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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Broken Fact: This Generation and Deng Xiaoping

The Original Story:
On Pages 251-252 of Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping described in amazing detail how her Red Maple Society got into trouble by publishing an article that caught Deng Xiaoping's attention:

Toward the end of my second year at Suzhou University, our group was invited to attend a conference in Beijing with the publishers of literary magazines from ten other universities. Since we were not ranked a first-tier school, this was a tremendous honor. The Red Maple Society slaved for weeks to create what we considered our finest magazine yet. And in doing so, we took a huge risk: we choose to include an article written by a student titled "A Confession of a Communist Member," which compared Mao's Little Red Book to the Bible... 

We made a special cover for this issue, and I spent many nights had printing copies. We then sent our representative from our inner working group to Beijing for the conference and distributed the publication around Suzhou. But the meeting never happened. The government decided at the last minute to ban the gathering of the ten universities  deeming it illegal. Instead, it was announced that China's de facto leader, Deng Xiaoping, would receive the representatives for a private meeting. 

This was when things went terribly wrong. Every representative who attended the special meeting with Deng had a copy of the Red Maple Society's current magazine in hand. Deng asked  to see what people were reading. One student from Beijing University passed him a copy of our magazine with its pages opened to the "Confessions" article, which was considered daring and controversial. 

"A Communist member questions his own party?" Deng asked with his eyebrow raised after quickly skimming the article...

To prove her tale, she provided a couple of pictures showing the magazine they produced, named Wu Gou:

The first picture shows the cover while the second picture is the Table of Content page, with the "Confessions" article being the first item.

The Changing Story:
Tania Branigan and Ed Pilkington of The Guardian also looked into this tale and reported:

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. 

Didi Kirsten Tatlow of International Herald Tribune also reported Fu Ping's clarification on this matter:

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. 

[Note: Didi Kirsten Tatlow made a translation error above: Wu Gou does not mean "No Hook," but a hook-like weapon used in the ancient country of Wu, close to where Suzhou is.]

The Debunking:
There are many parts of Fu Ping's story as well as her clarifications that are false. Indeed, the only parts that are true are her statements that Suzhou University is not a first-tier school and that they had published an issue of magazine that contained the "Confessions" article. Alas, neither of which is even helpful to her tall tale.

First of all, once again, her timeline is all wrong. As Professor Perry Link stated, student magazine representatives did meet in Beijing in 1979, on July 15 of that year in fact. This makes it at the end of Fu Ping's first year in college, not "second year." But wait, Fu Ping's Red Maple Society was founded only in the fall of 1979! Oops. Big Oops.

Suzhou University, named Jiangsu Teacher's College at the time, was indeed not a first-tier school. It would be quite remarkable for them to get an invitation to that meeting. The fact is that it wasn't. No school from Jiangsu province attended the meeting. (Incidentally, there was a magazine named Red Maple represented in that meeting, but it was from Jilin University in northern China where red maple trees are much more prominent than Suzhou in the south.)

For those who can read Chinese language, here is a detailed account of what happened at that time from someone who was actually there.

The group had a productive meeting in Beijing and encountered neither Deng Xiaoping nor any political trouble. They then returned to their respective campuses and founded the journal This Generation. If Deng Xiaoping were going to meet them at that time, there would have been neither Wu Gou nor This Generation for him to pick up and pick upon.

However, Fu Ping's tale of Deng Xiaoping's involvement is not entirely made up either. The above account also remembered that, on January 16, 1980, Deng Xiaoping did make a speech criticizing the magazine This Generation, labeling it a counter-revolutionary propaganda, with a copy of that magazine in his hand. Consequently, This Generation ceased to exist after her very first edition.

Fu Ping probably heard of this story and thus conveniently substituted This Generation with her own Wu Gou and claimed the story for herself. When that was exposed, she quickly pivoted and claimed that she "believed the article was selected for This Generation." Her belief proves to be as erroneous as her facts.

Perry Link is once again correct that the only issue of This Generation did not include the article Fu Ping mentioned from Wu Gou, as seen in its table of contents below:

This Generation got into political trouble because of her own contents, having nothing to do with Fu Ping's little group or journal.

Broken Fact: Fu Ping's Famous Red Maple Society in College

The Original Story:
In Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping tells one of the most significant events in her college life on Pages 250-253:

Halfway through our first semester, my friends and I formed a group called the Red Maple Society. We decided to publish a literary magazine composed of our essays and poems, as well as articles about events taking place across campus and in Suzhou. I was elected editor in chief... 

