Harry Wu

Probably the widest known of all the dissidents due to his extensive media exposure, from a "6o Minutes" segment that he made back '92 with Ed Bradley, where they posed as businessmen looking to purchase prison-made goods, to a BBC documentary that detailed the illicit trade in executed prisoners' organs, where he posed as a wealthy Amercian business man looking to purchase an organ for his ailing uncle, to an appearance of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, where Leno praised him as an "American hero". Wu is a natural-born journalist with a relentless mission: to uncover China's human rights abuses, particularly those of its prison system.

Born into a bourgeois family from Shanghai, he was entrapped and arrested in 1956 at the age of 23 for criticizing the Communist Party during the Hundred Flowers Campaign. In 1960 he was sent to the laogai ("re-education through labor"), the Chinese labor camp system, as “a counter-revolutionary rightest” for attempting to escape China due to his miserable prospects there as a consequence of his tainted political background.

He was imprisoned for 19 years in 12 different camps mining coal, building roads, clearing land, and planting and harvesting crops. According to his own accounts, he was beaten, tortured and nearly starved to death, at one point living on only ground corn husks. He recounts in his autobiography, "Bitter Winds", how he would chase rats through the fields in order to "steal" the grains in their nests, or eat snakes. He witnessed the deaths of many other prisoners from brutality, starvation, and suicide. All of this because his university had been given a quota of counter-revolutionaries to purge.

Released in 1979 in the wake of the liberalization which followed the death of Mao, Wu left China and went to the United States, where he became an unpaid visiting professor of geology at the University of California, Berkeley. (He took the position so hastily that UCB wasn't able to provide funding for him. He arrived in America with $40 and lectured while homeless). Eventually, he founded the Laogai Research Foundation, a non-profit research and public education organization. The work of the foundation is recognized as a leading source of information on China's labor camps, and was instrumental in proving that organs of executed criminals are used for organ transplants, and addtionally that the camps are used to manufacture export goods with slave labor.

The Laogai Research Foundation estimates that there have been fifty million people incarcerated in the laogai since 1950, and that there are eight million people in forced labor today. Harry Wu’s self-proclaimed goal is to put the word laogai in every dictionary in the world, and to that end, works eighteen-hour days criss-crossing the country and the globe speaking with student groups and heads of state to make this present-day horror become a past memory. Wu has on several occassions presented testimony as an expert before various United States Congressional committees, as well as the Parliments of the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, the European Parliment, and the United Nations.

This last Wednesday, he spoke, along with Wei Jingsheng, Rabiya Kadeer, and several U.S. lawmakers at a joint press conference of the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom and the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.

Books:

• Laogai: The Chinese Gulag (1991), the first full account of the Chinese labor camp system.
  Bitter Winds (1994), a memoir of his time in the camps.
  Troublemaker (1996), an account of Wu's clandestine trips to China and his detention in 1995.
  New Ghosts, Old Ghosts, Prisons and Labor Reform Camps in China (1999), by James Seymour and Richard Anderson

Awards:

• Freedom Award from the Hungarian Freedom Fighters' Federation (1991).
  Martin Ennels Award for Human Rights Defenders. ( Its first recipient, 1994)
  The Medal of Freedom from the Dutch World War II Resistance Foundation. (1991).
• Honorary degrees: St. Louis University and the American University of Paris
  

Profession: Executive Director of the Laogai Research Foundation and the China Information Center. He is also a member of the International Council of the Human Rights Foundation.
Education: Geology Institute in Beijing.

Web links of interest:

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=22295 (He was a homeless vagabound during his first semester or so at Berkeley! A somewhat "humorous" account of this time provided here along with a more serious Q & A with NYWND).

http://www.laogai.org/news/index.php

http://www.speaktruth.org/defend/profiles/profile_49.asp

http://backissues.cjrarchives.org/year/95/5/wu.asp