AN ADMIRABLY CRAZY FIGHT AGAINST CHINA'S GULAG

by Richard Cohen

Washington Post, July 12, 1995

Washington - The only sane way to think about Harry Wu is to consider him insane. After 19 years in the Chinese gulag, after being beaten and so starved that he stole from a fellow prisoner the meager booty of a rat's burrow, he has repeatedly gone back to China to expose its prison system. Now, as was bound to happen, this American citizen has been arrested and charged with capital crimes, and the U.S.-Chinese relationship, already poor, are heading toward an open breach. Blame it on crazy man.

In Mr. Wu's case, that craziness is guilt - survivor's guilt. He has been frank about his motivation, about what has compelled him to leave California and the prison system where be spent nearly two decades.

"I want to enjoy my life." he once said. "I lost 20 years. But the guilt is always in my heart. I can't get rid of it. Millions of people in China today are experiencing my experience. If I don't say something for them, who will?". Mr. Wu once smuggled a hidden camera into the Chinese prison system for "60 Minutes". On account of him, Americans learned that some of what they had been buying from China was made by slave labor. He is determined that everyone learn the word laogai: the chinese gulag.

Who are the people who intrude on our selfish complacency? Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote a letter while in the army voicing a mild criticism of Stalin. For that he was sent to the gulag. After he was freed, he tock on the system armed only with a pen. Didn't he know he could be killed, another among numberless victims? My God, who are these people?

Mr. Wu is one of those people. You would think that having gotten out of yhe laogai he would make sure he would never go back. Like Alexander Solzhenitsin, he was arrested for a political caprice: suggeting that the Soviet invasion of Hungary was wrong. He was 20 years old and weighed around 155 pounds (70 kilograms). Soon, he was down to 80 pounds. He ate grass and insects, caught snakes, bit off their haeds and skinned them with his teeth. He learned to look for rat boles and to value the cache the rodents stored. When, once, another man found the hole first, Mr. Wu knocked him aside and stole the food. "I took it. Later he died. I feel very bad."

Mr. Wu is a true saboteur. Like the French workers who inserted their sabots, or wooden shoes, into the machinery, he has inserted himself into already tense U.S.-Chinese relations and made things even worse. To the Chinese, he is a criminal. He may or may not entered the country illegal, but that is hardly the nut of the matter. It is his insistence on exposing the system of labor camps that has made him a pariah to Beijing. The most serious cherges against him relate to that.

We are told that guilt, like envy, is a fruitless emotion. I do not agree. Mr. Wu's guilt is his animating emotion. He cannot abide doing nothing while others languish in prison camps. There is nothing fruitless about that. It may stem from his education at a Jesuit boys school where, incidentally, he got the nickname "Harry". The Jesuits are rigorous thinkers who detest moral muddles. If the camps are wrong, then it is wrong to do nothing about them.

But Mr. Wu puts us in a fix. Not only wuold most of us prefer not to think about foreed labor (or, even, how people live in the ghetto), but we sometimes resent those who insist that we pay attention to such matters. Moreover, in the government - any government really - individuals like Mr. Wu are detested. They gum up the works. China is a major market, a billion consumers. Who is this Harry Wu to endanger U.S.-Chinese relations?

Well, he is a man, a mere man burdened by guilt. He is a unduobtedly brave, but he is crazy in a way that few of us can apreciate. For one thing, he knows the cause of insanity. "I am a survivor." he told a U.S. congressional committee four years ago. "I think I have a responsibility to those inmates who are still there."

If that is the case - and it is - then the obbligation of us all is to have him freed. Otherwise, we have to live with his guilt.

AN ADMIRABLY CRAZY FIGHT AGAINST CHINA'S GULAG

by Richard Cohen

Washington Post, July 12, 1995