Q and A with Ping Fu, author of 'Bend not Break'
The South China Morning Post's Wu Nan spoke to Ping Fu in late June about the continuing controversy surrounding her memoir.
South China Morning Post: Your alma mater, Soochow University, has documents showing that you dropped out of school in March 1982 without earning a BA or MA. Nanking University has also said that you were not a graduate of theirs, nor did you earn a Ph.D there. What's your comment on this?
Ping Fu: In the book I wrote exactly what the fact is: I don’t have a degree from Suzhou [Soochow University], there is no contradiction. I have a MS and BA in the USA. On my social network sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, I only list my two US degrees, which are both in Computer Science. My understanding is that when other publications post my profile on their websites, they may run an automatic Internet search, which presents degrees from other people with the same name as mine, Ping Fu, and these peoples’ degrees get attached to my name. I found many instances of this, even on very reputable sites such as those of Bloomberg Businessweek, the Wall Street Journal, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
Post: Soochow University said they gave you demerits in October 1981 for being absent for classes and for violating school regulations. Is that true?
Fu: Yes, in chapter eight of my book I explained the incident, related to my research, and my demerits were due to absences from school. I did not have a chance to write the thesis. My research about birth control policy, which let to the observation of infanticide, never turned into a thesis because I left school. In my senior year I was planning to go to Nanking University to study journalism. Some of my classmates and my family knew about it. It was permitted for a literature student to write on a generalised topic instead of a specific literature topic in order to pursue graduate studies in journalism.
Post: Your class advisor, Ni Junqiang, said that the university did not arrest you and other Red Maple Society members, or interrogated any of you. How do you comment?
Fu: There was no arrest or time in jail or prison for the Red Maple Society members. We did informing and confession. As I wrote in the book, I was not the author of the article “A Confession of A Communist Member," I was an editor. In 1980 Deng Xiaoping had a university student publication in his hand and criticised the underground publications. Later our magazine (“Wu Gou”) was not allowed to be published any more.