Over the course of the next year and a half, our magazine grew quite popular -- and not just among the university students or in Suzhou... our professors endorsed us, and the university itself printed the magazine...

Fu Ping provided a picture of their group to a Chinese online media:

The caption in the above photo says "founding Red Maple Society at Taipin Mountain, fall, 1979". The main picture was reproduced in Bend, Not Break.

The Changed Story:
Tania Branigan and Ed Pilkington of The Guardian took an interest in this story and did a little ask around:

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.

The Debunking:
During the years Fu Ping was in college, 1978-1982, editing and publishing unauthorized student journals became quite fashionable. It is therefore quite natural for her, a student of Chinese literature, to be involved in such activities.

But Fu Ping presented her Red Maple Society as quite popular in her school and beyond, endorsed by professors and the university itself (before it supposedly ran into political trouble later). Yet Professor Cheng Yinghong who was in the same school at the same time was "completely unaware of" it!

Fu Ping's only response was "because it was underground," so much so that her contemporaries never have heard of it. So, where was the popularity?

By the way, the photo above stated that the Red Maple Society was founded in the fall of 1979, a full year after she started college based on her revised timeline, not "halfway through our first semester."

Of course, there are still more to this student journal story, and each of them turned out to be false...

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。

Fang Zhouzi: Once Again on Fu Ping's Lies and Quibble

The following post was published by Fang Zhouzi on his blog on February 15, 2013. This one is a follow up on the report by The Guardian and provides more detailed background information on the issues of Fu Ping's family history and the student journal incident in 1979:

　英国《卫报》在2013年2月13日发的第二篇关于傅苹回忆录引起的争议的报道很下功夫，不仅把我们已发现的问题拿去询问专家和让傅苹解释，而且还新发现了两处此前我们没有注意到的问题。 

　　一处是傅苹在书中声称孙中山“将我的爷爷和叔公像亲生儿子一样养大”，在研究孙中山生平的专家质疑这一说法后，傅苹对记者改口说，孙中山是照顾他们，而不是实际收养他们。报道发表后，傅苹在加拿大人John Kennedy的博客下面留言，称她的曾祖父是民国烈士傅慈祥，并奇怪专家为何要否认其存在。http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1149921/some-vindication-ping-fu-and-malicious-chinese-cyber-trolls?page=all#comments 

　　没有人否认历史上有过傅慈祥这个人，专家否认的是孙中山与傅家存在收养关系。傅苹有可能是傅慈祥的曾孙女并靠这层关系去美国留学，那么傅家与孙中山的关系究竟有多密切呢？ 

　　傅慈祥是孙中山创建的兴中会的成员，1900年与唐才常成立自立军, 准备在武汉三镇起事，被张之洞发觉而遇害，史称“自立军起义”或“庚子起事”。傅慈祥留有两个儿子：傅光培（也叫傅养荪）、傅光植（也叫傅芸荪）。小儿子傅光植默默无闻，大儿子傅光培则是武汉名流，写过多篇回忆文章，在《缅怀先父傅慈祥——纪念庚子汉口起事八十周年》一文中他写道： 

　　“1912年四月，孙中山先生交卸临时大总统职后，莅临首义之区视察，那时我才十二岁（方舟子按：应是十六岁）。先父同学刘道仁引我去见孙先生，我问刘怎称呼？刘叫我称大总统。我向孙先生鞠躬称大总统。刘向孙先生介绍：‘这是傅慈祥的儿子。’孙先生抚摸着我的头亲切地说：‘不要叫我什么总统，叫我伯伯好了。’孙先生问了我的年龄后，嘱我好好读书，继承父志。” 

　　在傅慈祥牺牲11年后，孙中山才首次见到傅荣祥的儿子，而且连年龄都不知道，其陌生可知，怎么可能存在收养或近乎收养的关系？孙中山只是客气地要傅光培叫他伯伯，就被傅光培大书特书，传为佳话（一些文献都提及此事），如果对傅家子弟有实质性的照顾，例如接济、提携，那更要大肆宣扬了。但是傅光培却只字不提，说明他与孙中山的关系也就仅限于这一面，没有得到特别的照顾，更没有被收养。傅光培一直在武汉工作、生活，有一女儿，傅苹的祖父很可能是傅光植，如果那样的话，他甚至连孙中山的面都没见过。 

