http://www.zonaeuropa.com/201007a.brief.htm#011Tang Jun PK Fang Zhouzi (07/07/2010)
(Guangzhou Daily)
At 8:20pm on July 1, Fang Zhouzi posted a response to an inquiry: "Tang Jun's California Institute of Technology PhD degree is fake. Should we replicate how to construct fakery?:
Previously in April 21, 2009, a netizen had already challenged the academic credentials of Tang Jun at Fang Zhouzi's website xys.org. This netizen said that he had studied at CalTech from 1991 to 1996 and he had never heard of Tang Jun. Subsequently Fang Zhouzi wrote that he was unable to locate Tang Jun's doctoral thesis in the American database.
When Fang Zhouzi raised the issue again this time, he was challenged to produce evidence. Fifty minutes later, he produced two pieces of evidence: (1) Tang Jun is not on the list of CalTech alumni; (2) no thesis by Tang Jun can be found in the American database of doctoral theses. Later, Fang Zhouzi produced more evidence: "No person of Chinese descent had ever obtained a computer science doctorate before 2001, and no one with the family name Tang has ever done so before or since."
According to information, in the book <My success can be replicated> by Tang Jun, the 56-th paragraph of the 2nd chapter is: "By the time that I started my second company, I was almost ready to abandon my studies. But by virtue of the research on linguistic classification, I eventually obtained a computer science doctor of philosophy degree from the California Institute of Technology."
The series of microblog posts by Fang Zhouzi drew Internet attention. Fang admitted that he had not actually read Tang's book but he conducted an investigation after receiving a denunciation ... "In Tang Jun's <My success can be replicated>, he said that he learned to use email the first time when he began to work at Microsoft in 1994. As a biology department student, I began using email in 1992. How can he not have used email as a computer science department doctoral student at CalTech?"
Fang then turned his attention to the other claims of Jun Tang. "In the 1990's he had a number of inventions after he arrived in America. These inventions made him money and thus led him to the attention of Microsoft. But the database of the US Patent and Trademark Office had nothing on anyone named Jun Tang prior to 1999. Since this was the name that was used when Jun Tang joined Microsoft, it is unlikely that he had obtained his patent rights under some other name."
... Our reporter has attempted unsuccessfully to contact Jun Tang to obtain his response. Tang's secretary Ms. Li said: "Fang Zhouzi has a problem. He is wildly biased. He is writing all this to promote himself. We do not intend to respond because we think that it is futile to respond to questions from people like that!"
To date, Jun Tang has kept silent. His microblog is being updated, but he was only writing about his thoughts on World Cup Soccer. He has said nothing about the salvos from Fang Zhouzi.