (in 2005) I went through a deep training, kind of a psychological and sociology training, and in there I got hypnotized, and I was crying like crazy, and that’s when my floodgate opened the first time. It’s called a Grinnell Leadership Training. He has a hypnotism session, and it’s deep. It’s the first time I experienced that. … I cried through three boxes of tissues. And they asked me why I was crying, and I started talking. … After I came out of the class, I was much more vulnerable and much more open, and that’s when the Inc. reporter was there. I would have never told the Inc. reporter my whole life story if it wasn’t for this session. It opened me up with the past, and it put me in this vulnerable position at the time. … I revealed whatever I remembered basically, and he wrote a big story. That event caused a lot of people following me with interviews, and I was approached by an agent to write a book. I went in, I did some research, I did a proposal, and I decided not to write it. They even assigned me a co-author. We went down that route. We spent a year doing research. We wrote a book proposal. And I pulled out. 

Q: Why did you change your mind? 

I didn’t want to write a book. It was too involved, too painful, and my daughter was too young. She was just becoming a teenager, and I didn’t want to subject her to the Cultural Revolution at that time. 

Q: How was the book idea later revived? 

Then my daughter turned 18, and she went to college. And somehow I had a lot of time in the evenings and weekends. You suddenly have an empty nest. And that just triggered me to write a book. My new co-author knows a lot about China. … She’s a ghost writer for the Dalai Lama’s book also, and she’s a Buddhist. … She takes a look at my material, and she says, “Oh my God, I’ve never seen anything like this. You should write this book. I would really like to help you. Why don’t we write a business book? It’s really easy. Let’s pick eight principles of Ping.” … The second thing that happened was I wanted to not write – again. I wasn’t sure I wanted to write a book. So I wanted to withdraw. 

Q: What happened this time? 

I’m an introvert. I never really wanted to write a book. I don’t have a strong incentive to write a book. … It’s a lot of work. So half-way through it, I don’t like what the book is. 

Q: How did the book project evolve? 

I needed to change the voice. I needed to write this book like I’m sitting on the kitchen counter telling the story to my daughter. So that evolved into adding more of the past into the book. So it’s at that point that I committed to writing the book – because I suddenly I felt like it’s a book worth writing. … I was also trying to show in this book the in-between spaces where the opportunity lies. So the two worlds are China and America, which have different ideologies, but at end the two big countries have a lot of similarities. Two mothers, one is very loving, one’s very analytical. And two fields of study, art and science. And what happened when I combined those – I was trying to show the opportunity lies between the extremes. It end up to be a business memoir because more than half of it is about business, entrepreneurship. 

Q: Did you expect Chinese nationalists to attack your credibility? 

This caught me totally by surprise. I thought maybe there would be some negative grumblings, but I never expected anything like this. 

Q: How do you explain the intensity of the attacks against you? 

Forbes did an interview with me, and Forbes translated that interview in Chinese. The translation had some errors in there. … But what really happened is the Forbes article comes one day after The New York Times broke the story about the (Chinese) hackers. My attack comes one day after. 

Q: What do you think is Fang Zhouzi’s motive? 

He even said in his second or third posting, he said, “I don’t care about Ping being the casualty, what I’m going after is Western Media.” So he mobilized a lot of people to assault every media outlet that’s here. 

Q: How did the attacks operate? 

I’ll give you an example on Amazon. My book probably had 37 five-star, all-good reviews the first week I was on a book tour. Within a week the amount of smear they had showered me with was twice as much as Michael Jackson’s book, “Untouchable.” The whole site is smeared. If customers don’t know me, why would they buy the book? It’s entirely negative reviews. 

Q: How did Fang Zhouzi affect your book sales? 

Tanked, totally. Totally tanked. I was selling 1,500 copies a day before this started. 

Q: And after the attacks? 

Just few copies a day. 

Q: What’s your take on this experience? 

This is Internet terrorism. It’s people hiding behind the Internet being extremely cruel to me. They try to smear my reputation, damage my personal life. They’ve done so many things. My ex-husband’s email from Austria and my daughter’s email from college, they put it on Internet and tell people to send them hate mail. 

Q: Has it affected your personal life? 

I have my security software coming up much more often. It used to be twice a year saying it’s catching something. Now I get it three times a day. It will jump up and say some malicious thing wants to get into your email. There’s high activity of something trying to get into my computer. So my assistant had changed all of my passwords, they came to my house and changed everything. 

Q: Do you ever wish you had stuck to your initial instinct and not written this book? 

I don’t regret writing the book, but I don’t like the experience because I’m reliving what happened to me when I was 8 years old. I’ve been publicly denounced, publicly humiliated, which is what happens in the Cultural Revolution. I don’t like those people bringing the Cultural Revolution to America. Who gave them the right to invade my privacy? Or attacking other people, or suppressing other people’s opinion? Who gives them a right to try to silence me in this way? 

Q: The critics claim they are suppressing lies and promoting truth. 

I always said it’s not about absolute truth. It’s a memory. Who can get 50 years of memory right? It’s a memoir. It’s what I remember. It’s my experience. It’s my story. I have a right to tell my story my way. I’m not writing a history book, I’m not an investigative journalist. I’m not a scholar of the Cultural Revolution. 

I wasn’t trying to be perfect. I was trying to be authentic and honest. 

Q: How do you explain so many people joining this online campaign against you? 

I must have stepped on some nerves, obviously, otherwise it wouldn’t have created this much emotion. What I learned is a lot of time when I read those very hurtful comments, those people are telling their own story. They’re angry. And somehow they use this forum to express their own anger or their own hurt. It isn’t even about my story. It makes me think that the Cultural Revolution has been over for many years, but it’s still very fresh in people’s minds. I have gone through the Grinnell Leadership, and opening up, and talking about it, and writing a book. It’s a healing process. And it was painful for me to write it. Those people have not gone through that. So through my book, it’s bringing out the anger, the frustration that maybe they experienced in their life. So I want to extend my compassion to them. 

I am still trying to get a handle on what happened.

Fang Zhouzi: The Double Faced Political Correctness of New York Times in Ping Fu Affair

The following post was published by Fang Zhouzi in his Chinese blog on February 25 and translated into English by xgz. It's a direct response to the two articles by Didi Kirsten Tatlow.

The International Herald Tribune (the Global Edition of The New York Times) reporter Didi Kirsten Tatlow wrote two articles on the Ping Fu affair. One was published on the International Herald Tribune (www.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/world/asia/21iht-letter21.html), the other was posted on the New York Times blog (rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/true-or-false-the-tussle-over-ping-fus-memoir/). The contrast between these two articles is like they were written by two different people. In the blog post, Tatlow did some investigation, which allowed readers to see how Ping Fu flip-flopped and twisted herself into a pretzel. However, in the newspaper article, Tatlow flip-flopped herself on behalf of Ping Fu, adopting the tactic of Ping Fu’s team to blame the so-called fallibility of memory, and further using the lack of openness of information about China as an excuse to claim that one cannot prove whether Ping Fu is lying. No wonder the co-author of Ping Fu’s memoir MeiMei Fox recommended the newspaper article on Twitter while ignoring the blog post. Ping Fu’s team may be under the impression that even if her memoir is full of errors, as long as one cannot prove that Ping Fu is intentionally lying, they win. 

