IN the summer of last year, when women from all over the world were converging on Beijing for the United Nations Women's Conference, a troublemaker made some trouble. Harry Wu, a Chinese dissident with an American passport, had been caught trying to enter the country two months earlier. Hillary Clinton, who was due to attend the conference, refused to go unless he was released. For a week, his name floated on the airwaves, until his trial ended with a 15-year jail sentence and expulsion from China.
To the relief of the US government as much as the Chinese, the second part of the sentence was executed first. Harry Wu was sent back to California, and the Western world could get on with its enthusiastic engagement with the Chinese economy, unimpeded by awkward questions about human rights.
It was odd that so much fuss could have been caused by a kind of ghost. "I have come back," Harry Wu says, - "from the land of the living dead."
He is a small but insistent sound, escaped from an immense silence. Of all the unknown millions of people sent to the laogai, the forced labour camps in China since 1949, he is one of very few now at large to tell the tale. Driven by the necessity to speak for those who have no voice, he has twice risked his life by making undercover trips through China, gathering evidence of slave lab our, public executions and the sale of organs from the bodies of executed prisoners. When he was arrested last summer, he was attempting a third trip.
In the China of the 1950s, counterrevolutionaries were born, not made. Harry Wu spent all of his twenties and his thirties - 19 years in all in prison camps, not for what he did but for who he was. He had the wrong parents. He was born, as Wu Hongda, in the most westernised Chinese city, Shanghai, in 1937. The son of a businessman, he was educated by Italian priests, and baptised a Catholic. Though he didn't realise it at the time, he belonged to a privileged elite.
"In Shanghai," he remembers, "because my school was for very wealthy people, I seemed to be in the middle class. We didn't have an automobile at the time. In this environment, I wasn't one of the rich people, so I didn't think I was at the top of society." Only after the revolution when, as a geology student, he went on a field trip to Shandong Province, did he see for the first time how privileged his own upbringing had been. "I saw - Jesus! These people had nothing. I saw why the communists got the support of the majority, because the communists were fighting for these people at the time. I said `well, maybe communism and revolution are good'." When the Communist Party leaders at the university told him to write self-criticisms, he now did so with some enthusiasm. "I wanted voluntarily to accept punishment and reform," he remembers.
But his confessions earned him no forgiveness because, as he came to realise, he was "a member of the counterrevolutionary class" and therefore irredeemable. Fearing eventual imprisonment, he and two other students who had been branded as "rightists" planned to leave the country. One of them, however, had taken some money to finance their escape, and Harry was blamed. In 1960, he was sentenced to "re-education through labour".
He had entered what is in reality a system of slave labour. In recent years, as China has become increasingly integrated in world trade, the products of the camps have come onto the markets of North America and Europe. The camps are, he says, "part of the gross national product", manufacturing 120 different items that are sold on international markets. They are "the Chinese equivalents of multinational corporations, but they have a huge advantage - their labour force is partly free. The prison warden is now an entrepreneur."
In 1960, when he entered the laogai, the economics of the system were less sophisticated, but the reality of slavery was the same. When the Red Guards discovered a small hoard of books that he had managed to hold on to Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Victor Hugo, Tolstoy they smashed his arm with a shovel, then made him kneel and watch the books burn. Later, his back and legs were broken in an accident in a coal mine.
Why did he survive when so many, died? "It's a combination of factors, he says. "First of all the religious factor, which is not very strong for me. The second year I was in the lab our camp, I almost starved to death, and I saw my friend tortured to death. I turned to prayer. I said `God please help me. You told me you are universal, we are suffering, where are you?' I yelled to God and got no answer. Since then, I never did any praying, but I still wanted to say that God is in my soul, at the bottom of my life. The second factor is my family education. My father always told me `never give up'. The Chinese communists interpret this a different way - they say `you are very stubborn'. That's what the judge told me at my trial last year.
