Obituary: Harry Wu, Chinese dissident and labour camp activist

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Harry Wu, a Chinese dissident who mounted an international campaign to expose the horrors of his country’s labour camps, where he endured 19 years of captivity as an alleged counter-revolutionary, has died aged 79.

Mr Wu settled in the United States in 1985 after a ghastly odyssey in the Chinese prison system in which he withered to less than six stones in weight. He was worked nearly to death and survived, in part, on food that he foraged in rats’ nests. His offence, as a university student in the years after the Chinese Communist Revolution, had been to criticise the 1956 invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union, the world’s other major Communist power.

Mr Wu was imprisoned in 1960. After his release in 1979, three years after the death of Communist leader Mao Zedong, he built a profile as a human rights activist and self-described “troublemaker” who repeatedly slipped back into China to gather undercover footage of the prison camps.

The footage was aired on the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes and on the BBC in the 1990s. With those reports, Mr Wu helped to draw widespread attention to Chinese practices of using forced labour to produce exports – among them wrenches and artificial flowers ultimately banned by the US – and harvesting organs from executed prisoners. According to his research, more than 50 million prisoners passed through the system over 40 years.

He was compared to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian writer who documented the atrocities of the Soviet gulag system. Mr Wu described the prisons, which purported to deliver laogai, or “reform through labour,” as the Chinese gulag, and said he would not rest until the word laogai appeared in “every language dictionary in the world.”

In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, he described them as “the cornerstone of the Chinese Communist dictatorship and the machinery for crushing human beings physically, psychologically and spiritually”.

By his account, Mr Wu stole from prisoners and collaborated with police to survive in prison. “I became an animal,” he told The Washington Post. “Unless you are an animal, you cannot survive.” He endured solitary confinement and suffered a broken back when a runaway cart struck him in a coal mine. When his captors discovered that he had hidden Western books, including Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, they broke his arm.

A turning point came with the death of a fellow inmate and friend. “Human life,” he recalled thinking, “has no more importance than a cigarette ash flicked in the wind. But if a person’s life has no value, then the society that shapes that life has no value either. If the people mean no more than dust, then the society is worthless and does not deserve to continue. If the society should not continue, then I should oppose it.”

© The Washington Post