In my previous article "Fu Ping’s Incredible American Story" I expressed hope that someone would go to the Albuquerque Police Department to check whether there was any record about Ping Fu being kidnapped by a Vietnamese Chinese. I was certain that no such record existed, because the story of being kidnapped from the airport by a Vietnamese Chinese to babysit for him for three days was a total fabrication. The most valuable point in Tatlow’s blog post, was that she checked with the Albuquerque Police Department. And, just as I expected, Albuquerque Police Department had no record of such a case. Ping Fu contended that she did not press charges against the Vietnamese Chinese. "I don’t know how they keep records," as if there would not be a police record simply if she did not press charges. Anyone with a little bit of knowledge of the US would know that this is impossible. First of all, kidnapping is a felony. Even if Ping Fu as the victim did not cooperate with the police, the police would not automatically close the case. Secondly, even if they closed the case, there would still be the records of the 911 call, the sending of the officers, and the police interview. Furthermore, this case involved three abandoned children. The police had to find social services to deal with the children, which means a lot of paperworks. There had to be a big paper trail. The fact that no record exists only means that the case never happened. Ping Fu made up the whole thing. 

Ping Fu blamed inconsistencies in interviews of her and in her memoir on memory lapses, and also blamed them on American reporters misunderstanding her meaning and their undisciplined writing. I predicted that Ping Fu would next make her co-author MeiMei Fox a scapegoat. Sure enough, Ping Fu blamed some mistakes in her memoir on poor communication with Fox, on exaggerations by Fox, on Fox’s ignorance in Chinese geography, and on Fox using incorrect material found on the internet - inadvertently revealing that the so-called memoir was not based entirely on Ping Fu’s own memory. Ping Fu even complained that Fox ignored her requests to correct mistakes. I gave an example of Ping Fu’s reckless fabrication in a previous article "A Habitual Liar Ping Fu”: Ping Fu said in her memoir that after China began to implement the one-child policy in 1982, all female students at Suzhou University were checked every month by university officials, who inserted their fingers into the vaginas of the students to check for menstrual blood. Now Ping Fu is changing the story to that what she meant was that the university officials asked the students to put their own finger into the vagina to check their menstrual blood, that Fox made a mistake, and that she tried to correct it three times to no avail. 

Even conceding that Ping Fu originally meant to say that the officials asked the students check their own menstrual blood for them to see, does that make this story believable? Not at all. First, there were thousands of female students at Suzhou University at the time, but no one ever came out and said there had been such a bizarre thing. On the contrary, several female students who studied at Suzhou University at that time came out and said such humiliating things never happened. Second, the family planning policy would have been targeted at married women,  not at female students in college, almost all of whom were unmarried in the early 1980’s. Checking for unmarried pregnancy at that time would not have been because of family planning. Unmarried girls who got pregnant would be punished for their immoral behavior, not for violating family planning policy. Third, to detect unmarried pregnancy, checking menstruation would be both laborious and inaccurate. Because there were many female students and their menstrual periods were not synchronous, the students needed to be checked everyday. Even if a female student did not have her period, it didn’t necessarily mean that she was pregnant. Menstrual irregularity is quite common. If the university’s purpose for detecting pregnancy was not to provide prenatal care as soon as possible, but to force abortion, then why did they need to know so early? Why not wait until there would be obvious signs of pregnancy? How compromised must one’s intelligence be to believe a story of checking for menstrual blood (either by self-fingering or fingering by others)? And how perverse must the storyteller be to concoct such a story? 

After the Guardian reported that Professor Cheng Yinghong, who attended the same university with Ping Fu, never heard of the student publication Red Maple edited by Ping Fu, she now changed her story to say that she remembered wrong, and that she was involved in editing a student publication called Hook of Wu (Tatlow incorrectly translated it as No Hook). Ping Fu spent considerable lengths in her book to describe how while in college she organized a student club called Red Maple (also attached a photo of club members), and acted as the chief editor of (now she changed to "participated in editing") a student publication named Red Maple, and how famous this publication was both within and outside the campus. In 1979 student representatives who attended a meeting of college student publishers each held a copy of Red Maple, and went to meet Deng Xiaoping, who took a look at the magazine, which had an anti-party article that attracted his attention, and therefore the chief editor Ping Fu suffered the consequences... Now Ping Fu is telling us that she remembered incorrectly the name of this famous publication. Ping Fu claimed that this is an example “that shows everyone’s memory can be wrong". But I do not believe that someone would misremember the name of their own college publication which they acted as a chief editor. Moreover the names Hook of Wu and Red Maple are neither similar in pronunciation nor in meaning. How could one misremember Hook of Wu as non-existent Red Maple? 

Ping Fu also changed her story about what magazine the representatives to the 1979 meeting of the national college publishers were holding. It was not Red Maple, but This Generation instead. I have to point out that Ping Fu “remembered incorrectly" again. This Generation was a joint publication published after the meeting, and was printed by Wuhan University. Jiangsu Teachers College, where Ping Fu was a student, took no part in it. In fact, Jiangsu Teachers College sent no representative to the meeting. This Generation had only one issue. Its publication license was revoked because of two poems, rather than an "anti-party" article titled “A Confession of a Communist Party Member” as claimed by Ping Fu. There was no article with that title in the only issue of This Generation. 

Sing Tao Daily said that Ping Fu obtained her green card through political asylum when it reported Ping Fu’s "Outstanding American by Choice” award, and people suspected that her initial motive for fabricating her persecution in China was to apply for political asylum. Ping Fu said that she obtained the green card by marrying a U.S. citizen: September 1, 1986, she married a U.S. citizen in California and divorced three years later. She said that her reason for not mentioning this marriage before was to protect this American. Protecting from what? Did she already foresee that her memoir would be criticized and lies exposed? The real reason for hiding this marriage in all interviews and in her memoir may not be so honorable. Searching marriage registration records one finds that someone named Ping Fu and Richard Lynn Ewald married on September 10, 1986, not in California, but in Las Vegas, Nevada - a marriage and divorce paradise. The procedure there is extremely simple. In U.S. movies, television shows, and literature, going to Las Vegas to get married is often depicted as not being serious about it. This marriage after she was less than two years in the US seemed almost non-existent for Ping Fu, and her memoir reflects it: 

“I was almost thirty years old and had no personal life. It had been more than 5 years since I'd landed in the United States, yet I still wondered, what was an American life exactly? I had much to learn and to experience if I wanted to make this country my home.... what finally transformed my personal life was not a class I took or a book I read. It was something totally unplanned and unrelated to these well-intentioned, purposeful efforts to make myself ‘fit in’: a romance. " 

Ping Fu was already married with the American Richard Lynn Ewald for two years when she was 30 years old. Yet she complained about having no personal life, not knowing what American life was like, and still waiting for a romance. It took a romance with an Austrian (her second husband) for her to integrate into the American society. This means that the marriage between her and Richard Lynn Ewald was in name only; it had nothing to do with love, but had everything to do with the green card. To prevent fraudulent green card applications through sham marriages with American citizens, U.S. immigration law only approves a temporary green card initially for someone who marries an American. The official green card can be applied after two years of marriage. And it takes a few months more for the official green card to be approved. They can divorce as soon as the official green card is approved. So this type of green card marriage often lasts only three years. 

