'Liar-hunter'
Fang Zhouzi accuses Ping Fu of selling fake tragedy to Americans
John
Kennedy
WATCH:
Ping Fu's dramatic journey from captivity to computer entrepreneur
http://bit.ly/WbUXv0 @pfugeomagic
4:39
PM - 23 Jan 13
What
hurts more than a beating that never took place? Getting a lesson in truthiness
from China's most-hated myth-buster, academic and otherwise, Fang Zhouzi.
While
not as painful to watch as that time Christopher Hitchens went after myths
surrounding Mother Teresa, what Fang seeks to expose now are a number of claims
by Geomagic CEO Ping Fu, who found corporate success in the United States after
arriving in 1983 to attend graduate school, claims Fang argues range from the
unlikely to the seemingly impossible and yet which journalists have taken at
face value here, here and elsewhere.
Of
the recent heartrending coverage of Fu's new memoir, "Bend, Not
Break", it seems to have been this piece from Inc. magazine that prompted
Fang's takedown earlier this week (that and Forbes had the piece linked to
above translated for its Chinese site here).
First
up, Fu's claim she was sent to a labour camp at age 8 or 9 with her younger
sister where for the duration of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) she was
kept apart from her parents, brainwashed, starved, tortured, gang-raped, forced
into child labour and deprived of education.
Fu
would have been a minor throughout the Cultural Revolution, Fang points out,
never mind her younger sister; children that young being forced into labour
camps was unheard of: "I haven't seen this in anyone else's memoirs of the
Cultural Revolution, it must have been a tragic experience had only by Ping Fu
herself."
As
for Fu's claim of being deprived of education those ten years, Fang points out
that in 1977 - when the holding of university entrance examinations resumed and
Fu was accepted by Suzhou University - not only were all applicants get
pre-screened for eligibility, but also less than 5 per cent of applicants were
accepted that year. "Was she a prodigy?," he asks.
In
2010, Fu told NPR (13:30 here) she witnessed Red Guards execute one teacher by
tying each limb to a separate horse and dismembering her by having each horse
run simultaneously in a separate outward direction, done specifically to
frighten the kids into submission.
Of
all the different cruel ways people were killed during the Cultural Revolution,
Fang writes, with many beaten to death or buried alive, dismemberment using
four horses was unheard of, except for Ping Fu's having said so. She says all
the other kids in the labour camp were assembled to watch this, he asks, so why
didn't even a single one of them step forward to say they'd witnessed such a
rare and inhumane thing? Were all the other children killed?
Getting
technical, Fang adds dismemberment by horse sounds easy, but would have been
quite difficult to pull off even if Red Guards had been able to find four
horses trained to do such things. "Would Red Guards go to such great
lengths just to scare these kids?"
Several
hundred years ago there was rumoured to have been dismemberment by five horses,
Fang goes on, but in fact that was just a legend:
Criminals
have been dismembered using horse carriages, which is obviously easy to carry
out, but not using horses themselves.
Dismemberment
by carriage has been carried out several times in Chinese history, he says, but
records of it were kept each time and the practice died out hundreds of years
ago. Dismemberment by four horses was used in ancient times in the West, and if
China's Red Guards actually resumed the practice in Nanjing in the 1960s,
making that the first time in Chinese history a living human was dismembered
using four horses, and Ping Fu is the only person to publicly acknowledge
having witnessed this, then shouldn't those who research incidents of torture
call her to talk? Shouldn't the victims and other eyewitnesses also be sorted
out?
In
an interview with Forbes, Fu also appears to have claimed to have written her
undergrad thesis at Suzhou University on the practice of female infanticide in
rural China and that her research received nationwide press converage at the
time. In 2005, speaking to Inc., Fu went on to explain that after she submitted
her undergrad thesis in 1980, her findings were later covered by Shanghai's Wen
Hui Bao newspaper and later also by People's Daily, resulting in condemnation
from around the world, sanctions imposed by the UN, and Fu getting tossed into
prison.
Fang
says he went back and checked People's Daily archives for the period Fu says her
research would've been published there and found nothing regarding female
infanticide in rural China:
In
fact anyone with a bit of political common sense knows that People's Daily at
that time was full of nothing but glorious and wonderful news and it's
impossible anything affecting China's image as much as this would've received
coverage.
As
for the UN imposing sanctions on China, does she not know that China, as a
member of the UN Security Council, also has the power to veto motions? Why does
nobody else in China know that the UN placed sanctions on China in 1981? And
how does Ping Fu know that?
Regarding
Fu's claim to NPR she was walking on campus when a black bag was suddenly
thrown over her head and she was stuffed into a car before being arrested:
This
is like a scene from a gangster film. In 1981, was there actually any
university campus in China where the Public Security Bureau would have had any
reservation about taking away a university student?
On
Fu's claim she was then held three days and narrowly avoided being sentenced to
reform through labour when authorities decided instead to send her into exile:
Getting
exiled to the United States to study just for writing a thesis with negative
content, could there be anything more wonderful in this world? The only people
China sentences to be deported are foreigners. The practice of sending
dissidents off to the United States didn't begin until the 1990s, and that was
only reserved for the most high-profile of dissidents.
Ping
Fu was an unheard-of university student at the time, which makes being deported
off to the United States to study a true miracle. Being allowed to pay your own
way to study in the United States in the early 1980s was remarkably difficult
to achive; without special connections overseas, it would've been impossible.
Noting
Fu told Forbes she arrived in the United States knowing only three words of
English, Fang remembered hearing the same anecdote in interviews she'd given to
other media, so he went back and checked and found different sets of those
first three words:
Inc.:
Please, thank you, help;
Bend, Not Break: Thank you, hello, help;
NPR: Thank you, help, excuse me.
Not
only that:
According
to the Inc. report Ping Fu arrived at Suzhou University wanting to study
engineering or business, but the Party assigned her to study English. How then
could she have only learned just three words? Even if she wasn't an English
major, English was still one of the core courses. And even if she was a poor
student, how is it possible she was only able to remember the three most basic
words in English?
All
these claims are only good enough to fool laowai who don't know anything about
China. Ping Fu knows that, which is why she's so much more honest when speaking
with Chinese.
[...]
At the time, Chinese international students
had many ways of being able to stay there in the United States. One of those
was to fabricate bizarre tales of having faced persecution in China and apply
for political asylum. It didn't matter how fantastic you made your experiences,
Americans would still believe them to be true. Some people told so many lies
they even started believing it themselves.
good
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