The defaming article might have gone too far. A simple AUTHOR search would show he got a number of first author papers in Nature, Physical Review Letter etc and he had thousands of external citations [>6000] with his h-index [=36] being at least higher than most senior academics in Europe or US.
One's achievement cannot be judged by whether he gets a professorship or not in the west.
Many of us chinese are simply nasty self-inflicting political animals....