Tatlow said in her article on the International Herald Tribune that although some of Ping Fu’s experiences sounded weird, they could still be true. The article used as an example what Ping Fu described as her research in infanticide for her thesis which angered the government and led to her imprisonment for three days through a kidnapping carried out by police. Tatlow provided two "evidence": 

One "evidence" was from Ping Fu who produced a letter sent by one of her classmates in May 1982. The letter mentioned that Ping Fu suddenly left college without graduating, and the reason given by the school was that Ping Fu suffered a nervous breakdown due to breakup of a relationship. Ping Fu claimed that it was a politically motivated cover-up, and that the real reason was because she wrote an article on infanticide in rural areas due to the one-child policy which after being picked up by the newspapers, created an international outcry and caused her trouble with the authority. 

This story can not withstand scrutiny. First the timing was wrong. The letter was written in May 1982. But according to Ping Fu’s memoir, she was detained for her thesis in the fall of 1982. Earlier this month, in a reply to a Forbes reporter's question her publicist also "confirmed” that Ping Fu "left school in the fall of 1982 after being held by the government." So what was mentioned in the letter in May about her suddenly leaving school could not have been about her detention. Second, Ping Fu’s memoir also mentioned "leaving school due to nervous breakdown before graduation," but it was an excuse made up by her mother and her to avoid being assigned a job outside the city, rather than a political cover-up by the school. 

The other "evidence" provided by Tatlow was a New York Times report on April 11, 1983 which mentioned a March 3, 1983 People's Daily report saying that "the phenomena of butchering, drowning and leaving to die female infants and maltreating women who have given birth to female infants have been very serious." I do not know why Tatlow considered this as evidence. The People's Daily report was on March 3, 1983, half a year after Ping Fu’s alleged imprisonment in late fall of 1982. The title of the report was "Comrade Leader of the All China Women's Federation Responds to a Letter from 15 Women in Anhui Province, Calls on all Sectors of Society to Fight against Patriarchal Thinking and Behavior." It was a response to a letter to the editor published by the newspaper on February 23 titled "We Demand a Second Liberation" which did not contain anything about female infanticide. The newspaper report only mentioned in passing that “in the past two years, the All China Women's Federation has received many materials and letters from various places that reported the shocking phenomena of drowning and abandoning female infants and maltreating women who have given birth to female infants. This has become a serious social problem" (the People's Daily article did not use the word “butchering", which was arbitrarily added by the New York Times). Therefore, neither the time of the report nor its content were in any way connected to the so-called thesis by Ping Fu. 

Ping Fu claimed that her thesis was the first report of the phenomenon of female infanticide caused by the implementation of the one-child policy in China, and that because of the UN sanctions, the Chinese government placed the blame on her. 

In fact, prior to the time that Ping Fu claimed to have finished her thesis (1982), there were already official Chinese newspaper reports on female infanticides due to the implementation of the one-child policy, and these reports were republished by the US media: According to 1981 Executive Intelligence Reviews, China’s Population Research Quarterly and the South China Daily both reported that the one-child policy had led to the crime of infanticide (EIR Volume 8, Number 12, March 24, 1981, page 49, Volume 8, Number 13, March 31, 1981, page 54, and EIR Volume 8, Number 21, May 26, 1981, page 50). If the Chinese government wanted to blame someone, the last person they could blame was Ping Fu. Since both before and after Ping Fu’s thesis was completed, China's newspapers had been reporting infanticides, it was clearly not a sensitive topic. Why would the government grab Ping Fu and deport her? 

Tatlow claimed that before China opens all its files and allows an open debate, there would be no way to know whether Ping Fu was telling the truth. 

Are the US archives open enough? Is public debate allowed in the US? The Albuquerque police could not find any record of Ping Fu’s kidnapping. But it took only one sentence "I don’t know how they keep records" from Ping Fu to shut Tatlow up, even though Tatlow knew full well whether the Albuquerque police should have the records, and whether Ping Fu was lying about this. 

In fact, Ping Fu’s incredible China stories did not involve any state secrets, and can be exposed as lies from publicly available information. There was no need to wait for "opening files and allowing public debates" in the distant future. One should not blame everything on China not being open and free, although doing this is very politically correct. Even worse is to ignore the basic facts right in front of one’s own eyes, just for the sake of being politically correct, which is often the tendency of some Western journalists. 

At the least, even if it is difficult to verify the truthfulness of every old story told by Ping Fu, by just looking at how she told new lies about what just happened, one can tell that she is a habitual liar without any credibility. Just a few days earlier she told the Guardian that her critics should not be called a smear campaign, now she complained to Tatlow that she was being smeared. And her complaints were filled with lies: "They tried to get my daughter’s name from the Internet"- in fact, her daughter's name is on the first page of her memoir. "They sent people to Shanghai and surrounded my house, and to Nanjing to harass my neighbors” - I reposted the photo of the mansion that Ping Fu claimed was her Shanghai home, and asked people to locate it to see if it was real. Although several people looked in Shanghai, no one was able to locate this house. How could anyone have surrounded the house? There were indeed someone who went to ask questions about Ping Fu to her Nanjing neighbors, but the neighbors did not think it was harassment. Instead they testified that Ping Fu was lying. She said that her second exhusband, Herbert Edelsbrunner, received a lot of "hate mails"- What I saw was that people who criticized Ping Fu expressed sympathy to Edelsbrunner, feeling that the credit due him was stolen by Ping Fu. Who would send him "hate mails "? Perhaps they were from Ping Fu supporters? 

Recently Ping Fu was interviewed by a local media, News & Observer (www.newsobserver.com/2013/02/23/2699216/geomagic-founder-ping-fu-says.html), which is located at the same place as her own company. In this interview she continued to lie, saying that she had been the target of internet terrorist attacks, saying that the smear campaign against her started the day after the New York Times report about the Chinese hacker army - in fact, a quick check can show that the New York Times report was later; saying that I launched a smear campaign, and that in the second or third article, I had said, "I do not care whether she is the victim (of the smear campaign), my target is the Western media" - Where did I ever say that? 

Tatlow, do you believe that you also need to politically correctly wait for China to open its files and allow public debates to decide whether Ping Fu lied about what just happened?
In 1996, Ping Fu published a memoir in China, Drifting Bottles - American Sketches (Hubei Children Publishing House), authored entirely by herself. In the Chinese memoir, what Ping Fu described about her life in China and in the United States, are exactly the opposite of what she described in her English memoir. This further proves that we are right to question her: She is a liar. In future articles, I will compare Ping Fu’s Chinese and English memoirs. I also hope that Tatlow can go to the National Library in Beijing to borrow a copy of Drifting Bottles - American Sketches, read it (Tatlow said she could read and write Chinese), and write a follow-up report - this book is publicly available now, you do not need to wait for the future.

