Labor Camp Nightmares Trail Dissident to U.S. : Human rights: Former Chinese prisoner’s book is named for ‘Bitter Winds’ that swept through the paper-windowed cells and came to represent the prevailing injustices.

Harry Wu wanted to forget the torture, the scavenging for rats to keep from starving, the memory of friends dying one by one, carried away and dumped into cold ground.

But even after Wu arrived in the United States, free after 19 brutal years in Chinese labor camps, the nightmares never went away.

“The bitter winds always follow me and, in the end, I think I have to tell people the truth,” said Wu, whose real name is Wu Hongda, in a recent interview.

He couldn’t shake his memories of Big Mouth Xing, a wily petty thief who taught him the art of survival but died of hunger, or Lu Haoqin, driven mad and then to suicide for the lack of human touch.

“I loved them and they loved me. I can’t turn my back on them. To forget them means to betray them,” said Wu, 57, as he discussed his new book, “Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag.”

The book is named for the northern winds that swept through their paper-windowed cells and came to represent the injustice of their plight.

Wu’s story begins in 1955, when he was a young man in Shanghai eager to help Chairman Mao Tse-tung build socialism. He read in the People’s Daily that the future of China would depend on minerals, oil and coal, and enrolled in Beijing’s Geology Institute.

After Wu adjusted to the spying of the Communist Party Youth League and mandatory party ideology study sessions, he tried to settle into a routine of study and his passion, baseball.

But he made a few mistakes. He didn’t join the party-sanctioned singing and drama clubs, he snuck off campus to meet a girlfriend and he spoke out against the arrest of his older brother for “illicit connections with foreigners” after authorities discovered letters from their sister in Hong Kong.

On April 27, 1960, just after graduation, Wu was arrested. Never formally charged or tried, he spent the next 19 years in labor camps, labeled, like tens of thousands of other prisoners, a “counterrevolutionary rightist.”

He was released in 1979 by a government desperate to recover from the violent excesses of the decade-long Cultural Revolution.

By then, he had learned to steal and beat up fellow inmates for food and cigarettes, find rats and snakes to supplement his diet of gruel and biscuits, and think about his mother’s cooking at “food-imagining parties.”

He had also had a revelation while escorting the body of a fellow inmate to his grave.

“Human life has no value here, I thought bitterly,” Wu wrote. “But if a person’s life has no value, then the society that shapes that life has no value either. If the people mean no more than dust, then the society is worthless and does not deserve to continue. If the society should not continue, then I should oppose it.”

It was that thought that stopped him from committing suicide. It is the same thought that keeps him going today.

He arrived in the United States in 1985. He’s now a resident scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and he hopes to start a family with his wife, Chen Ching-lee.

But he wants the American people to know that the conditions that prompted his nightmares still exist. Wu and Chen went to the prisons in 1991 to shoot a secret video for a “60 Minutes” segment on Chinese prisons.

While the dissidents from the 1989 Tian An Men Square uprising still capture headlines, Wu doesn’t want people to disregard the faceless millions laboring in China’s gulag.

“The people will see that this is the core of the human rights issue in China, not a few well-known dissidents,” he said.

The Chinese government says there are about 3,300 political prisoners, although human rights advocates believe the figure is closer to 10,000. Wu estimates there are 10 million people in the “laogai,” or labor-reform system of prisons, labor farms and resettlement camps.

Wu intends to testify before Congress for a second time against renewal of favorable tariff status on Chinese imports and against imports of goods made by Chinese prisoners.

“I hope President Clinton will become the first world leader to condemn the gulag system,” he said. “We have to talk about these nameless, faceless, ordinary people, just like you and me, who disappear in this vicious machine.”