Rumors

The world of Internet is just a universe of the explosion of knowledge, and rumors.

The controversial marriage between the 82-year-old Dr. C. N. Yang (one of the top American physicists born in China) and 28-year-old Fan Weng has been a topic among everybody in the Chinese communities worldwide. The insurmountable achievement of Dr. Yang in various fields of physics has been replaced by his remarriage in the news headers in China. Recently I saw on the web a lot of rumors about Dr. Yang:

• A baby was born to Dr. Yang and Fan.
• Fan’s dad married the great-granddaughter of Dr. Yang.
• Fan was sent to greet Dr. Yang since 1990s because the Communist wanted to keep him visiting China instead of Taiwan.

Evidently the first two rumors are fake. If you really googled about these pieces of "news", they only appeared in forums and blogs, not in any official newspapers. However, the Epoch Times, one of the most anti-Communist newspapers, did mention it but addressed the rumors were spread on the web in a sentiment against this marriage (which is a spoof about the declining moral level in China, as this anti-Communist newspaper put it.) For the third one, nobody can really know although you can always make such a guess.

Another rumor is even more devastating, about Koreans applying the Boat Festival as the World Cultural Heritage. This is not completely wrong, but the truth is that what they tried to apply is one of the local customs of the festival in a Korean city instead of the festival itself. This rumor was made in China, and it spread through the Internet to Hong Kong and Taiwan. And this rumor has been so widespread that everybody thought it was true. And more unfortunately, a Taiwanese newspaper reported this, which resulted in the protest of the Korean government.

The uncensorable nature of the Internet is enhancing the easiness of confusing the public.