　　《国际先驱论坛报》（《纽约时报》的国际版）记者Didi Kirsten Tatlow写了两篇关于傅苹事件的文章，一篇登在《国际先驱论坛报》上（www.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/world/asia/21iht-letter21.html ），一篇登在该报的博客上（http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/true-or-false-the-tussle-over-ping-fus-memoir/ ）。对比这两篇文章，几乎就像是两个人写的。在博客文章中，Tatlow做了一些调查，让我们得以听到傅苹是如何再次改变说辞进行狡辩的，然而在报纸文章中，Tatlow却自己为傅苹狡辩起来，采纳了傅苹团队所谓记忆错误的说法，以中国信息不公开为由声称无法证明傅苹是不是在说假话。难怪傅苹自传的共同作者MeiMei Fox在推特上推荐这篇报纸文章却无视那篇博客文章，在傅苹团队的人看来，即便傅苹回忆录充满了错误，只要不能证明傅苹是有意说谎，就是胜利。 

　　在《傅苹的“美国传奇”》一文中，我表示希望有人能去Albuquerque警察局查查有没有傅苹被越南华人绑架的记录，而且我敢肯定是找不到任何记录的，因为所谓在机场被越南华人绑架去当了三天保姆就是胡编的一个故事。Tatlow博客文章中最有价值的一点，就是她去向Albuquerque警察局查了，而且如我所料，Albuquerque警察局并没有这个案子的记录。傅苹的狡辩是，她当时没有要求起诉那个越南华人，“我不知道警察局是怎么保存记录的。”似乎她不要求起诉警察局就不会有这个案子的记录。只要有点美国社会常识的人就知道这是不可能的事。首先，绑架是重罪，即使傅苹作为受害者不与警方合作，警方也不会因此就不立案。其次，即使不立案，也会有报警、出警、审讯的记录，而且这个案子还涉及到三个被遗弃的小孩，警方需要找社会服务机构处理，更会涉及到一大堆文书，必然会有很多记录。没有任何记录，只能说明这个案子从来就没有发生过，完全是傅苹捏造出来的。 

　　傅苹对自己在采访、回忆录中的错误，除了归咎于记忆错误，还怪罪给美国记者误解了她的意思而乱写。我曾指出傅苹接下来会把共同作者MeiMei Fox当替罪羊。果不其然，傅苹将其回忆录中的一些错误怪罪给Fox与她交流不善、用词夸张、不懂中国地理和只是在互联网上找不正确的资料来用——无意中透露了这本所谓回忆录并非完全根据傅苹的回忆，而是从网上找资料拼凑而成。傅苹甚至埋怨Fox不按她的要求进行改正。我在《习惯性说谎者傅苹》中举了一个傅苹回忆录胡编乱造的例子：傅苹在其书中说，1982年中国开始实行一胎化政策后，苏州大学的全体女生每个月都要被大学官员把手指插入阴道检查有没有经血。现在傅苹改口说，她本来说的是大学官员要求女生自己把手指插入阴道检查有没有经血，Fox写错了，她改正了三次都没有改过来。 

　　就算傅苹本来的意思是官员让女生自己查经血让他们看，这个故事就可信吗？并不。第一，苏州大学当时应该有上千名女生，却从来没有哪个出来说曾经发生过这么离奇的事情，反而有当时在苏州大学读书的女生出来说从未发生过这种污辱人的事。第二，计划生育政策针对的是已婚妇女，当时在校女生几乎都是未婚，根本就不会在她们身上执行计划生育。如果要查未婚怀孕的话，那也不是因为计划生育，未婚怀孕的女生会因为不道德而不是因为违反计划生育政策而受到处罚。第三，真的要查女生是否未婚怀孕的话，查月经是费力而不准确的做法。因为有那么多的女生，而她们的月经并不同步，这就意味着每天都要女生都查一遍。即使某个女生当月没来月经，也不能说明她就是怀孕，因为月经不规则是常有的是。学校查女生怀孕的目的不是为了尽早做孕期保健，而是为了强迫人流，那么迫不及待地想知道女生是否怀孕干什么呢？完全可以等到有了大肚子等明显怀孕特征后再采取行动。相信这么个普查月经（不管是自查还是他查）的人智力该有多么低下，而编造这个荒唐故事的人心理该有多么变态？ 

　　在《卫报》报道当时与傅苹同校同系的程映虹教授从未听说过傅苹主编的学生刊物《红枫》后，傅苹现在改口说，她记错了，她大学时参与编辑的学生刊物叫做《吴钩》（Tatlow错误地把它翻译成"No Hook"——《无钩》）。傅苹在书中花了相当长的篇幅来介绍她如何在大学期间组织一个叫红枫的学生社团（还附了一张社团成员合影），主编（现在改口是“参与编辑”）一份叫《红枫》的学生刊物，这份刊物当时如何在校内外闻名，1979年参加全国大学生刊物会议的代表人手一册《红枫》，拿着它去见邓小平，被邓小平拿去看，上面一篇反党文章引起了邓小平的注意，主编傅苹因此遭殃……现在傅苹告诉我们她记错了这份著名刊物的名字。傅苹声称这是一个“任何人记忆都会出错”的例子，但我不相信会有人连自己在大学时代主编的刊物的名称都会记错。何况《吴钩》和《红枫》不论是读音还是意思都没有任何相似之处，怎么会把《吴钩》记成了不存在的《红枫》？ 

　　傅苹也改口说，1979年参加全国大学生刊物会议的代表拿的不是《红枫》，而是《这一代》。我不得不要指出，傅苹又“记错”了。《这一代》是在这次会议之后才出版的联合刊物，而且是由武汉大学出的，与傅苹所在的江苏师范学院没有任何关系。事实上，江苏师范学院并无代表去参加会议。《这一代》只出了一期就被停刊，停刊的原因是里面的两首诗，而不是傅苹说的那篇“反党”文章，《这一代》上面也没有那篇题为《一个共产党员的自首》的文章。 

　　《星岛日报》在去年报道傅苹被评为“杰出归化美国人”时曾说她是靠申请政治避难获得的绿卡，因此人们怀疑她编造如何在中国受迫害的最初动机是为了申请政治避难。现在傅苹说，她是靠和美国公民结婚获得的绿卡：在1986年9月1日她在加州和一个美国公民结婚，三年后离婚。她说她此前之所以对这次婚姻只字不提是为了保护这个美国人。她在保护这个美国人什么呢？难道她已预见到她的回忆录会受到批评、揭露？她在所有的履历、采访和回忆录中隐瞒这段婚姻的真实原因可能并不那么光彩。搜索婚姻登记记录可以知道在1986年9月10日有一个叫Ping Fu的人和Richard Lynn Ewald结婚，但不是在加州，而是在内华达州的拉斯维加斯——那里是结婚和离婚的天堂，手续极其简便，在美国影视、文学作品中，跑到拉斯维加斯结婚往往被当成结婚不严肃的表现。傅苹这段她才到美国两年多就结上的婚姻对她来说就像几乎不存在一样，这是她在回忆录里自己表露出来的： 

　　“我几乎30岁了，却没有个人生活。自从我抵达美国5年多已经过去了，但是我还在疑惑，究竟什么是美国生活？如果我要把这个国家当家的话我还有很多要学习和体验的。……最终转变我的个人生活的，不是我上的某门课程或我读过的某本书。而是某种完全没有计划的，与有意让我自己‘融入’无关的东西：一次罗曼史。” 

　　傅苹30岁的时候已与美国人Richard Lynn Ewald结婚了两年，她却还在抱怨自己没有个人生活，不知道什么是美国生活，还在等着来一次罗曼史，与一个奥地利人（她的第二任丈夫）的罗曼史才让她融入了美国社会。这说明她与Richard Lynn Ewald的婚姻名存实亡，与爱情无关，而与绿卡有关。为了防止靠与美国人假结婚骗取绿卡，美国移民法规定与美国人结婚后一开始只能获得临时绿卡，结婚两年后才能申请转为正式绿卡，等正式绿卡批下来又要过几个月，拿到正式绿卡就可以离婚了，所以这种绿卡婚姻往往只持续三年。 

　　登在《国际先驱论坛报》上的Tatlow文章说傅苹的某些经历虽然听上去很怪异，但是有可能是真的。它举了傅苹说她由于其研究杀婴的大学毕业论文激怒了政府，被公安绑架囚禁了三天一事。Tatlow给出了两条“证据”： 

