Gulag Survivor Harry Wu Recounts Labor-camp Abuses

　
The media has told the world of the human rights abuses that go on to this day in China – of forced sterilizations of healthy women, long sentences in labor camps for speaking out of turn, a strictly enforced one-child policy – but Harry Wu says the outside world forgets almost as quickly as it hears of the latest outrage by the regime against its own people.

But as a survivor of 19 years in the labor camps – known as “laogai” – after speaking out against the Soviet Union’s use of force to crush the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and for having the temerity to criticize the Chinese Communist Party, Wu refuses to forget those who are still incarcerated.

“For the rest of the world today – including Japan, the United States and Europe – the most important thing they think about is making money and the benefits of business in China,” Wu told a press conference at the club on April 21. “It’s all about contracts and buying products – and many of those come from the laogai.”

Founder of the Washington, D.C.-based Laogai Research Foundation, Wu says one of the most evil facets of the system is the use of prisoners to provide human organs that are then sold for a profit.

“Since the 1980s, we have had documents that state that their organs could only be used if the prisoner agreed to provide them after his execution, if his family agreed and if no one collected the cadaver after the execution,” Wu said. “But if anyone violates a rule within the labor camp they can be killed, and no one picks the body up then.”

“But does anyone care now?” he asked. “International society has been informed of what is going on, but I see that 16 Japanese have been to China to undergo organ transplants.”

Ironically, China’s Ministry of Health has trumpeted its achievement of carrying out 13,000 such procedures every year, putting it second in the world behind the U.S. Of the total, 95 percent of organs come from executed prisoners.

Born in 1937 as the son of a Shanghai banker, Wu studied at the Beijing College of Geology until he fell foul of a purge by the university’s branch of the Communist Party for “speaking from my heart.”

He was sentenced to 19 years in the system of gulags that was modeled on the one already in extensive use in the Soviet Union, surviving physical and psychological torture largely on a diet of corn. In his autobiography, Bitter Winds, Wu described chasing rats through the fields to steal individual grains of corn from their nests.

Released in 1979, Wu managed to leave the country in 1985 and arrived in the U.S. with $40 in his pocket. In exile, he wanted to forget his experiences in the laogai and forge a new life for himself. But appearing before a Congress committee in 1990, Wu was asked how many camps existed. He replied that he did not know. And it was at that moment that he decided to dedicate himself to all those who were still suffering from the torments that he had escaped from.

At great personal danger, he returned to China to document the laogai for television programs for the BBC and 60 Minutes, among others. For his pains, he was elevated to “most wanted” status by Beijing and his luck ran out on his fifth clandestine trip in 1995. Wu was sentenced to a further 15 years in prison but spent only 66 days in detention before the Chinese government gave in to worldwide pressure for his release. Back in the U.S., he was feted as a hero. Wu says he was nothing of the sort, but the experience encouraged him to redouble his efforts to tell people about the barbarous laogai and the regime’s other human rights abuses – from the regular use of the death penalty to the one-child policy, the denial of religious freedoms and the long-standing problem of Tibet.

Wu has set up the Laogai Museum in Washington and estimates there are some 1,000 camps across China that hold as many as 5 million prisoners. They are forced to make products such as car parts, paper clips, plastic flowers and clothing worn by fashion-conscious people around the world who are utterly unaware of the conditions in which it was made. They are forced to give up their religion and political views, with those that do not sentenced to solitary confinement or tortured.

“We know about this, but does anybody really care?” he asked. ❶