MCLC: Fake Tu Youyou Nobel speech

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Fake Tu Youyou Nobel speech
Source: China Real Time, WSJ (12/16/15)
Fake Tu Youyou Nobel Prize Speech Makes the Rounds on China’s Internet
By Felicia Sonmez and Olivia Geng
>From fake bank branches to entire fake municipal governments, China is known for its often elaborate counterfeits.
Now add a new one to the mix: a fake Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
A speech purportedly given by Tu Youyou, China’s first Nobel laureate in science, has gone viral on the Chinese Internet over the past week. Where it originated, not even China’s state-run media has been able to ascertain. But since it first appeared on China’s WeChat social-messaging app last Saturday, it has been forwarded hundreds of thousands of times, according to the Xinhua Daily Telegraph, a newspaper controlled and owned by China’s official Xinhua News Agency.
Ms. Tu did deliver a speech in Stockholm — her Nobel Lecture at the Karolinska Institutet on Dec. 7, three days before she and nine other laureates formally received their awards. Far from the flowery language of the fake speech, however, Ms. Tu’s actual address focuses mainly on the discovery of artemisinin, the antimalarial drug for whose discovery Ms. Tu was jointly awarded this year’s prize in medicine.
Ms. Tu isn’t the only celebrity to have had words put in her mouth. Famous figures including Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill have all had fake quotes attributed to them at one point or another. (In Mr. Churchill’s case, one academic even bestowed a name upon the trend: “Churchillian drift.”)
But none of those giants of history, it seems, has had an entire address manufactured under his name.
The fake Nobel acceptance speech has Ms. Tu thanking artemisinin as well as four others – Chairman Mao Zedong; her father; fourth-century Chinese scientist Ge Hong; and the “millions of African people” who trusted that traditional Chinese medicine could help find a cure for malaria.
“I want to thank a great man in China: Mao Zedong,” the fake speech quotes Ms. You saying. “This great statesman, thinker, strategist and poet attached great importance to our cultural heritage. … He emphasized that ‘traditional Chinese medicine is a great treasure that should be explored and enhanced.’”
At another point, the fake address has Ms. You poetically reflecting on her achievement and her own mortality.
“One day, I will say farewell to artemisinin, and farewell to my loved ones,” the counterfeit speech quotes her as saying. “When that day truly comes, I hope those who come after me will spread my ashes among the sweet wormwood (from which artemisnin is derived) and let me watch over the land that I have loved all my life, watch over the green leaves of the sweet wormwood, and watch over the booming development of traditional Chinese medicine.”
The false speech has prompted some hand-wringing among China’s state-run media. Xinhua Daily Telegraph, the China Daily newspaper and the Science and Technology Daily, a newspaper under China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, all ran articles exploring how a completely fabricated, 2,000-character Nobel address could go viral for days.
Raymond Zhou, a columnist for the China Daily, wrote Tuesday that the fake lecture “has probably been retweeted more than the real one because it played to the Chinese stereotype of what such a speech should be.”
Guo Xiao’an, an assistant dean at Chongqing University’s journalism school, told Xinhua that such forged speeches are actually quite common and that netizens often seek to latch onto celebrities’ success, particularly when they become hot news.
“The psychological motivations of rumormongers are quite complicated. It could be because they’re curious or anxious, or they may be driven by profit,” Mr. Guo told Xinhua, adding that the writer of Ms. Tu’s fake Nobel speech likely was seeking “the realization of his or her own self worth.”
By Wednesday, several Chinese media outlets had run stories alerting readers to the fake speech, and many Internet users grudgingly acknowledged they had been duped.
Wrote one user on China’s Weibo social media network: “I still read the whole fake speech to the end.”
–Felicia Sonmez and Olivia Geng. Follow Felicia on Twitter @feliciasonmez and Olivia at keikogfy. 
by denton.2 at osu.edu on December 21, 2015
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