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Harry Wu: Back to the Gulag
In the sixteen years since his release from one of China's "reform-through-labor" camps, Harry Wu has become a vexing presence both for China and for the Western governments who soft-pedal their objections to the regime's human-rights abuses. Beginning in 1991, Wu secretly entered, re-entered, and re-entered again what he calls the "Chinese Gulag," the labor camps where he had spent nineteen years of his life. While inside, armed only with a video camera, Wu acted as something of a surrogate journalist, documenting for Western news organizations evidence of China's vast use of prison labor to produce goods for export, and the Chinese hospitals that transplant organs from executed prisoners to wealthy and well-connected recipients while government officials look the other way.
Wu's clandestine visits came to an abrupt halt in June, when he was detained at the northwest border of Xinjiang province while attempting his fourth crossing. An American citizen since 1994, Wu faces charges -- including stealing state secrets -- punishable by death. This time, instead of lifting the thin veil of state denials covering shocking government practices, Wu himself had, by July, become a focal point of already deteriorating U.S.-China relations.
Wu, fifty-eight, is a geologist by training. Born into a wealthy, westernized Shanghai business family that committed itself to remaining in China for the rebuilding that followed World War II, he studied at the Beijing Geology Institute, where his capitalist background and criticism of the Soviet suppression of revolution in Hungary in 1956 earned him the suspicion of the Communist Party. In 1960, at twenty-three, he was called a "counter-revolutionary rightist" and was sent to the laogai, the reform-through-labor camps introduced by Mao Zedong. Shuffled from camp to camp over the course of nearly two decades, Wu watched people around him die of starvation and disease. At one point he was reduced to fending off a fellow prisoner for the right to the food stored in a rat's burrow. The experience forged a consuming, almost reckless, determination to shed light on the inner workings of a Chinese regime that had nearly smothered him.
Wu has written two books since 1985 -- Laogai: The Chinese Gulag and Bitter Winds -- and founded the Laogai Research Foundation to document labor camp practices and to gather the stories of exiled former prisoners like himself. But Wu was aware of the necessity, in a video age, of going beyond the written word.
It was in 1991 that Wu first returned to China, posing as a prison guard, carrying a hidden camera to videotape the production of goods that were being shipped to the United States. The existence of this prison economy -- comprising some 1,100 camps making products ranging from textiles to hand tools -- has been routinely denied by the Chinese. When that tape's quality was found too poor to be used, Wu slipped across the border again, this time posing as a Chinese-American businessman.This venture, with Ed Bradley, who also posed as a businessman, resulted in an Emmy award-winning 60 Minutes segment. "Harry Wu is a man on a mission," Bradley says. "He has used the tools of journalism in an activist's role. He's very good at what he does."
In April 1994, Wu returned to China to document for the BBC the illicit trade in executed prisoners' organs. Portraying himself as a wealthy American in search of an organ donor for an ailing uncle, Wu visited twenty-seven prisons, taping interviews with doctors and patients involved in the practice. (In one of the prisons, he was allowed to videotape heart surgery. In an editing error, the surgery was incorrectly identified in a voice-over in the BBC's documentary as a kidney transplant. The flaw came up in Wu's recent interrogation. He readily conceded the error to his captors, who in turn tried to portray his on-camera admission to the world as a confession of wrongdoing.) During the 1994 trip, Wu also obtained still photographs of show trials and prisoners who were seconds away from executions. The bodies of executed prisoners, Wu says, often yield organs for transplants.
Before his first trip, in 1991, Wu drafted a statement to be released in the event of his arrest. When he was detained recently his message was published in The New Yorker; it begins by describing the sound of a coal cart emerging from the mine elevator, which he heard on the day he left the Wang Zhuang labor camp. He notes the "long line of stooped and blackened figures . . . straining against their coal carts, inching slowly forward." It is a verbal snapshot of the prison labor experience. He closes with a question for himself: Who else could undertake his journey back into the Gulag? "The sound from the mine in my ears seems to ask, 'Who will go?' " he writes. "And the answer that comes back is, 'If I don't go, then who will?' "
Wu went where no journalist has gone, and the photographs on these pages
represent the fruits of his mission.