　　一个“证据”是傅苹出示了她的一个同学在1982年5月写给她的一封信。信中提到傅苹突然没有毕业就离校，校方说是傅苹由于失恋而精神失常。傅苹声称，那是一个政治掩盖行为，实际上她由于写了一篇关于一胎化政策导致农村普遍杀溺婴的论文，被报纸报道后，国际舆论大哗，给她带来了麻烦。 

　　这个说法经不起推敲。首先是时间对不上。这封信是1982年5月写的，而傅苹在其自传中声称她由于论文遭到关押是1982年秋天的事，本月初傅苹的公关人员答复《福布斯》记者的采访时也“确认”傅苹“1982年秋在被政府扣押”。所以5月份信里提到的她突然离校不可能指的是她被关押。其次，傅苹自传中也提到了“因精神失常不毕业就离校”一事，但是是她妈和她为了避免毕业被分配到外地而编造出来的一个借口，而不是校方的政治掩盖行为。 

　　Tatlow给的另一个“证据”是，《纽约时报》在1983年4月11日报道说，1983年3月3日《人民日报》的报道称“当前残杀、溺杀、遗弃女婴和虐待生女婴的妇女的现象非常严重，已成为一个严重的社会问题”。 

　　我不知道为什么Tatlow会把这当成证据。《人民日报》的报道是1983年3月3日，距离傅苹说她被监禁的时间1982年秋晚了半年。该报道标题是《全国妇联负责同志就安徽十五名妇女来信发表谈话 呼吁社会各方面与重男轻女的思想和行为作斗争》，是对2月23日该报刊登的一封反映生女孩的母亲在农村遭到歧视的读者来信《我们要求第二次解放》的回应，来信中并没有涉及溺杀女婴的内容，该报道也只是顺便提了一句“近两年来，全国妇联曾不断收到各地寄来的材料和群众来信，反映当前溺弃女婴和虐待生女婴的妇女的现象十分突出，已成为一个严重的社会问题”（《人民日报》的原文并没有“残杀”一词，那是《纽约时报》擅加的）。所以该报道的时间、内容无论如何与傅苹的所谓论文扯不上关系。 

　　傅苹声称，她的毕业论文是中国首次报道中国由于实行一胎化政策导致杀女婴现象，由于引起了联合国制裁，中国政府才怪罪到她头上。 

　　实际上，在傅苹声称其完成论文的时间（1982年）之前，中国报刊都已正式报道过实行一胎化政策导致杀女婴现象，而且被美国媒体转载：1981年Executive Intelligence Reviews报道说，中国《人口研究》季刊和《南方日报》都报道一胎化政策导致杀女婴这一犯罪行为 (EIR Volume 8, Number 12, March 24, 1981, page 49, Volume 8, Number 13, March 31, 1981, page 54, and EIR Volume 8, Number 21, May 26, 1981, page 50)。中国政府要怪，怎么也怪不到傅苹。既然在傅苹论文完成的之前和之后，中国的报刊都在报道杀女婴的事，可见这并非敏感话题，怎么可能因此去抓傅苹并把她驱逐出境？ 

　　Tatlow声称，在中国开放档案和允许公开辩论之前，没法知道傅苹说的是不是事实。 

　　美国档案够开放了吧？公开辩论也是允许的吧？但是Albuquerque警方找不到傅苹被绑架的记录，傅苹一句“我不知道警察局是怎么保存记录的”不也让Tatlow不敢说她说谎？虽然Tatlow应该很清楚Albuquerque警方该不该有记录。 

　　事实上，傅苹的中国传奇故事根本不涉及国家机密，根据现有的公开资料就可以认定傅苹说谎，哪里用得着去等遥遥无期的“中国开放档案和允许公开辩论”？你不能把什么事都归咎于中国不开放、不自由，虽然那样做很政治正确。更不能为了政治正确，就无视眼前的基本事实，虽然某些西方记者习惯这么做。 

　　退一步说，就算傅苹所说的陈年往事的真实性难以给出确切的答案，那么看看傅苹对刚刚发生的事是如何造谣、说假话的，也可以认定这是个没有信用的习惯性说谎者。她前几天才向《卫报》说她不应该把对她的批评称为抹黑行动，现在又对Tatlow控诉起她是如何遭到了抹黑了，但谎话连篇：“他们试图从网上得到我女儿的名字”——其实她女儿的名字在其自传的第一页上就有；“他们派人到上海包围我的家庭，到南京骚扰我的邻居”——我在网上转了傅苹声称是其上海老家的豪宅照片，请人去找找看那究竟在哪里、有没有这样的豪宅，虽然有多名网友去找过，到现在也还没找着，怎么去包围？的确有人问了傅苹在南京的邻居关于傅苹的事，但是邻居并不觉得是被骚扰，反而作证说傅苹在说谎；她说她的第二任离异丈夫Herbert Edelsbrunner收到了许多“憎恨信件”——我看到的是，批评傅苹的人如果提到Edelsbrunner都是同情他的，觉得他的功劳被傅苹霸占了，谁会去给他寄“憎恨信件”？难道是傅苹的支持者寄的？ 

　　傅苹近日接受其公司所在地一家媒体News & Observer的公关采访(http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/02/23/2699216/geomagic-founder-ping-fu-says.html )，继续造谣，说她遭到了互联网恐怖主义攻击，说对她的抹黑行动是在《纽约时报》报道了中国黑客部队之后的第二天开始的——其实只要稍微查一下就知道《纽约时报》的那篇报道是后来的；说我发动了抹黑行动，说我在第二或第三篇文章里说“我才不在乎她成为（抹黑行动的）受害者，我的目标是西方媒体”——我在哪篇文章里这么说过？ 

　　Tatlow，你认为要傅苹在这些刚刚发生的事情上撒谎，也需要政治正确地等到中国开放档案和允许公开辩论之后吗？ 

　　傅苹1996年在中国出版了一本她本人一个人写的自传《漂流瓶——旅美散记》（湖北少年儿童出版社出版）。在这本中文自传里，傅苹叙述她在中国和在美国的生活，与她现在在英文回忆录里所说的，截然相反，更证明了我们对她的质疑是对的：这是个骗子。在后面的文章中，我就把傅苹的中文自传和英文回忆录做个对比。我也希望Tatlow能去北京国家图书馆把《漂流瓶——旅美散记》借来读读（Tatlow说她能读、写中文），写一篇追踪报道——这本书是公开可借的，不用留待将来。

IHT: True of False? The Tussle over Ping Fu's Memoir

On February 20, 2013, International Herald Tribune published the following article written by Didi Kirsten Tatlow. It's one of the two articles by the author on the subject on the same day.

According to this article, Fu Ping disclosed for the first time that she had an earlier marriage which was never mentioned in either Bend, not Break or her earlier memoir Drifting Bottle. She also blamed her coauthor Meimei Fox for some of the "errors" in her memoir.

Cindy Hao, who was credited as a contributor to this article, also contacted the Albuquerque Police Department's Records Office and got an affirmative answer that there had been no records on Fu Ping's alleged kidnapping incident.

Did Ping Fu, a prominent Chinese-American businesswoman and author of a recent memoir, “Bend, not Break,” make up her horrible experiences during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution in order to gain United States citizenship? Did they help her become an American by claiming political asylum? 

That’s what her critics, many of them fellow Chinese-Americans, say. It’s an accusation that can stick. As a recent New York Times investigation showed, claiming persecution has spawned an immigration industry involving lawyers prepping clients to make false asylum claims. 

