Q. Last year you went to mainland China twice under the guise of a Chinese businessman with members of the CBS Sixty Minutes team to shoot a program about the reform-through-labor camps there. What made you willing to risk your life in such a way?

Letting the world know

A. I think I am extremely fortunate to be one of the lucky survivors of mainland China's reform- through-labor camps. Many people who survived the camps have not dared to say anything and there are still a lot of people living inside them. I want to let the world understand that this kind of system still exists today.

People are still discussing how the Jews suffered genocide at the hands of the German Nazis during World War Two; people are educated about this and memorials are established to stop the same kind of thing ever happening again. This kind of concentration camp regime is based on political ideas, what political parties advocate and the aspirations of leaders; then political, organizational and terrorist means are used to try to wipe out peoples.

Among the survivors of the Chinese camps you find members of the Kuomintang, the Chinese Communist Party, students, ordinary laborers, teachers. Why have all these people been sent down? For listening to the Voice of America, having different ideas about religion or literature, or perhaps a "bourgeois" father. When I was sent down in 1957 I was just a second-year university student encouraged by the Hundred Flowers Campaign to speak out; after I had spoken my piece, they said I was a rightist poisonous weed and sentenced me to reform through labor.

If this period of history is not recorded then there is no hope for the Chinese race. I am putting the photographic evidence I have collected on exhibition in every Western country and I want to make a film. Chinese people must definitely stand up about this problem. We cannot allow such a thing to happen to our own children and descendants.

Lethal consciousness

Q. When you went back to the mainland what changes did you discover in the labor camp system?

A. In the 1950s and 60s Marxism-Leninism- Mao Tse-tung Thought was at its peak and there was a great belief in it amongst the people. The Public Security Bureau guards in the camps believed in Marxism-Leninism and the inmates themselves believed that they were in need of remolding and could lighten their sentences and get to the communist paradise if they just studied Mao Thought well. Because of this the sentences and beatings were lighter.

On my return it was very different. Nobody believed in communism or thought reform, including the guards. Also, the labor of the earlier camps was geared towards comparatively primitive tasks, such as repairing roads, mining, opening up the mountains and planting the fields. They were subsidized by the central government and had a very limited scope of production.

After several decades the camps have now gradually turned towards more industrial types of production. The biggest change came in the 1980s, with Teng Hsiao-ping's call for "enterprise, responsibility and growth" and for everyone to go all out making money. The guards are now employees and their wages, uniforms, bonuses and children's educational expenses are all supported by their brigades. Of course they will be eager to make you work and produce things that can be sold for money; the best kinds of products are those that can be ex ported because foreign exchange earnings from exports can be shared with the central government. This has all been brought about through a deliberate policy.

The nature of the inmates has also changed. There are more young people, more criminals and fewer political prisoners. The Communists have themselves declared that the proportion of political prisoners is 10 percent and my own estimate is around 15 percent.

The problem is that it is very hard to be clear about exactly who is a political prisoner and who is not in mainland China. In the 1950s it depended on class considerations: The landlord and capitalist classes had disappeared by the 1980s. Then there were the people who had worked for the Republican government who have also disappeared. Because there are no longer such political prisoners the criminal inmates of the camps are now more numerous.

The Chinese gulag

Q. Very many Chinese people have described their personal sufferings at the hands of the Communists and most of them have come out in the form of a kind of wounded literature. Your short story 586 won the United Daily News prize for literature. Earlier this year you finished your book Laogai--The Chinese Gulag which has made the reform- through-labor system a subject for academic re search. There are not many such examples. Some Western China watchers think that the Chinese people have become hollow after so many years of political repression, so scared and fatalistic that they are not willing to write. What do you think?

A. What you say is very true. My book is the first work of academic research on this subject. When I went to America I got very enthusiastic reactions from the universities and various forums I spoke at. However, from these questions and discussions I discovered that most of my audience thought I was talking about special cases; very few of them knew that this was the problem of a whole system and regime.

In the 1960s young people in the West were infatuated by Mao and even thought that "reform- through-labor" was a great episode in the history of humanity. Now with Bertolucci's The Last Emperor people are still talking about how the emperor was reformed through labor to become an ordinary citizen.

If this was just a personal matter I could study the Count of Monte Cristo and take personal revenge on my enemies. What need would there be for me to write books and give lectures?

After I came out from the reform-through-labor system I returned to university. The person who had accused me of being a rightist was already a committee secretary in the Party. Did I hate him? He was just a screw in the national machine. Why should I use my brain to battle with a screw? It was not worth it! I put aside my personal thoughts and started out by looking at the system.

This is not just my personal story. I am very lucky to be able to get out and tell the story, but there are still so many unknown names: Where are they? Who can tell their stories? Today there are still a lot of people who are continuing to suffer my story. How can we overlook this?

People often say to me that a lot of countries have religious and political problems which give rise to the same kind of extreme measures we see in China. What makes the big difference to me, though, is that the measures of the Nazis, the Soviets and the Chinese Communists have all been open, theorized and systematic long-term plans to mobilize the whole people and put them into action. Murderers imprisoned in other countries are not forced to undergo hard labor and thought reform, whereas official Chinese Communist documents stipulate that only when you have been forced through hard labor can you be recreated as a new socialist man. This means that you can wear people down to death and brainwash them at will. Incarceration in the West is certainly not for the purpose of thought remolding--this is the biggest difference.

