Oscar Wilde once crossed the Pacific to "civilize America." Incessantly complaining about the bustle of the country, its lack of copyright protection for authors, and delighting in poking fun at its nouveau-riche, he described San Francisco's Chinatown as the most artistic place he had ever been to.

Such an experience is far removed from that of French photographer Patrick Zachmann (p.40) who is publishing a series of photographs on the overseas Chinese under the title The Eye of the Long Nose. To get a deeper understanding of such a different culture from his own, Zachmann simultaneously set about tracing his own Jewish roots through photographing a series on the Jews in France. Zachmann says that he could communicate with his Jewish subjects on the level of "art," while the Chinese only wanted to talk business.

Was the "long nose" able to understand his own culture while being blind to some hidden Chinese aesthetic? Or had the miners of San Francisco's Chinatown a century ago preserved more of their original culture than their wealthy businessmen successors of today? Was Wilde's jesting about America possible due to his having the history of European culture at his back, or just made possible by the wealth and power of the British Empire?

Two summers ago, Harry Wu of Stanford University's Hoover Institution visited mainland China to get photographic evidence of the production of prison-made goods there (see p.96). Back in the West, Wu quickly became a focus of media attention as he called for controls on prison-made exports from mainland China.

The first reaction to Wu's lectures was often one of disbelief: How could it be that in places where goods were being produced by slave labor, where there would inevitably be present a host of security personnel, that business managers would be able to casually discuss business and even say, "Do not worry, if the quality is not good we can punish the inmates more heavily"?

The Chinese Communists feel no shame over making labor-camp inmates work for no wages. Even many among Wu's Chinese audience share a feeling of bemusement over what exactly is wrong with letting "criminals" do a bit of work and conveniently earn a bit of foreign exchange for the nation in the process.

Wu explains that what he wants to discuss is not the prison system but his discovery on reaching America that even those sentenced to death still need to be treated as people, let alone the hundreds of thousands of people in the mainland camps who are there for perhaps no other crime than having unorthodox beliefs. Looking back at his life as a labor-camp inmate from this Western point of view, he now realizes that the inhabitants of mainland China are basically not treated as human beings at all.

How do Westerners advocating human rights see the mainland camps? Some leading China scholars have held rather optimistic and romantic attitudes about them, they were even seen as historical achievements during the Mao fever that once swept the West, and recently Bertolucci's film, The Last Emperor, hailed the reform of "emperor to citizen." Just how ethnically relative is it to "value human rights" or to "love art"?

In Rhinoceros, Rumanian playwright Eugene Ionesco tells the story of a town whose inhabitants turn one-by-one into rhinos. When the leading character's girlfriend, with whom he has made a mutual promise to recover their "human nature," also turns into a rhino, he begins to resent the fact that he himself does not have a beautiful thick hide or handsome horn adorning his face and feels increasingly despondent and dejected.

In mainland China, where human rights are unknown, can people come to realize that it is just not acceptable to put naked prisoners to work in vats of chemicals? In the West, with its concern for human and animal rights, it was not long ago that antivivisection activists went s o far as to plant a bomb under a scientist's car which exploded and killed a five-month-old baby.

As for saving the endangered rhinoceros (see p.42), if some people can look for a while beyond their own, or the rhino's, "long noses," they might see the problem in its entirety. To blame the Chinese for the long-term depletion of the rhinoceros because they use its horn as medicine, or the British for having hunted it for pleasure, is not as good as reflecting on the overall influence on nature of industrialization. Faced with the extinction of numerous endangered species and with millions of people still suffering in reform-through-labor camps, we all have good reasons to feel despondent and dejected.

When reading Ionesco or Wu we might rejoice that it is not the human race that is endangered, or feel happy that the inhumane phenomenon of forced prison labor is confined to remote China; we should not forget that the loss of any species to this world, or any trampling on humanity is a serious threat and warning towards anyone who enjoys their human rights and art.