As I write in my Letter from China this week, Ms. Fu is being accused of making up a lot of things in her memoir. She’s also a successful entrepreneur: the U.S. government honored Ms. Fu, the founder of the software company Geomagic (in the process of being sold to 3D Systems), with a “2012 Outstanding American by Choice” award. 

Ms. Fu is on the board of the White House’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and is a member of the National Council on Women in Technology, according to the Web site of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. 

Ms. Fu, who says in her memoir she was “quietly deported” to the U.S. in 1984 for writing about female infanticide while still a college student, denies the accusations. But until now she hadn’t explained in public how she became an American. 

In an interview with the International Herald Tribune, she said, apparently for the first time, the reason she kept quiet was she was trying to protect her first husband, an American, whom she does not mention in her memoir. The marriage took place while she was living in California, she said. 

“I had a first marriage and that’s how I got my green card,” she said by telephone. She married on Sept. 1, 1986 and divorced three years later. Until now she had kept silent because of a “smear” campaign against her online, mostly by fellow Chinese who accuse her of lying, which extended to real-life harassment, she said: “They smear my name, they try to get my daughter’s name on the Internet, they sent people to Shanghai to surround my family and to Nanjing to harass my neighbors.” She said the accusers, who are “angry” for reasons she doesn’t really understand, contacted U.S. immigration authorities to challenge her award and her citizenship, as well as shareholders of 3D Systems to warn them she was a “liar,” and not to buy Geomagic. Her second husband, Herbert Edelsbrunner, whom she has since divorced, received many “hate e-mails,” she said. “I just don’t want to hurt innocent people.” 

If a first, unpublicized marriage might lay to rest one contentious issue, there are others. Some were the result of exaggeration or unclear communication with her co-author, MeiMei Fox of Los Angeles, she said. 

In the interview, she volunteered an example of an error: a widely criticized account of the ‘‘period police,’’ the authorities who checked a woman’s menstrual cycle to ensure she wasn’t pregnant in the early days of the one-child policy. To stop women substituting others’ sanitary pads for inspection, they were sometimes required to use their own finger to show blood. Through a misunderstanding with Ms. Fox, Ms. Fu said this was portrayed as the use of other people’s fingers — an invasion of the woman’s body. 

Ms. Fox “wrote it wrong,’’ she said. ‘‘I corrected it three times but it didn’t get corrected.’’ Women used their own finger to show blood, she said, but the mistake went into print anyway.
In general, Ms. Fox may have ‘‘just made some searches on the Internet that maybe weren’t correct,’’ Ms. Fu said. 

Chiefly the errors involved use of the words ‘‘all, never, any,’’ that generalized unacceptably, Ms. Fu said. And, ‘‘She doesn’t know China’s geography,’’ she said. 

At the beginning of her memoir, Ms. Fu writes of being kidnapped by a Vietnamese-American on arrival in the U.S. state of New Mexico and locked in his apartment to care for his very young children, whose mother had left, in a bizarre incident. A spokeswoman at the Albuquerque Police Department’s Records Office, where the alleged kidnapping took place, said she could not locate such an incident in their records. Asked about it, Ms. Fu repeated that she did not press charges as, fresh from China, she was terrified of all police, “So I don’t know how they keep records, if there is no criminal charges or record.” 

And in an e-mail to me, she admitted she made mistakes about a magazine she said she helped edit, called Wugou, or “No Hook,” produced in 1979 by students at her college, then called the Jiangsu Teacher’s College (later it changed its name to Suzhou University, she said.) It was not that magazine but another one, This Generation, that was taken to a meeting in Beijing of student magazine writers from around the country, she wrote in the e-mail. “A good case that shows everyone’s memory can be wrong,” she wrote. 

But bigger questions about the scale of the online vitriol from parts of the Chinese and Chinese-American community remain. “I really haven’t known China for 20-something years, and it didn’t occur to me that what I wrote would generate so much anger,” she said. In the last years, “as China got stronger, nationalistic views got stronger,” she said, making a “civil conversation” about disagreements apparently harder. 

Additional reporting by Cindy Hao in Seattle.

Fang Zhouzi: The Depravation of Sir Harold Evans

The following post was published by Fang Zhouzi on his blog on February 21, 2013 and was immediately translated into English by xgz. This post is a direct response to Sir Harold Evans' article on The Daily Beast.

Harold Evans is a famous British journalist. How famous is he? In 2000, he was named one of International Press Institute's 50 World Press Freedom Heroes of the past fifty years. In 2004, he was knighted by the Queen for services to journalism. When he was a young man, he was a well-known British investigative reporter. He was the first to report many of the headline events of the day, and earned his reputation for his sense of justice and his daring reporting. Later he emigrated to the United States, served as editor-in-chief for the Atlantic Monthly, and then for U.S. News and World Report. Currently he is editor-at-large for Reuters. His wife Tina Brown is also a heavyweight of the U.S. press, an editor for both Newsweek and the Daily Beast. 

This greatly respected sage of the Western press, recently wrote a commentary on the Daily Beast titled "the persecution of Ping Fu." In this commentary he denounced the criticism of Ping Fu's memoir by world-wide Chinese community as a persecution of her. Evans' wife Tina Brown has been an important supporter of Ping Fu. She had promoted Ping Fu's memoir on the National Public Radio in the United States. Her newspaper, the Daily Beast, has also been heavily promoting the book. This newspaper was among the first to publish a report of the criticism of Ping Fu, but it quoted the criticism out of context in an attempt to label the criticism as an organized smear campaign, in clear violation of journalistic ethics. Evans had himself conducted an interview of Ping Fu on behalf of Reuters, but never questioned the legend-like stories told by Ping Fu. So it is no surprise that he would come out again and continue to speak on behalf of Ping Fu. What is surprising, however, is the horrific writing style and journalistic incompetency displayed by him that is completely at odds with his sagely image in the field of journalism. 

Evans focused on the large number of one-star reviews on the Amazon website of Ping Fu's memoir Bend, not Break. Initially, Ping Fu's memoir received mostly five-star (highest) reviews, written by Americans. At the end of last month, hundreds of negative reviews, most apparently written by Chinese Americans, began to appear and pulled the average rating to less than 2 stars. This seemingly unusual phenomenon actually has a very simple explanation: at the end of last month, I began to criticize Ping Fu's memoir (Note by translator: on microblog, a Chinese version of twitter), which attracted attention to this book. Because I have a lot of followers on microblog (Note by translator: Fang Zhouzi has a few million followers on microblog), it is not surprising that a few hundred of them who are also Amazon users would go there and write negative book reviews. But this was not how Evans thought. He intentionally made no mention of my name in the article (Why is it intentionally? Because previous reports about the incident, including the The Daily Beast reports and Ping Fu's response either named me explicitly, or referred to my article implicitly, so it is impossible for Evans to not know), but attributed the emergence of a large number of negative book reviews to two possible reasons: 

1. Sockpuppets. Evans claimed that, one only needs an e-mail account to post a book review on the Amazon website. Thus, a person can use multiple mailboxes to register more than one account, posing as two people, 20 people, or even 100 people writing different book reviews. He complained bitterly about Amazon's "openness" and its ineffective handling of complaints. As a former investigative reporter, Evans did not even bother to check the basic requirements set up by Amazon to post book reviews there. It takes more than an email address to post book reviews on Amazon. One must also have purchased something through the Amazon website (not necessarily the book being reviewed). Through the purchase, the user will have already left a real name and address with Amazon. Although book reviews can be posted with a pseudonym, but the identity of the reviewer is real. It is very hard for a user who post comments on Amazon to have two accounts, let alone one hundred accounts. 

