red guards

Description

When Chinese-American entrepreneur Fu Ping published her memoirs late last year the book soon attracted controversy -- particularly here in China. Entitled "Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds" it tells the story of Fu's early life in China during the cultural revolution and, later, her reinvention as a highly successful entrepreneur after being granted asylum in the US in 1984. However many Chinese contemporaries of Fu -- the co-founder and CEO of software company Geomagic - have complained that her book is riddled with inaccuracies and outright fallacies. One that has been widely derided is her description of someone being torn apart limb from limb by four horses driven by Red Guards. Fu also describes being taken away from her parents, abused and then forced to work in a factory. AND she says she was briefly jailed and then forced to leave China after triggering an outcry when her thesis on female infanticide was published in the People's Daily. Now Soochow University, where Fu studied from 1978 to 82, has chimed in too. On its website the school has accused Fu of distorting facts about her time there. It says she has "given both our school and country a bad reputation". Amongst the assertions the university rejects are Fu's claims of "finger checking" of female students' to ensure they weren't pregnant; it says it has no record of the thesis Fu claims she wrote; it also disputes her claim that she only knew the words, "hello", "thank you", and "help" when she arrived in the US, saying school records show she received As and Bs in her English classes. Online there's been quite a bit of debate about Fu's book -- AND the university's response. So to find out what's being said let's check in with our researcher Esther Deng. Go to http://bon.tv/china-take to watch the full episode