Calabasas : Human-Rights Activist to Speak at Soka

Harry Wu, an American citizen and Chinese-born human rights activist, will speak Wednesday at Soka University on “China: The Truth Behind Slave Labor.”

Wu, who spent two decades in a concentration camp for speaking out against his country’s repressive regime, was born Wu Hongda in 1937, one of eight children of a prosperous banker. He was educated in a Jesuit school in Shanghai, where he earned his nickname, Harry, and at Beijing Geology Institute, where his outspoken “rightist” views eventually got him in trouble.

He was jailed just before his graduation in 1960 and spent the next two decades in prison labor camps. Inside the camps, he says, inmates were routinely tortured and the organs of executed prisoners were removed and sold.

He was released in 1979 and was eventually given permission to attend UC Berkeley as a visiting scholar. He later became a resident scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

In a daring move, he returned to China in 1991 with a hidden video camera to document alleged human rights abuses in prison camps for CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes.”

When he returned again to China this year, he was arrested in June, tried and sentenced to 15 years in jail. But after pressure from the international community, he was released in August and deported to the United States.

The free program, the last in a fall lecture series on human rights, begins at 7 p.m. in Minuteman Hall at Soka University, 26800 W. Mulholland Highway in Calabasas.

For information, call (818) 878-3780.