Locustland | Some vindication of Ping Fu and the malicious Chinese cyber trolls 'persecuting' her with facts

Last month, China's most feared fraud detector Fang Zhouzi noticed American entrepreneur Ping Fu making improbable claims in interviews as publicity for her book, "Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds" and went to work debunking them in his trademark meticulous style.

For people familiar with China's horrendous Cultural Revolution and tumultuous early 1980s, Fang's takedown left little doubt of the veracity of Fu's wilder claims to media, some of which she then retracted, suggesting the record would be set straight if people would just read her book.

Meanwhile, press coverage of Fu and her book was almost exclusively as uncritical as it was patronising, led by The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, Forbes as well as others.

Exhaustive attempts were made in comment sections to explain the issue, but Fu's supporters appeared unwilling to listen. Even senior Reuters editor Harold Evans (and husband of Daily Beast founder Tina Brown) turned out to vouch for Fu, calling online appeals to reason a persecution.

Of course by this time actual internet trolls, the ones who fabricate China's history in the opposite direction, had joined in, but all of this appeared lost on Fu's unquestioning cheerleaders who, variously, dismissed all the feedback as an attack by Chinese internet vigilantes, a coordinated smear campaign against Fu, now placed high "on the vituperative frontline of cyber hostilities between China and the West".

Ping Fu, the woman in the picture posing with the other Red Guards, who emerged from the Cultural Revolution politically correct enough to be one of the highly privileged few allowed to study abroad in the early 1980s.