ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, October 28, 1996 TAG: 9610290005
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
ONE day in 1979, Harry Wu climbed into the back of a truck and gazed across a dark valley as the truck rumbled away from the Wang Zhuang Coal Mine.
He was free - free after 19 years as a political prisoner in China's vast "reform-through-labor" system.
He was leaving a place of torture and despair, where hunger once reduced him to fighting a fellow inmate over food scraps stored in a rat's burrow. Disease and starvation were so commonplace, Wu would recall, that the dead were casually rolled up in reed mats "like egg rolls" and then stored in a shed until they could be hauled away by ox cart.
On his day of freedom, the sound of a coal cart dumping its load compelled him to take a final look.
Halfway up the hillside was a scene he cannot forget: A line of "stooped and blackened figures" straining muscle and sinew against the hulking coal carts. He had been in that line the day before.
Wu returned to his old university post, but he did not forget. "Indeed," he later recalled, "it became quite clear to me that I was now only in a slightly larger cage than before."
He came to America to pursue geology research at the University of California, Berkeley. Even here, he could not escape the memories of his years inside the Chinese Gulag.
That's why he has returned again and again to his former home, to risk his life to document the abuses of the prison labor machine. That's why he has blasted Wal-Mart, the World Bank and other economic behemoths for their economic relations with the Chinese regime. And that's why he became an international flashpoint last year when the Chinese government arrested him as he tried to slip into the country.
He was charged with espionage, an offense punishable by death. After a world outcry, Chinese authorities sentenced him to 15 years in prison, then expelled him.
Sixty-six days back in the hands of China's prison apparatus gave him a higher profile from which to tell his story - and condemn the United States and other nations for not doing enough to stop the trade in clothing, tools, tea and other goods produced under body-breaking conditions by an estimated 6 million to 8 million Chinese prisoners.
He was in South Africa nine days ago, then flew home to Milpitas, Calif., arrived home late, slept in his own bed for once, got up, did a telephone interview, then started packing for Los Angeles; Jacksonville, Fla; and then Pittsburgh. Today he'll fly into Roanoke for a speech at Virginia Western Community College.
"Almost every morning," he says, "I get up and get on an airplane."
On Nov. 12, Times Books will release "Troublemaker," Wu's third book. He writes them to force the world to remember the men and women still trapped inside what he calls "the largest concentration camp system in history."
"I want to forget about the past," Wu, 59, says. "I know that this is America and if I work hard and I'm honest with people, I can live a good life. Why should I remember those nightmares?"
His answer is simple: "If I forget about these people, I betray someone."
`Death arrived almost unnoticed'
Harry Wu was born into a monied, Westernized family in Shanghai. His father was a banker.
Then came the communist takeover in 1949.
Wu studied at Beijing Geology Institute, but he came under official suspicion because of his family background and his criticism of the Soviet Union's suppression of the 1956 pro-democracy revolt in Hungary.
He was 23 when he was arrested in 1960 for being a "counter-revolutionary." He was thrown into the "laogoi" - China's "reform-through-work" system.
By August 1961, a national famine had bred desperation among labor-reform inmates. Fights over food and escape attempts made it hard for officials at the Qinghe prison farm to keep order. His captors decided to move Wu and other inmates who had reached advanced starvation to a special compound, Section 585.
Section 585 was called the "Prison Patient Recovery Center," but it was hard to tell the dead from the living. "Much of the day we lay in a state of near-stupor," Wu would write later. "No longer did we pay attention when someone reached the end and went into last gasps or tremors. Death arrived almost unnoticed."
Once, however, he risked the wrath of a security captain by demanding to go with a friend's body to the burial ground. He climbed into an ox cart with seven corpses and rode up the curving path to the graveyard, Section 586.
Small chunks of wood served as markers, with names of the dead written in black ink. Fresh holes had been dug into many of the grave mounds. He guessed that wild dogs had tunnelled in and eaten the bodies. Looking across the field, "I could see no end to the mounds. There may have been thousands."
He survived, but spent 19 years being shunted from camp to camp. He was let go in 1979 and "reinstated" to his university post. The leaders of the purges that had put Wu and millions of others in prison "cordially welcomed me back" but "showed not a hint of remorse about what they had done." It was "their way of informing me that from now on I would be expected to keep my tail between my legs."
`They're caught up in the system'
Harry Wu began his journey from ex-inmate to activist in 1985, when he wangled a temporary visa to teach geology at Berkeley.
