From: World Tibet Network News, Sunday, July 16, 1995

By CHARLENE L. FU

Associated Press Writer

BEIJING (AP) -- When Chinese authorities arrested Chinese-American human rights activist Harry Wu, they did not have to dig deep for evidence against him. Moral arguments aside, Wu appears to have openly broken Chinese law during secret trips since 1991 to uncover abuses in prisons and labor camps.

The most serious charge he faces -- stealing state secrets -- is normally punishable by 10 years to life imprisonment. But the death penalty is possible if the crime is "especially serious and the circumstances especially odious."

Wu's case is one of several issues damaging U.S.-China ties, including arms proliferation, trade and Taiwan. The Clinton administration is demanding Wu's release, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., urged the president last week to boycott an upcoming U.N. women's conference in Beijing.

Detained June 19 as he crossed China's remote western border, Wu was formally arrested and charged July 8. Besides stealing state secrets, he also faces other charges, some of them unnamed. He joins five American citizens held in Chinese prisons. One awaits trial for fraud. Three others are serving sentences of six to 20 years for business fraud. The fifth is serving a 15-year sentence for possessing hashish.

The legal code defines the crime of stealing state secrets as: "Stealing, secretly gathering or providing intelligence for an enemy." That has been used in the past to convict people of telling foreign reporters about troop movements along the Vietnamese border, as reported in official newspapers, and leaking interest rate adjustments.

Wu's alleged crimes are more serious. A former labor camp prisoner for 19 years, Wu exposed how Chinese labor camps produce and sell for export everything from wrenches to wine grapes. He also uncovered secret "internal" government documents praising labor camps with high export volumes and urging the entire camp system to produce more high-quality exports. What makes things worse, he told the world what he knows. The British Broadcasting Co. and the U.S. television program "60 Minutes" aired Wu's secretly-filmed footage, and news organizations gave his trips global coverage.

Wu regularly testified at U.S. congressional hearings on China's human rights practices, helping alert U.S. customs officials to illegal imports of Chinese prison goods. Legal issues aside, many Chinese may consider such actions by an ethnic Chinese as traitorous. Wu also is charged with entering areas off-limits to foreigners. These areas may have militarily sensitive installations or simply be considered too poor and backward for foreigners' eyes. Even some open areas have places -- ranging from prisons to certain schools and factories -- that are off-limits without special permission.

In his autobiography "Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag," Wu details his first two trips back to China in 1991, when he visited nine labor camps across the country. Several were in west China's Qinghai province, known as China's gulag. Having spent 19 years in the very labor camp system he has been exposing, Wu knew all too well the risks of what he was doing. "I felt urgently the responsibility not just to disclose but to publicize the truth about the Communist Party's mechanisms of control, whatever the risk to me," he wrote.

Most foreigners who enter closed areas are either simply ordered out of the area or expelled from China. But Wu, who visited some of the same camps that once held him, clearly has angered Chinese leaders with his relentless exposes. Wu filmed some labor camps' exteriors with a hidden camera. Others he entered disguised as an American businessman. In Qinghai, where foreign businessmen are rare, Wu impersonated a policeman, wearing a borrowed uniform. In China, as elsewhere, that is a crime.