Harry Wu

Wu survived not only the starvation that killed so many fellow inmates. He survived torture, solitary confinement, crushing labour, a back broken by a runaway coal cart, the collapse of a mine he was working in, brutal attacks by guards and fellow prisoners. He survived his stepmother’s suicide and the beating to death of his brother because of his own “counter-revolutionary activities”, rejection by his siblings, his father’s public denunciation by his own daughter, and the destruction of his once-wealthy and happy family by Mao Zedong’s communists.

After his release, Wu fled to the United States to begin life afresh, but found he was a prisoner there as well — a prisoner of his past. He could not forget the camps, or his fellow inmates, so he dedicated the rest of his life to exposing the horrors of China’s gulags.

He called those camps “the cornerstone of the Chinese Communist dictatorship and the machinery for crushing human beings physically, psychologically and spiritually”. He reckoned there were more than 1,000 laogai, and that over several decades 40 million Chinese passed through them. Several times he secretly returned to research them.

“I want to enjoy life. I lost 20 years,” Wu said in 1995. “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?”

Wu Hongda was born in 1937, one of eight children of an affluent Shanghai banker and an upper-class mother. He attended a Jesuit school, where he acquired the name Harry, and enjoyed an upbringing of “peace and pleasure” until the communist revolution of 1949. The family’s fortunes collapsed. His father lost his job. His mother had to sell her belongings to feed and educate her children.

Wu studied at the Geology Institute in Beijing, and was more interested in baseball than politics, but in 1957 the party launched its Hundred Flowers Bloom campaign, which relaxed restrictions on free speech. Wu went to a meeting and criticised the Soviet invasion of Hungary the previous year, only to be denounced as a counter-revolutionary rightist. He was put under surveillance, and arrested the day after his graduation. He was taken straight to a labour camp where he was told he had been sentenced to life imprisonment. “The iron door was locked behind me,” he said.

Wu spent the next 19 years in 12 different laogai — nine in a coalmine in Shanxi province, the rest in factories or farms. The purpose of those camps was to reform and rehabilitate prisoners through hard labour — if they did not die first. He endured what he later described as a daily routine of “labour, torture and the teachings of Mao”, and attributed his survival to a fellow inmate nicknamed Big Mouth Xing.

“I was 23, a college graduate raised in an affluent, urban family, and a political criminal,” he wrote decades later. “Xing Jingping, three years younger than I, was a peasant from a starving village, a thief with no education and no political viewpoint. The gulf between us was vast, yet I grew to admire him as the most capable and influential teacher of my life.”

Xing taught him to fend for himself, to do whatever it took to stay alive as he endured 12-hour days of gruelling labour with little food. “I never share with other people and always tried to grab the food from other people. I did it many times. I beat them and robbed their food . . . They did it to me too,” he told NPR. “I just lived as a beast,” he told another interviewer.

Wu in 1995 under arrest in China

REUTERS

Wu suffered seven fractures to his back, leg and shoulder when hit by three runaway coal carts. He was buried in rubble when the roof of a mine collapsed. He had his arm broken by guards after they found some western books that he had hidden. He saw countless prisoners executed, starved or beaten to death. He grew so thin that he weighed just 80 pounds. “My other inmates were dying every day — one, two, three, four.”

Then, in 1976, Mao died. Deng Xiaoping emerged as China’s new, relatively liberal leader. In 1979, aged 42, Wu was released and given a teaching job at the Geoscience University in Wuhan in central China. However, his family had fallen apart during his imprisonment. His stepmother had committed suicide after his arrest. His father was a broken man, having been denounced as a counter-revolutionary, stripped of his job, tortured and publicly shamed. His brother had become a devoted follower of Mao, yet was beaten to death by the police because of Wu’s subversive background. Wu’s other siblings had denounced and rejected him.

Wu had married a fellow inmate, Shen Jianu, in the mine, but they divorced after his release. In 1984 he married Lu Qing, a Wuhan student 24 years his junior, but that too ended in divorce.

Finally, in 1986, he escaped to San Francisco after receiving an invitation to be an unpaid visiting scholar at Berkeley for a year. He arrived with just $40 and nowhere to live. At first, he slept in parks or stations, then found an all-night job working — illegally — in a donut shop. “It was wonderful, for finally I had a roof over my head. The coffee was free, and so were the donuts,” he wrote.

Wu worked hard, found better jobs to support his lecturing, and gradually established himself. He was determined to forget his past and move on, but one day a student asked if he could write his thesis on Wu’s life. That led to an invitation to speak at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Wu talked — and wept as he remembered all the dead. He realised he had to battle China’s gulags. “I cannot turn back on these people, these nameless, voiceless, faceless people. Forget means betraying. I cannot do that.”

In 1988 he left Berkeley after receiving a grant to research the camps from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The Tiananmen Square massacre followed in 1989, and suddenly Wu found receptive audiences for his message.

Four times he returned to China in various disguises to locate and clandestinely photograph the laogai, and to make documentaries for CBS and the BBC — one exposed the sale of organs from executed prisoners. In 1995 he was arrested as he entered China from Kazakhstan, though he was by then a US citizen. He was sentenced to 15 years for spying, but released 66 days later after international pressure. It doubtless helped that Hillary Clinton, then first lady, was about to attend a World Conference on Women in Beijing.

He set up the Laogai Research Foundation, wrote several books, testified regularly before the US Congress and other bodies, and lectured at universities. A decade ago he moved from California to Washington DC with his third wife, Ching Lee, whom he subsequently divorced, and his son, Harrison Lee Wu. There he opened the Laogai Museum to commemorate the victims of those camps.

Wu fought not just against the laogai. He also opposed China’s rampant use of the death penalty, its one-child policy, censorship and religious repression. He supported dissidents, labour rights and a free Tibet. “I’m very happy to be a troublemaker for the Chinese Communist party, because the Communist party is a troublemaker to democracy and freedom,” he wrote in a book entitled Troublemaker: One Man’s Crusade Against China’s Cruelty.

Wu vowed never to rest until the word “laogai” appeared in all the world’s main dictionaries. By the end of his life he had largely succeeded in that goal.

Harry Wu, Chinese human rights activist, was born on February 8, 1937. He died on April 26, 2016, aged 79