Wu Says He Shut Out Emotions in Prison : Survival: Activist tried to forget his wife, family and having ‘good things outside’ in order to steel himself. He was buoyed by a U.S. newspaper article.

Human rights activist Harry Wu, in his first detailed account of his months in captivity, said Friday that his widely publicized “confessions” to his Chinese captors were based on lies he told to save himself.

Deprived of medicine for his ailing back, isolated from the outside world and subjected to grueling interrogation, Wu said he survived by shutting out his emotions and telling his interrogators what they wanted to hear.

“What is a confession?” he asked a crowd of reporters gathered on his front lawn. “Shall I be honest to the liars? I want to deal with the man as the man deals with me. It is true I lied to them. . . . This is the way to survive.”

Wu, looking better rested and more fit than when he limped off an Air China flight from Shanghai that landed in San Francisco on Thursday night, said he had been prepared to die in a hunger strike rather than live out his life in a Chinese prison.

Unaware of the international campaign led by his wife, Ching Lee Wu, to win his release, Wu said he was surprised when he was told he would be deported and did not fully realize he was free until he looked out the airplane window and saw the Pacific Ocean.

The soft-spoken Wu said he was stunned by his hero’s welcome upon his return. He had been unable to telephone his wife after his release, and as he flew toward home, “I decided to rent a car and drive by myself and make my wife a surprise.”

Reunited with his wife, he apologized to her for attempting to forget her during his ordeal. “I asked my wife to remarry me,” Wu recounted. “ ‘I’m sorry,’ I confessed to my wife, ‘I didn’t think about you a lot because thinking of you a lot I would go mad.’ Don’t think about it. I don’t have a family, I don’t have good things outside. I have to prepare for my death.”

Wu, 58, and a naturalized U.S. citizen, spent 19 years in a Chinese prison as a “counterrevolutionary rightist” until his release in 1979. Serving his time in a series of forced labor camps, he nearly died of starvation and was forced to live like an animal to save himself.

Since immigrating to the Bay Area in 1985, Wu has carried on a crusade to expose the laogai --China’s system of reform-through-labor camps. Wu was arrested June 19 attempting to re-enter China and was accused of spying.

Subjected to long interrogation and surrounded by guards who watched him 24 hours a day, Wu quickly reverted to the survival techniques of his earlier prison days.

At one point, he said, he was given hope by a Los Angeles Times article reprinted in the International Herald Tribune that slipped past censors when it was given to him by a visiting U.S. Embassy official.

The article quoted former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, saying China would have to act on Wu’s case--and Wu realized his detention had become an international issue.

Eventually, he made at least two confessions that were a blend of fact and fiction. In July, he confessed in a videotaped interrogation to “deliberately falsifying facts” in a British Broadcasting Co. documentary that exposed China’s execution of prisoners to harvest their organs for sale and transplant.

In a separate letter, Wu also confessed to impersonating a police officer and filming inside a prison camp during previous trips to China--actions he openly wrote about in his recent autobiography, “Bitter Winds.”

“Since 1957, there’s a lot of so-called confessions in my file,” he told reporters. “I criticize myself to death and I uphold ‘Long Live Chairman Mao.’ I swear I’m loyal to the Communists. This is the way to survive.”

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On Friday, the Chinese government sought to tarnish Wu’s reputation by attacking him as a thief who seduced women students while serving as a college teacher after his first release from prison.

Wu says he stole food in prison to survive, and at one point after his release planned to marry one of his students, according to his autobiography.

The People’s Daily also reported that Wu said in a confession that he would no longer allow himself to be exploited by “international anti-Communist, anti-Chinese forces” and would halt his campaign to expose the abuses of China’s prison system.

But meeting with reporters at his home, Wu said he has no intention of halting his work. “The fight is just beginning,” he said. “They can destroy me, but I doubt they can defeat me.”