　　另一处是傅苹声称在1979年邓小平读了她发表在学生刊物上的文章，她因此遭到校方的关押、批评。她在书里声称，1979年10所高校文学社的代表计划在北京聚会，会议在最后一分钟被政府禁止，改由邓小平私下接见与会代表。接见时代表们人人手里拿着一册傅苹编的《红枫》杂志，邓小平问大家最近在读什么，一个代表就把《红枫》给了邓小平，然后邓小平就看到了登在上面的大胆文章。 

　　1979年7月，由武汉大学张桦发起，10所大学文学社团代表在北京聚会。张桦近年来写过回忆文章，接受过采访，对事情的经过叙述甚详（http://blog.voc.com.cn/blog.php?do=showone&type=blog&itemid=538323 ）参加这次会议的有北大、人大、北师大、北京广播学院、南大、武大、吉大、杭大、中山大学、西北大学十所高校的15个人，会议在张桦家举行，官方并无干预，后来他们还去见了文艺界领导陈荒煤。与会代表并无傅苹所在的江苏师院的人，邓小平也没有接见与会代表。傅苹说邓小平接见是她听人说的，问题是除了她，有关这次会议的回忆没有别人这么说过。邓小平接见并阅读她的文章更可能也是她做的美梦。 

　　这次会议后，这十所高校的文学社以及后来加入的南开大学、杭州师大、贵州大学文学社共13所文学社联合出版了学生文学刊物《这一代》，只出了创刊号就被官方叫停。傅苹声称《这一代》登了她的文章。但是查《这一代》的目录（http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-279293-403821.html ），里面并无傅苹说的文章。实际上，《这一代》激怒高层的，是里面的两首诗：王家新《桥》和叶鹏《轿车从街上匆匆驶过》，与傅苹或其文学社没有关系。 

　　傅苹声称她主编的《红枫》杂志很出名，但是和她同时在同一个系读书并且也有自己的文学社团的程映虹教授却没有听说过这份杂志。傅苹辩解说是因为那是一份地下杂志，所以别人不知道。但是她又说其他学校的文学社代表人手一册这份“地下杂志”，难道只是在本校地下，到校外就跑地上了？ 

　　现在已发现的傅苹回忆录的虚假不实之处已有十几处，其回忆录出版商声称这些只是小错误，以后要改正。实际上这些都是重大的、关键性的错误，如果真的都要改正的话，她那部回忆录得全盘重写，而且将变得没有那么励志。一个习惯性说谎的人，是事无巨细都忍不住要说假话的，其书中的虚假不实之处绝不止这些，也不限于只是其国内的经历造假，其在美国的经历也同样造假，以后我还会一一指出。

The Guardian: Ping Fu's Childhood Tales of China's Cultural Revolution Spark Controversy

Tania Branigan and Ed Pilkington, who had previously reported doubts on Fu Ping's story, published another report on The Guardian on February 13, 2013. This was the first media report on the affair in which the reporters actually sought out experts to exam, and almost unanimously refute, several aspects of the story, including her claimed family history, her episode with student magazine, and so on.

It's also worth noting that Professor Perry Link, who was quoted in this story, is still banned from visiting China by the government there for his pro-democracy involvement decades ago. So, he could be hardly grouped into the conspiracy theory of a Chinese government sponsored "smear campaign."

Top US software entrepreneur faces new contradiction claims over rags-to-riches memoir of personal torment in 60s China 

A successful US entrepreneur faces mounting questions over her widely lauded tale of childhood torment in China's cultural revolution, as fresh contradictions emerge and experts cast doubt on key elements of her story. 

Ping Fu's rags-to-riches memoir Bend Not Break says she was torn away from her parents at eight, brutally abused and sent to work in a factory; then forced to leave China for the US after triggering an international outcry over female infanticide as a student. She went on to found software company Geomagic, currently being acquired by 3D Systems. 

Critics acknowledge the horrors of the cultural revolution, but question Fu's personal account. She has already conceded that a description of Red Guards killing a teacher by tying their victim to four horses was an "emotional memory" and probably wrong. Closer examination of her book and interviews reveal numerous conflicting claims and experts told the Guardian several parts of her story were implausible. 

Fu, 54, said she was traumatised and hurt by the criticism, adding: "I don't know who is behind this, but somebody is." 

