A Crusader for Humanity : The Guilt Harry Wu Suffers From Surviving China’s Prisons Drives Him to Force Reform

The torture of Harry Wu did not end when he was released from a Chinese prison after 19 years of forced labor.

His back and arm, broken in fights with fellow prisoners, have healed. He has long since regained the 75 pounds he lost. But the guilt of survival will not go away.

Imprisoned as a “counterrevolutionary rightist,” he cannot forget what he did to stay alive: cheating, lying, fighting and, worst of all, stealing food from a starving man.

“I turned myself into a beast,” the soft-spoken, scholarly Wu recalled recently. “Many people passed away. Many people are still there. It is shameful to survive.”

And so, moving to America to start anew, he has become a crusader, risking his life to expose the laogai --the forced-labor camps that form the backbone of the Chinese prison system.

Three times he has crossed the border back into China, posing as a prison guard and as a wealthy businessman to get inside the prison camps and bring back videotapes and other evidence of human rights abuses.

“I want to enjoy my life,” Wu explained. “I lost 20 years. But the guilt is always in my heart. I can’t get rid of it. Millions of people in China today are experiencing my experience. If I don’t say something for them, who will?”

The driven Wu has become a persistent critic of the George Bush and Clinton Administrations’ willingness to overlook human rights abuses in favor of better business ties. “Today they’re fighting for CD rights, not human rights,” he protested.

He has taken his campaign to the parliaments of the Western World and has testified before Congress seven times to press for sanctions against China. Most recently, he testified April 3 before the House Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights about the forced labor camps. Next month, he is scheduled to testify before the Senate Committee on International Relations about China’s practice of selling executed inmates’ organs for transplant.

In his quiet, resolute way, Wu has become the voice of China’s conscience--an advocate some liken to Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

“Harry Wu is a very courageous man and a very effective one,” said Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). “I am frankly in awe of the risks he is willing to take for democracy against such a ruthless and formidable foe.”

Wu hardly looks the part of a freedom fighter challenging a despotic government. Mild-mannered and unassuming, he appears younger than his age of 58. He lives with his wife of four years in a two-story home on a quiet suburban street in blue-collar Milpitas just north of San Jose.

Since 1988, he has been a resident scholar at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He supports his work through grants and small donations to his Laogai Research Foundation.

Wu said one of his goals is simple: to place the word laogai --literally meaning “reform through labor”--into the English language, just as the terms Holocaust and gulag have come to represent the worst abuses of the Nazi and Soviet systems.

In the large upstairs study devoted to his work, Wu is surrounded by photographs he took of Chinese labor camps. His undercover disguise of a prison guard’s uniform is stuffed unceremoniously into a See’s candy shopping bag.

And nearby is his collection of products made by Chinese prison labor for export: Dynasty wine, Elephant and Diamond brand wrenches, tea, artificial flowers, a chain hoist, rubber boots and, among his latest acquisitions, paper cocktail napkins specially printed for sale to Elks Clubs and the Los Angeles Times.

Wu said the napkins were smuggled out of prison by English-speaking prisoners who wanted to help spread word of the misery of Chinese forced labor camps. One took a picture of himself with the items in China to authenticate them and wrote on the back of the Elks Club napkin: “This shows conclusively that the Chinese government is involved in the export of prison-made products to the U.S.A. This is done with impunity.”

An official at the Elks Club headquarters in Chicago said he had no knowledge of the club purchasing napkins or any other product made in Chinese forced labor camps and that the issue had never been raised before. “I know nothing about it,” he said.

Times purchasing agent Hector Muniz said the newspaper’s napkin supplier had assured him that all napkins purchased by The Times were made in the United States. About 18 months ago, Muniz added, The Times stopped using the style of napkin Wu said had come from China.

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied that it uses prison labor to make products for export to the United States.

In his gripping autobiography, “Bitter Winds, A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag” (John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1994), written with Carolyn Wakeman, Wu recalls how he was sheltered as a child from much of the misery of pre-revolutionary China.

Born Wu Hongda in Shanghai in 1937, his wealthy banker father sent him to an elite Jesuit boys school where he studied English, played baseball and was given the nickname “Harry.” After the communists came to power in 1949, Wu said he continued his education and was near graduation from Beijing’s Geology Institute when he was arrested in 1960 and sent to prison without trial. He had naively criticized the government during a brief period of openness and was branded a counterrevolutionary rightist.

He went to prison, he said, as famine resulting from Mao Tse-tung’s failed Great Leap Forward swept the countryside. An estimated 15 million to 30 million peasants starved to death and there was little food for prisoners.

All Wu was fed for months were small steamed buns made mostly of fermented corn cob. Prisoners weak with hunger began stealing and fighting over food, he said.

Wu learned from gang leaders, petty criminals and peasants how to assert authority, to strike before he was struck and to forage for food. He learned which grasses and roots were edible; how to catch snakes, bite off their heads and skin them with his teeth; how to dig up the burrow of a rat and take the rich yield of corn, beans and rice it had stored.

On one occasion, a man in Wu’s squad spotted a rat’s hole in the ground. Wu said he knocked the man down, dug up the burrow and stole the food. “I took it,” he said. “Later he died. I feel very bad.”

All around him, people were dying of starvation and disease. With his weight down from 155 to 80 pounds, Wu was transferred to a prison “recovery” center, where he was fed a bowl of thin gruel twice a day and a few ounces of powdered food supplement.

Wu said he and his fellow inmates had so little energy they lay huddled in a stupor on the kang , a heated platform that served as a communal bed. Dead bodies were hauled away nearly every day.

When Chen Ming, one of his few prison friends, died next to him on the kang, Wu said something in him snapped. He refused to let go of the body and was given permission to attend the burial.

As Chen Ming’s featherweight body was lowered unceremoniously into the ground, Wu viewed the thousands of shallow, unmarked prison graves. Later he wrote: “If the people mean no more than dust, then the society is worthless and does not deserve to continue. . . . I should oppose it.”

Wu’s newfound determination, he said, helped keep him alive for his 17 more years of incarceration.

In 1969, Wu acquired a new status: resettlement prisoner. He was forced to labor in a remote coal mine, he said.

In the ensuing years, he survived the turmoil that swept China by spouting his allegiance to the country’s leaders. After the death of Mao in 1976 and a subsequent political shift, Wu was finally released in 1979.

Wu was allowed to begin teaching and, having made a significant contribution in oil-drilling technology, was permitted in 1985 to go to UC Berkeley as a visiting student.

Without any source of financial support, he arrived with $40 in his pocket and spent 10 nights sleeping at BART stations and People’s Park in Berkeley. Finally, he got a job working the graveyard shift at a doughnut shop and slept by day in the university library.

Determined to inform the world of the laogai prisons, Wu went back to China in 1991 with Ching-Lee, then his wife of four months, and used a hidden camera to shoot videotape of prisoners in several camps.

Working with “60 Minutes,” he entered the country again that year, adopting the disguise of a prison guard to visit camps in remote areas. Posing as an American businessman, he arranged to buy $88,000 worth of parts from a machine factory prison for delivery to the United States--despite the American ban on prison-made products.

Orville Schell, a writer and China observer, said Wu’s willingness to gather evidence at tremendous personal risk has changed the international debate over China and its forced-labor camps.

“I admire his determination to shine a light on this very dark corner of contemporary China,” Schell said. “There is a side of him that just won’t quit. . . .There is almost a religious fervor to his dedication. He is bearing witness.”

Last year, Wu went back to China, this time working with the BBC, and traveled to 27 laogai camps. Posing as a wealthy American seeking an organ donor for a sick uncle, he arranged to pay $30,000 in cash for the kidney of a prisoner who was soon to be executed.

“This is organized crime, government crime,” Wu said. “I have to do something for these people.”