The Chinese have a big problem in that their idea of human rights is still very weak. A lot of people think that if you break the law then you deserve to die and any punishment must be right. Once when I was doing geological research in the countryside I saw a whole village excitedly rushing along to watch an execution.

I am certainly not against having a prison system. There are always people in society who will do wrong things and society should both punish and help them. Yet if wrongdoers repent then they should be given another chance. If you have murdered someone and tomorrow you are going to be executed, you are still a "human being" to day. Unfortunately we Chinese only have ideas of "kingly" rights and "military" rights but no idea of "human" rights.

There have to be sacrifices for democracy

Q. The export of prison-made goods by the Communists has caused quite a stir in the West and led to open efforts to control such trade. Will their measures have any effect on the economic development of the mainland? How can people know whether something has been made in a prison camp or not?

A. When I speak to American businessmen I tell them that I am certainly not against doing trade with mainland China. But I ask them whether, if their brothers and sisters were in a labor camp, they would be willing to sell shoes from that camp just to make a bit of money.

When I report to the American customs I do not want to harm the profits of ordinary American businessmen and do not want the customs to investigate and ban all mainland goods. As for identification, goods are often falsely packaged so it it is not necessarily possible to tell if they have come from labor camps.

As for the problem of harming economic development, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa once said that economic sanctions imposed by the West would in fact have an adverse effect on the employment opportunities for black people in his country. However, for the sake of long-term policy and to resist the ruling white minority they were willing to accept sanctions.

If you are doing business with mainland China, even if the profits are 100 percent, as a slice of the whole cake what does this amount to in respect of what most ordinary businesses and people actually get out of it? The people overseas who shout that sanctions will hurt the general public tend to be businessmen. They do not talk about themselves but say it is the ordinary people who will suffer.

Mainland China is huge. Tientsin and Canton do in fact have relationships with foreign trade and investment, but if this is divided amongst the general public, then what does it amount to? The economic profits all go to the central government so that it can buy airplanes and warships.

Uniting to stop goods produced by prison slave labor

Q. For 40 years the system of reform-through- labor has been inseparable from the economic and political systems of the Chinese Communists. What do you think are the chances that international pressure can change this situation?

A. If political forces, economic forces, foreign relations and human rights can all be used together, then there is some hope. The Communists could be forced to provide information, for example. The basic statistics about just how many reform-through- labor brigades there are and how many prisoners they contain have still not been supplied.

The Communists have been very troublesome over this problem. They signed a memorandum with the United States saying it would be investigated but it was only when the issues of prison exports and human rights were raised during the debate over China's Most Favored Nation status that the Communists suddenly realized its importance. Their ambassador to the United States even commissioned an American public relations company to deny that any prison-produced goods were being exported.

Last year I masqueraded as an American businessman and went to Shanghai to negotiate with a group of four public security cadres who represented a reform-through-labor brigade enterprise and we signed a contract for the export of goods produced by their brigade. This contract was later revealed to the United States Congress and public as proof that the labor brigades were still exporting goods. It was based on this that the United States Customs issued their first related customs ban.

Last month I held a photography exhibition in Washington and people from an organization established to memorialize the Nazi concentration camps came to see it. Later on I went to see their memorial and they told me that the Chinese people should also have such a memorial. They also remarked that the Chinese Communists are unsteady and that if the day does come when the Communists finally leave the stage then I should quickly go back to tell the new government to keep the remaining camps as memorials.

I think that establishing a Chinese memorial to reform-through-labor is probably the dream of my life. There must come a day when Chinese people are also seen to be human beings and worthy lives. Why is it that after 40 or 50 years people can still remember the Jewish victims of the Nazi concentration camps, while the Chinese continue to go on accepting the existence of their own reform-through-labor camps today?

[Picture Caption]

Inmates in a leather clothing factory in Tsing Hai immersed naked in a vat of chemicals. (photo courtesy of Harry Wu)

Chinese characters on the wall surrounding this farm in Tsing Hai clearly read "products for sale." (photo courtesy of Harry Wu)

On 23 September, 1991, Harry Wu testified to the United States Congress. Here he holds a photograph of a banner praising the achievements of a Tsing Hai labor camp dealing with inmates imprisoned after the Tienanmen Massacre. (photo courtesy of Harry Wu)

Harry Wu and Chen Ching-li had not been married for long before they risked going to mainland China to photograph the labor camps.

Inmates in a leather clothing factory in Tsing Hai immersed naked in a vat of chemicals. （photo courtesy of Harry Wu）

Chinese characters on the wall surrounding this farm in Tsing Hai clearly read "products for sale." （photo courtesy of Harry Wu）

On 23 September, 1991, Harry Wu testified to the United States Congress. Here he holds a photograph of a banner praising the achievements of a Tsing Hai labor camp dealing with inmates imprisoned after the Tienanmen Massacre. （photo courtesy of Harry Wu）

Harry Wu and Chen Ching-li had not been married for long before they risked going to mainland China to photograph the labor camps.