One of her most striking claims is that Sun Yat-sen, revered as the father of modern China, "raised my grandfather and granduncle as his own sons" – akin to a Briton being reared by Winston Churchill. Prof John Wong of the University of Sydney, an expert on Sun's life, said he had no knowledge of such wards. 

Fu told the Guardian: "That was what I was told by my family before I left China. I believe this is true. My mother says it's in history books." She then added that Sun was attentive towards them, rather than actually adopting them. 

In a chapter of her book titled Factory Worker, Fu describes labouring in factories for a decade until schools reopened in 1976. She describes working six hours a day, six days a week and told an interviewer she never went to school in 10 years. 

Experts on the cultural revolution told the Guardian schools mostly reopened in 1968 or 1969 and that pupils had lessons in factories to learn skills, but were not used as labour. 

Fu said: "For 10 years I didn't have proper schooling. I was sent to study in the factory, and sometimes in farms." 

A photograph supplied to media by Fu shows her posing with a little red book, Mao badge and armband. Michel Bonnin of Tsinghua University and Prof Yin Hongbiao of Beijing University said it showed she was not disgraced as a "black element" at the time, as she claimed; Fu said it was common for children to be pictured pledging allegiance to Mao, "whether 'black' or 'red'". 

Fu also says she was arrested and criticised by Suzhou University authorities after Deng Xiaoping, then China's paramount leader, met student publishers. She says Deng had seen a daring article from the popular magazine she edited. 

Perry Link, an expert on modern Chinese literature at the University of California at Riverside, said student magazine representatives met in 1979, but added: "I do not believe for a moment that Deng Xiaoping ever came near the group." 

Neither he nor others knows of a representative from Fu's group, Red Maple, attending. Fu said she believed the article was selected for This Generation, the joint publication from the meeting, but Link's copy shows it is not included. 

Yinghong Cheng, now a professor of history at Delaware state university, studied at the same time and in the same building at Suzhou as Fu, and had his own literary group. He told the Guardian: "I am completely unaware of that group [Red Maple] and publication, and if it had been that popular I would have known about it." 

Fu, who supplied a copy of her magazine, said her contemporaries might not have heard of the society because it was underground. She said Deng met the representatives at the same time as Communist Youth League leaders, noting that she was told about the meeting and was not present. 

The entrepreneur claims she was ordered to leave China after exposing female infanticide in the early 80s, writing that in a few months of research she "witnessed with her own eyes" drowned and suffocated female infants. Last month, she told a radio station she watched "hundreds of baby girls being killed in front of my eyes. I saw girls being tossed into the river." 

Therese Hesketh of University College London, an expert on population controls in China, said: "I have never heard stories of this kind. Infanticide did of course occur, but was not commonplace … It certainly was not done in public as even at that time to be caught meant a possible murder charge." 

Fu told the Guardian that she mis-spoke in the live radio interview and should have said "my research was based on hundreds of cases, and I saw baby girls killed right in front of my eyes". 

She added: "If you went to the countryside and to the family planning unit it was going on all the way down the line in every village and every school. Very few people were allowed to go to the poor areas. These kinds of things happened, and China doesn't want people to know it happened." 

The entrepreneur once said Deng personally intervened to free her when she was jailed due to the resulting outcry – a remarkable detail not mentioned in her book. 

Other questions include when Fu left China: she has said variously that it was two weeks or over a year after her release. 

Fu said she had been wrong to call the criticism a smear campaign, adding she had realised the people she thought were attacking her were telling their own stories of the cultural revolution. 

"I hope that this will turn into a more civil discussion about what happened and if any good can come from it I don't mind that people have turned their anger towards me so long as we can heal together," she said. 

Adrian Zackheim, publisher of Penguin's business imprint, Portfolio, said: "Ping Fu wrote in the Author's Note at the front of her book: 'I have tried my best to remember and describe the events and people in my life. Mostly, I have used real names, although some names have been altered to protect privacy. Many details happened more than forty years ago and I've tried as much as possible to verify the facts.' 

"Sometimes, despite everyone's best efforts, minor mistakes appear in nonfiction books. Whenever they are brought to an author's attention they are corrected in future printings. Ping has already acknowledged several of these, and if any additional corrections are required, of course those will be made as well."

xgz: Ping Fu's Time Travel Machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was when things went terribly wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The second little jewel is also on page 3:

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

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

This book should be categorized as a science fiction.