Controversial philanthropist admitted cheating

Controversial Chinese philanthropist Chen Guangbiao admitted he cheated in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, Sanxiang Metropolis Daily reported on Thursday.

In an interview taken earlier this month, the 47-year-old philanthropist, who made his millions in recycling, called his challenge a plotted performance art instead of a real one.

The authenticity of his challenge had drawn widespread doubts with Chen kept denying them, saying he knows martial arts and once was trained in the well-known Shaolin Temple.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was popular worldwide as a way to raise money for the treatment and research of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known in North America as Lou Gehrig's disease. Participants pour buckets of ice water over themselves on camera. They can then either challenge someone to either take buckets of ice water or donate money to ALS research.

Last August, Chen uploaded two video clips to his micro blog that showed him taking the challenge.

In the video, Chen broke up a massive chunk of ice and then entered a garbage bin about 1 meter tall. His employees then poured more than 30 buckets of ice water with ice cubes onto him. After pouring the ice water on Chen, his employees then put in the bucket some of the ice fragments that Chen had made from the ice block he had smashed.

According to commentary on the video, Chen stayed in the bucket for about 30 minutes.

In the latest interview, Chen said that ice fragments and block are authentic ice. But the garbage bin he stayed was filled with hot water with a temperature of about 50 C. Although a thermometer showed the temperature in the bin stood at freezing point, the bin was actually quite warm.

"Combined hot water with iced one, the temperature in the bin lingers at 25 C, about the same with the temperature of a hotel's swimming pool," Chen was quoted as saying.

He also said that it's no big deal for him to stay in such a bin for one hour or longer.

Among the people who keep challenging the authenticity of Chen's video is Wen Deyuan, director of Hunan Institute of Sexual Health.

With experiments on three mice, Wen made the public claim that dipping in freezing cold water for five minutes would lead to sterility.