Lin was the first negative reviewer of Ping Fu's memoir on Amazon, and continued to add the most detailed discussion to her review. Her review had the most comments and was rated most useful by readers, thus was automatically placed at the top of the web page. This brought special attention from Evans, who attacked Lin with the horrible line "Male, female, or hermaphrodite." Lin herself said in her book review that she is a woman, and this can be easily verified by Amazon. Evans also claimed that although the book review written by Lin was negative, she gave a fake five star. There had been some negative reviews that gave five stars for irony, but Lin's review had always been one-star. It is clear that Evans did a very sloppy journalistic work. After repeated complaints from Ping Fu's PR team, Amazon deleted Lin's review on grounds of being "visually disruptive." Lin later posted a new review with an ironic five-star, but this was well after Evans published his article. 

2. A "hate campaign" by Chinese nationalists in the United States or organized by the Chinese government. Evans cited a large body of data to prove that there are people who are hired to post on internet forums, the so-called wumao (Note by translator: these are the people who are hired by the Chinese government to post comments in support of the government. For each post they receive a payment of 0.5 yuan renminbi. This amount is pronounced wumao in Chinese. Thus these people are called wumao). The existence of wumao is not a secret. But one cannot be like celebrities on Chinese microblogs who accuse anyone disagreeing with them of being wumao. If one is to prove that critics of Ping Fu are all wumao, then at least a few questions need to be answered: Why would the Chinese government go through the trouble of organizing such a multinational campaign? Ping Fu is not the enemy of the Chinese government. Quite the contrary, she frequently visited China in recent years to give speeches (for example, she gave a speech at Nanjing University on July 10, 2009). The company she founded, Geomagic software, has a branch in Shanghai. Chinese media had previously published multiple reports touting her (for example: "MoCho · Wisdom Woman" 2009 10 "U.S. Nouveau Riche Fu Ping: My Success Relied on Chinese Wisdom", "Shenzhen Special Zone Daily" 2012 February 24, "Chinese American Woman Entrepreneur Ping Fu Receives the Title of "Distinguished American", "China Business News" March 14, 2012 "Ping Fu, Chinese Woman Entrepreneur's Wonderful Life"). Ping Fu's memoir wrote about her miseries while in China, but that is not a sensitive topic. There are better known books on Amazon that present much darker descriptions of China. Why did none of those books receive such a treatment? There is simply no motivation for the Chinese government to take any action against Ping Fu or her memoir. 

Even if the Chinese government for some strange reason wants to discredit Ping Fu, how can it organize such a thing? Those who wrote negative book reviews on Amazon website were mostly overseas Chinese, in particular Chinese Americans. The website where people can post book reviews is in the United States; reviewers must have bought something from Amazon, and the review must be written in English. Spot checking a few negative book reviews, one can easily see that most of the reviews were written by Chinese Americans who had lived in the United States for many years. The level of English writing in these reviews cannot be reached by someone who have not lived in the United States. How could the Chinese government command so many overseas Chinese, many of whom are already U. S. citizens? These Chinese Americans, regardless of their political ideologies, gave overwhelmingly negative reviews to Ping Fu's memoir, and rebuked her lying. Almost no Chinese Americans supported Ping Fu (not counting one or two "whatever Fang opposes, I support" type of Fang detractors). Since when did the Chinese government have such a strong appeal? In addition, there are also non-Chinese scholars who questioned the truthfulness of Ping Fu's memoir (see the Guardian report). Can the Chinese government command these scholars too? I have not seen any influential person or website to call upon people to post negative reviews. On the other hand, Ping Fu and her team had repeatedly called on supporters to post positive reviews and send complaints to Amazon. 

Evans complained that after Penn State professor of Asian history, Erica Brindley, posted a comment in support of Ping Fu on the Amazon website, she was subject to a "human flesh search" (Note by translator: searching for real identity through google). Evans did not tell the reader the result of the "human flesh search": Erica Brindley is the sister-in-law of Ping Fu memoir's co-author MeiMei Fox. Dr. Erica Brindley spoke as a "PhD from Princeton University", and a sinologist. But what she said did not jibe with her position. This inconsistency prompted the suspicion of a conflict of interest. The "human flesh search" proved such a conflict. In this case, "human flesh search" is entirely justified. This would be similar to when Harold Evans was speaking on behalf of thalidomide victims, if someone spoke in support of thalidomide manufacturers, he would have investigated whether these people had conflict of interest. Evans also complained that when someone by the id of Van Harris spoke in support of Ping Fu, he was subject to personal attacks. First of all, it was Van Harris himself who carried out personal attacks against critics of Ping Fu (I have also been personally attacked by him, although I did not even have any exchange with him), and he also threatened critics. This person is a freelance graphic designer in North Carolina, and is possibly connected to Ping Fu's company which is also located in the same state. 

Evans said that any memoir would inevitably contain errors, and welcomed people to point out those errors. He said that he could not tolerate critics who were trying to destroy Ping Fu's credibility, and even her life. The problem is, we do not believe that the large number of critical errors in Ping Fu's memoir are just lapses in memory. They are intentional lies. If someone builds her reputation and fortune through lies, shouldn't the justice be to remove her credibility and such life? 

By speaking for a liar and abandoning journalistic professionalism, Evans behaved not as a competent journalist, and miles away from the hero of journalism. Such an unusual performance from him, is only possible because of his ignorance of China, his arrogance and prejudice against criticism - prejudice against Chinese in particular. Imagine if another ethnic group, say if Jews exposed those who fabricated their own tragic stories during the Holocaust (such fabrications have happened before), would Evans dare to accuse without basis those critics to have taken payments to engage in a smear campaign? Obviously not. Why did he do this to Chinese? It is racist prejudice at play. To him, Chinese are born without any sense of justice, without independent thinking. They only take orders from the government, and only do things when paid. Even if you have lived in the United States for many years, even if you are already an U.S. citizen, in Evans' eyes, you are still a Chinese nationalist ready to pledge allegiance to the Chinese government - such an accusation by Evans et al., is the real smear campaign in this whole affair.

　　哈洛尔德·伊万斯（Harold Evans）是英国著名的新闻人，著名到什么程度呢？2000年他被国际新闻协会评为50年来50名世界新闻自由英雄之一。2004年他因为在新闻领域的贡献而被英国女王封为爵士。在他年轻的时候，他是英国著名的调查记者，首先报道过多起著名事件，因为正义敢言而名噪一时。后来移居美国，担任过《大西洋月刊》《美国新闻与世界报道》等杂志的主编，目前为路透社的非在编编辑（editor-at-large）。其妻子是美国新闻界的重量级人物，《新闻周刊》和《野兽日报》的主编蒂娜·布朗（Tina Brown）。 

　　就是这么一位西方新闻界大佬，最近在《野兽日报》发表了一篇评论《傅苹的迫害》（http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/11/the-persecution-of-ping-fu.html ），把世界华人对傅苹回忆录的批评称为是对傅苹的迫害。伊万斯的妻子布朗是傅苹的重要支持者，曾在美国公共电台推荐傅苹回忆录，其主办的《野兽日报》也力推过傅苹回忆录，并在傅苹受到批评时最先发表报道，违反新闻道德，用断章取义的手法把对傅苹的批评称为有组织的抹黑行动。伊万斯本人曾代表路透社采访过傅苹，对傅苹的“传奇故事”毫不怀疑。因此他在这个时候出来继续为傅苹站台，并不意外。意外的是他在其站台文章中体现出来的拙劣的文风和低下的新闻素养，与其新闻界大佬的形象完全不符。 

