Harry Wu (吳弘達), a former political prisoner who dedicated his later life to exposing abuses in China’s brutal prison labor camp system, has died. He was 79.
Wu died on Tuesday morning while on vacation in Honduras, said Ann Noonan, an administrator with Wu’s Laogai Human Rights Organization.
The cause of death was not immediately known, and Wu’s son, Harrison, and former wife, China Lee, were traveling to the Central American nation to bring home Wu’s remains, Noonan said.
Photo: AP
“He was a real hero,” Noonan said by telephone from New York. “Harry’s work will continue, it will not stop.”
Wu was born into a prosperous family in Shanghai that saw most of its property confiscated following the civil war victory of Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) Chinese Communist Party in 1949. He studied geology at university, but fell afoul of the authorities for his criticism of the Soviet Union and was sentenced in 1960 at age 23 to China’s prison camp system known as laogai (勞改), or “reform through labor.”
Laogai was notorious for punishing intellectuals and political prisoners with long sentences and brutal conditions and the camps were blamed by some for causing millions of deaths.
According to his autobiography, Wu spent various terms in 12 different camps, experiencing harsh work regimens on farms, coal mines and work sites, along with beatings, torture and near starvation.
Released in 1979 following Mao’s death three years earlier, Wu moved to the US in 1985. He taught, wrote and founded the Laogai Research Foundation while returning frequently to China to conduct research on the labor camp system.
Having become a US citizen, Wu was arrested during a visit to China in 1995 and sentenced to 15 years on espionage charges. He was immediately deported to the US, where he continued his work documenting Chinese human rights abuses and was a frequent speaker before the US Congress and at academic events.
The Washington-based foundation established the Laogai Museum in 2008 to “preserve the memory of the laogai’s many victims and serve to educate the public about the atrocities committed by China’s communist regime,” according to the foundation’s Web site.
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