He arrived with $40 in his pocket and moonlighted at a doughnut shop and liquor store to help make ends meet. Sometimes he caught up on his sleep on the desktop in his university office.
That first year, he read several books about China written in English and was upset to find none that mentioned the labor-reform camps. In 1987, he decided to devote himself full time to exposing the "reform-through-labor" system.
He fought for U.S. political asylum and won. In 1991, he married and "found deep personal happiness" for the first time.
But his memories would not let him rest. Two months after his wedding, he and his wife traveled back to China to gather evidence of prison abuses. They posed first as tourists visiting friends, and later, as an American businessman and his secretary. Ching Lee Wu used a camera hidden in her handbag to film the graveyard at Section 586.
Later, outside another prison farm, security police grabbed Wu and twisted his arms against his back. They told him he was in a forbidden area and would have to pay a fine. But he stuffed a wad of money into their hands, and they allowed the Wus to get on their bicycles and ride away.
His research helped CBS and Newsweek document abuses. Their exposs prompted a Chinese government spokesman to accuse the news organizations of having "mistaken black for white and confused right from wrong" because of their "extreme hatred for the Chinese socialist system."
He returned three more times. In June 1995, a guard recognized him when he tried to enter the country at a remote border crossing from Kazakhstan.
The Chinese government kept him under arrest in a hotel room. Sue Howell, an assistant who accompanied him, said Wu didn't resent his guards. "Harry kept saying, 'They're just doing their job. They're not bad people. They're caught up in the system, too.'''
The Chinese government released him after nine weeks. At his homecoming, the whole block was decked in yellow ribbons. Neighbors stood on the sidewalk waving and clapping. A pack of reporters wanted a statement. Wu had little energy left to say what he had wanted to tell the world for weeks.
"I'm very proud to be an American," he said. "If I were not an American, I don't think I would have been let out."
`My soul is Chinese'
Harry Wu's crusade has produced some strange bedfellows. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., a hard-right, anti-union conservative, helped publicize Wu's charges that the Chinese government is selling the organs of executed inmates for transplants. But Wu has also joined union activists in attacks on U.S. companies that do business with China.
In a blustery December drizzle outside Tacoma, Wash., he stood on a bed of a truck with union organizers in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Union members displayed Nativity scenes made in China and sold under the Wal-Mart label, and Wu declared, "Let there be no mistake about it - China persecutes Christians, and it's the largest exporter of Christmas products to the United States."
Wu has no direct evidence Wal-Mart sells prison-made products. But he contends the company doesn't do enough to insure against human rights violations by its suppliers.
A Wal-Mart spokesman said the company does screen its suppliers, foreign and domestic, and cuts off those that violate workers' rights. "Mr. Wu is obviously very passionate and just sometimes attempts to criticize Wal-Mart without a lot of facts behind it - with a broad 'Don't do business in China.'''
Harry Wu isn't backing down. He plans to keep the pressure on those who profit from trade with China. For all his work - the speeches, the undercover missions, his books - Wu believes he has much more to do.
He dreams of going back to China. He dreams of a day when political repression and "reform-through-labor" are gone.
"I am Chinese," he says. "My soul is Chinese."
In his dream, he and Ching-Lee won't need false identities. They'll arrive at the airport and proudly hand over their visas. Then they will visit the mountains, the rivers, the temples, the cemeteries.
"People tell me never to think about going back to China again," he writes in his latest book. "Nobody tells Harry Wu what to do. I will go back.
"Front door next time."
*Harry Wu will speak at 8 p.m. tonight at Whitman Auditorium at Virginia Western Community College in Roanoke. Tickets are $7 and can be purchased at Virginia Western bookstore (857-7334) or at the door (if available).
LENGTH: Long : 180 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. Ching Lee Wu photographed her husband, Harry, filmingby CNBprisoners working in Zhejiang Province in China in 1994. 2.
Prisoners of the Qiaosi Labor Reform Detachment work on a farm. The
photograph was taken by Harry Wu's wife, Ching Lee Wu. 3. This photo
shows Harry Wu under arrest in a Chinese hotel in June 1995. He was
held for 66 days until his expulsion from China in August 1995. 4.
Through a vehicle window, Harry Wu took this April 1994 photograph
of prisoners of the 13th regiment of the Xinjiang Production and
Construction Corps. color. 5. Prisoners of the Qiaosi Labor Reform
Detachment stand in formation inside the prison walls in this
photograph by Harry Wu.