But what he most wants people to understand is that he is not a hero, that if he had been a hero he would be dead. "No hero can survive the laogai. From the first day you get in there the police ask you three questions every day, and you must answer: Who are you? What is this place? What are you doing here? Every day that you answer, you destroy your dignity, destroy your personality. You have to say `I am a criminal. This is a labour reform camp. I am receiving thought reform.' If you admit your crime, this is the opportunity for the Communist Party to `help' you by allowing you to do hard labour. If you do not admit your crime, you have to be beaten or tortured."
He chose the first alternative. "I surrendered. I made a lot of confessions. I reduced myself to the level of a beast. You never can treat yourself as a human being. If you think `I am a man, I am a human being,' then what does being human mean? Human beings have rights. You think about your dignity, your future, your freedom, your love, your family, none of which you can ever have. It only causes suffering." Instead he chose to survive, he says, by "fighting and bullying and lying and confessing.
He remembers two men in the camps who could not forget that they were human beings. One man called Lu Haoqin who kept thinking about the first time he had sex with his girlfriend. "And all the time he's thinking `I want it, I want it back'. He wants that wonderful time when he was a human being." The other man, called Ao Naisong, used to be a musician and talked all the time about the music he used to play on the Chinese violin. Both died. He understood that such human desire was the enemy of survival. "You fight for it, fight for it, but you never can it get it. And finally you are totally disappointed, and then death is better than life."
It was best not to be human at all. "If you treat yourself as an animal, then it's easy. For many years, I just survived as an animal. I saw my human friends die and go to the graveyard, I saw them thrown away like a thing of no value, just like cigarette ashes. And I said `in this society, human beings - no value.' But an animal would not let you kill it without a struggle. I decided not to die, but to struggle like an animal."
Two things kept some stratum of humanity alive within him - remembering books and playing chess in his head. "I always tried to protect my brain. We never had anything to read, no paper, no pens. So, everyday with - manual labour, month by month, year by year, your brain shrinks. But I remembered two things. One is to tell a story. Even today I can tell in great detail A Tale of Two Cities, Les Miserables, Anna Karenina. I told every detail of those stories again and again.
"And I could play chess without a board. Later, I could play chess without a board with two different people at the same time. And yet I'm still an animal. In the late evening, I'm telling stories, playing chess without a board, but that morning I have punched somebody in the nose, made him bleed, and stolen his food, just like an animal. Every day, the two are mixed together. So definitely I cannot say `I had a very strong will, I believed the truth, and I resisted.' No, I have to be honest."
HE was released in 1979, exonerated and given a job teaching geology in Wunan. He got married and tried to settle down. But when the University of California invited him to give a lecture on a geological paper he had written, he went to Berkeley, where he worked in a doughnut shop and slept in the park. Eventually, he was able to publish books and research papers on the laogai system, to tell a story that causes trouble for the governments and corporations who would like to be able to deal with China without the embarrassing complication of people like Harry Wu.
He rejects the notion that the growth of a market economy in China will inevitably lead to democracy. "Capitalism must never be equated with democracy," he warns. "This is a very American belief making money produces freedom and justice and equality. Don't believe it about China. Don't be fooled by electronics or air conditioning." China, he believes, is more likely to evolve into a new kind of "totalitarian, super-nationalistic military state".
And yet, for him, breaking free from such a long history of tyranny is a source not of triumph, but of guilt. "Why should I survive?", he asks. "I'm not a good guy. I'm not an honest guy. The honest guys died. The people who were honest to life, honest to human nature, are dead. The guy who talked all the time about his music, maybe in my heart I was laughing at him for trying to hold on to his dignity. He never beat other people. I did.
"And yet, I am free over here and you look at me as a hero. What the hell are you talking about? Harry Wu? Harry Wu, in the 19 years he was in the laogai many, many times could have just died, finished, just like that. And one would remember. These people who died, they each had a name, but you don't know it, even their families don't remember it. But I know it. Twenty four hours a day, every minute, we were together. That's why the first time I went back, I went to the graveyard, to try to find them. These people were real men, they were real human beings. Not me. Harry Wu means nothing."
. Troublemaker by Harry Wu is published by Chatto and Windus (£10.99). Harry Wu will speak at a public meeting in the Thomas Davis Theatre in Trinity College, Dublin, at 5 p.m. today.