　　伊万斯主要针对的是亚马逊网站上傅苹回忆录《弯而不折》（Bend, not Break）后面的大量的1星（最低）书评。傅苹回忆录原先在那里基本上都是美国人撰写的5星（最高）书评，在上个月月底开始出现了几百条由华人撰写的负面书评，把它的平均分拉到了不到2星。这个看上去不寻常的现象本来有一个很寻常的解释：因为我在上个月月底开始批评傅苹回忆录，引起了我的广大读者对这本书的注意。我的读者群这么大，有几百个亚马逊用户因此去发表负面书评，根本就不足为奇。但是伊万斯不这么认为。他在文章中故意对我只字不提（为什么说是故意呢？因为此前有关这个事件的报道包括《野兽日报》自己的报道以及傅苹的回应全都点名或不点名地提到我的作用，他不可能不知道），把大量负面书评的出现归为两个可能的原因： 

　　一、水军发的。伊万斯声称，在亚马逊发书评只要有一个电子信箱即可，一个人可以用多个信箱注册多个帐号，冒充两个人、20个人、100个人发书评。他对亚马逊的这种“公开性”很不满，而且抱怨亚马逊处理投诉不力。作为曾经的调查记者，伊万斯甚至懒得去查一下在亚马逊发书评的基本要求。要在亚马逊发书评，并非只要有电子信箱即可，还必须曾经在亚马逊购买过东西（不一定是购买要评论的书），必然在亚马逊留有真实姓名和地址。虽然在亚马逊可以用化名发书评，但是评论者的身份都是真实的，一个用户很难同时在亚马逊上有两个帐号发评论，更不要说一百个帐号。 

　　lin是最早在亚马逊对傅苹回忆录发表负面书评的，并不断补充，成为最为详尽的、讨论最多、也最受好评的书评，一直被自动置顶，也就遭到伊万斯特别关照，攻击说这个lin不知道是“男人、女人还是两性人”，虽然lin自己在书评里说了是女人，并可由亚马逊作证。伊万斯还说lin的书评虽然是负面的，却冒充5星书评。虽然有的负面书评故意打5星进行讽刺，但lin的书评在被删除前一直就是打的1星，可见伊万斯调查工作之马虎。在傅苹团队的不断投诉下，lin的书评被亚马逊以“扰乱视觉”为由删除。lin新发的书评才改给了讽刺性的5星，但那是伊万斯文章发表之后的事了。 

　　二、在美国的中国民族主义者或中国政府组织的“憎恨运动”。伊万斯并引用了一大段资料来证明中国存在拿钱发贴的五毛。网上当然有五毛，这并非秘密。但是你不能像国内微博上的“公知”那样把批评者一概当成五毛。想要证明傅苹的批评者是五毛，至少要能够回答这么几个问题：为什么中国政府要费心费力组织这么场跨国运动？傅苹并非中国政府的敌人，恰恰相反，近年来她频繁到中国访问、做报告（例如2009年7月10号在南京大学做报告），其创办的杰魔软件公司在上海有分公司，中国媒体此前多次发表过吹捧她的报道（例如：《莫愁·智慧女性》2009年10期《美国新富傅苹：我靠中国智慧成功》，《深圳特区报》2012年2月24日《美籍华人女企业家傅苹获“杰出美国人”称号》，《中国新闻报》2012年3月14日《华裔女企业家傅苹演绎精彩人生》）。傅苹回忆录虽然讲了自己在国内时的悲惨遭遇，但是那也不是什么敏感的话题，亚马逊上描写中国黑暗面的书籍比它更出名的、更悲惨的还有的是，为什么就没有哪一本享受了这样的待遇？所以中国政府根本就没有任何动机要对傅苹或对她的回忆录采取什么行动。 

　　即使中国政府莫名其妙地要抹黑傅苹，它又如何组织得起来？在亚马逊网站上写负面书评的基本上都是海外华人，特别是在美国的华人，因为那是在美国的网站，必须买过东西才能写书评，而且必须用英文写。只要抽查几篇负面书评看一下，就可以知道大多数是由在美国生活多年的华人写的，才有那样的英文写作水平。中国政府怎么指挥得动这么多的海外华人，其中很多已加入美国国籍？而且华人不分政治派别一面倒地给予傅苹回忆录负面评价，斥责傅苹说谎，几乎找不到有华人支持傅苹的（一两个“方舟子反对的我就支持”、借此攻击我的方黑忽略不计），中国政府何时有了如此强大的号召力？何况质疑傅苹回忆录真实性的还有非华人学者（见《卫报》的报道），难道中国政府连他们都指挥得动？也从来没有见过有哪个有影响力的人物或网站号召大家去写负面书评。相反地，倒是见到傅苹及其团队的人在号召支持者去写正面书评和向亚马逊投诉。 

　　伊万斯控诉说，宾州（州立）大学亚洲历史学家Erica Brindley因为在亚马逊支持傅苹，就遭到了“人肉搜索”。伊万斯没有告诉读者的是“人肉搜索”的结果：Erica Brindley是傅苹回忆录代笔者MeiMei Fox的嫂子。Erica Brindley是以“普林斯顿大学博士”、“汉学专家”的身份站出来力挺傅苹的，因为她的发言内容与她的身份不符，人们才怀疑她是否与书的作者存在利益关系，搜索的结果证明了这一点。这种“人肉搜索”完全是正当的，这就好比伊万斯当年为反应停的受害者维权时，如果有人跳出来剧烈地为反应停厂家辩护，他肯定也会想到要去查查此人是否与厂家有着利益关系。伊万斯还控诉说，有一个叫Van Harris的人因为替傅苹说话，就遭到了人身攻击。首先对傅苹批评者进行人身攻击的恰恰是Van Harris自己（我也受到其人身攻击，虽然我并没有和他争论），而且他还威胁傅苹的批评者。此人是北卡罗莱纳州的一个自由图像设计师，有可能与位于该州的傅苹的公司有合作关系。 

　　伊万斯说，回忆录难免有错误，指出记忆错误应该受欢迎。他难以忍受的是批评者试图让傅苹丧失信用，乃至破坏她的生活。问题是，我们并不认为傅苹回忆录中大量的关键性错误是回忆错误，而是有意说谎。那么，对于一个靠撒谎来获得名声和利益的人，难道不该让她丧失信用，破坏她的生活吗？ 

　　伊万斯如此没有专业精神地力挺一个撒谎者，不像一个合格的新闻人，更不要说是一个新闻界的英雄。如此大失水准，是因为对中国的无知、对批评的傲慢与偏见——对华人的偏见。试想，如果换另一个族群，例如犹太人揭露那些捏造自己在大屠杀中的悲惨故事的人（这种事曾发生过），伊万斯敢毫无根据地说这些批评者是在拿钱搞抹黑行动吗？显然不敢。为什么对华人就敢？还不是种族主义偏见在作怪，似乎华人天生就没有正义感，没有独立性，只会听从政府指挥，拿钱替人办事。不管你在美国生活了多少年，不管你是否已加入了美国国籍成为美国公民，在伊万斯这些人看来，你仍然是个中国民族主义者，随时准备效忠中国政府——伊万斯等人这么做，才是抹黑行动。

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."