Dissident Wu To Visit Harvard on February 16

Harry Wu, who has devoted his life to exposing the brutality of China's forced-labor camps, will visit Harvard on Friday, Feb. 16, for a series of special events sponsored by the Harvard Asian American Association (AAA), Quincy House, and the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations.

Wu will meet members of the Harvard community at a 5:30 p.m. reception in the Quincy House Junior Common Room. Later, he will address invited dinner guests and accept a Foundation award for his courageous efforts to focus world attention on China's human-rights abuses.

On Saturday, Feb. 17, at noon, Wu will give a free public talk at the ARCO Forum of the Kennedy School of Government during the AAA's seventh annual conference.

Wu was studying at Beijing Geology College in his native China when he spoke out against the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and criticized the Chinese Communist Party -- actions that led to his first arrest. In 1960, charged with being a "counterrevolutionary rightist," Wu was sent to China's Laogai ("Reform through Labor") system, the largest network of forced-labor/thought-reform camps in the world.

While confined to 12 different camps over the next 19 years, Wu was forced to make chemicals, mine coal, build roads, clear land, and plant and harvest crops. He watched, helpless, as fellow prisoners died of disease, starvation, brutality, and suicide.

Released in 1979, Wu arrived in the U.S. six years later as a visiting geology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He later began writing about his experiences, determined to expose the inhumanity of the system.

Between 1991 and 1994, Wu visited China to document continuing abuses. Posing as a businessman, he videotaped prison conditions, made his footage available to the TV news magazine 60 Minutes, and described his findings for Newsweek. In 1994, he worked with the BBC to document the alleged sale of human organs taken from executed Chinese prisoners.

While trying to enter China legally last June, Wu was arrested. During a four-hour trial in July, he was convicted of "stealing state secrets" and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Widespread international pressure led to his expulsion on Aug. 24, when he returned to the U.S.

Wu has testified before congressional committees, the United Nations, the European Parliament, and the governmental bodies of Australia, England, France, and Germany.

Now in his late 50s, Wu serves as executive director of the Laogai Research Foundation, a nonprofit group that continues to document conditions in China's work-camp system. Wu is also a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. His efforts have earned him the 1991 Hungarian Freedom Fighters Award and the 1996 Geuzen Medal of Honor of the Dutch Foundation for the Geuzen Resistance Movement.

Wu has described his personal ordeal in Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag (1994). In Laogai: The Chinese Gulag (1992), he takes a theoretical look at the system. He became a U.S. citizen in 1994.