Today's NPR soft commercial for 3D printers contained this eye-popper:
Among the celebrity entrepreneurs in the 3-D printing field is Ping Fu, who gave one of the most inspiring talks at SXSW. Fu is a refugee of the Chinese cultural revolution whose biological and adoptive parents were killed. She says that before she could finish college in China, she was told to leave or be killed.
(NPR has made changes to this paragraph. See update below. The original text with the above quote can be found
here).
Nowhere in Ping Fu's discredited memoir did she claim that either her biological or adoptive parents died during the cultural revolution. She did not claim to have received a death threat before leaving China either. All these are brand new claims. If Ping Fu didn't escalate her lies recently, then NPR has completely screwed up on this commercial for 3D printers disguising as a report.
Updated below.
Although I have written several diaries that covered many aspects of Ping Fu's lying in her memoir, the website Debunking Bend not Break recently set up by democracy advocate Eddie Cheng (who authored the book Standoff at Tiananmen) has a more complete archive of all the reports related to this controversy.
NPR has not done any proper reporting on the whole Ping Fu affair. They only did the original book promotion by Ping's good friend Tina Brown, and this soft commercial for 3D printers.
What has become of NPR? A subsidiary of lying capitalists?
Update: Apparently there are also comments on NPR's website pointing out the problem with this report, and NPR has changed their article to read:
Fu is a survivor of the Chinese Cultural Revolution whose biological parents were sent to exile in a remote area. She says that before she could finish college in China, she was told to leave or be killed.
This version is still false and a new lie on top of what has been claimed in her memoir. People interested in the real story should check out the
Debunking Bend not Break website.
Update II: Here is a screen capture of the original NPR story: