NEWS ANALYSIS : Risky Contest Led to Activist’s Arrest in China : Rights: Wu wrote a will before earlier visit to expose prison conditions. Now he may need it.

That human rights crusader Harry Wu was arrested trying to sneak back into the country that imprisoned him in labor camps for 19 years should surprise no one who has followed his high-stakes cat-and-mouse game with Chinese authorities.

In 1991, before a clandestine trip into China to expose prison labor camp conditions in his homeland, Wu made out a will. Four years later, as he faces the death penalty in Chinese courts, some fear that he may need it.

“Returning to China with this objective,” Wu wrote in his 1994 autobiography, “meant risking my own rearrest and reimprisonment.”

Confronting the possibility that he might not return from that 1991 trip, Wu videotaped an interview with a CBS News team in front of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. “I felt as if we were preparing a final bit of evidence in case anything unexpected should happen during my journey. Perhaps I would once again disappear.”

Wu, 58, a naturalized American citizen who lives in Milpitas, Calif., survived that 1991 trip and another clandestine foray into China later the same year. Posing as a uniformed Chinese public security officer, a tourist and an American businessman, Wu used a hidden camera to produce rare film footage of the vast Chinese reform labor camp system he called “the Chinese gulag.”

Four years later, however, Wu’s worst fears have come true. Arrested at a remote border crossing in western China on June 19, Wu is now in custody in the east-central Chinese city of Wuhan, where he is charged with “entering into China under false names, illegally obtaining China’s state secrets and conducting criminal activities.”

The charges, under a recently revised “counterrevolution” statute of Chinese criminal law, carry a potential sentence ranging from a minimum of three years in prison to the death penalty.

Despite strong protests from supporters in the U.S. Congress, Wu, who immigrated to the United States in 1985, is almost certain to find himself back inside the prison system he attacked in books and congressional testimony.

In March, a Hong Kong journalist who is also a former Chinese citizen was sentenced to 12 years in prison after a secret trial on the same charges. Moreover, in his books and testimony, Wu openly admitted committing some of the crimes the Chinese government alleges.

In his 1992 book, “Laogai--The Chinese Gulag,” Wu reprinted a classified internal document he obtained about “re-education-through-labor camps” in China that house many political prisoners. In his 1994 autobiography, “Bitter Wind,” he described using false names and fake business cards and even donning the state public security officer uniform to obtain entrance to labor camps.

Like the United States, China has strict laws banning impersonation of law enforcement officers.

Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the influential chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, demanded that Wu “be released immediately or the United States will be obliged to take immediate recourse.”

But after waiting nearly three weeks before formally charging Wu, the Chinese government has made it clear that it intends to throw the book at the crusading human rights activist who has continually embarrassed the Chinese regime with revelations about conditions inside the labor camp system.

“The United States may see it differently. For us, this a criminal case,” a senior Chinese official told Reuters news service. “It has no bearing on U.S.-China relations. Whether ties will worsen hinges on the United States.”

A consular officer from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing hopes to meet with Wu in his Wuhan jail cell sometime this week.

Chinese authorities, who announced Wu’s arrest Saturday, have not explained why he was moved from the site of his arrest in remote western China to Wuhan, a major Yangtze River industrial city in Hubei province.

But Wuhan is the last place in China where Wu worked before leaving China for the United States on a tourist visa in 1985. In China, those accused of national crimes are often taken back to their work unit locale for trial.

In addition, Wuhan is the site of the library housing records on organ transplants. Wu, citing secretly obtained documents, recently testified before Congress about the alleged sale of executed prisoners’ organs to wealthy Asians needing transplants.

Under the terms of the consular convention between the United States and China, Beijing is supposed to allow a U.S. consular officer access to a detained American citizen within two days of the announcement of the arrest. Visits are supposed to be permitted “on a recurring basis,” with no more than a month between visits.