OPINION:China's labour camps are a reminder of how wrong our indifference to the country is, writes JOHN WATERS
IT IS strange how, despite our constant gestures and assertions about human rights, we seem still to be able to create different categories and contradictory criteria without feeling disconcerted by the resulting moral discrepancies. Hitler, we are agreed, was a monster. Stalin, we have gradually come to accept, was not such a nice guy either. But Chairman Mao seems to be a different matter. We wear Mao T-shirts without irony and eat our dinners in restaurants bearing his name. We buy cheap goods with labels assuring us they are “Made in China”, congratulating ourselves that we are contributing to the capacity of the Chinese economy to feed that country’s estimated 1.3 billion people. From time to time, people of a certain generation let slip with a coy grin that when they were younger they used to be “maoists”. China, we seem to think, is different.
It is. The record of China in the matter of human extermination is worse than that of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union put together. And this culture of extermination has not been banished to history. Today, the population of the laogai– the name for Chinese labour camps – is estimated at between four and eight million.
Last week I met a man called Harry Wu, with whom I had been asked to conduct an interview, at the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, a most extraordinary festival of knowledge that happens every August at Rimini on the Adriatic coast of Italy. The Sunday encounter took place before an immediate audience of about 2,000 people, with thousands more watching on giant screens around the vast complex that is the Rimini Fiera.
Harry Wu spent 19 years in a laogai, one of the undisclosed number of China's labour camps. In 1961, aged 23, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and emerged in 1979, middle-aged, having been "pardoned" for his "crimes". Wu was neither a criminal nor a political dissident. His problem was that, when Mao announced the Hundred Flowers campaign in 1957, purportedly allowing people to voice criticisms of communism and of the Chinese Communist Party, Wu was one of those who took this a little too literally, criticising the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
His fate was perhaps already written. His father was a banker, his mother descended from landlords. Wu had been baptised a Catholic. Thus, as both a Christian and a member of the “exploiting classes”, he offended against several of the key criteria of an ideology seeking to establish the idea of the “proletariat” as the new God.
In prison he became, he told me, “a beast”. For the first couple of years, he thought about his family and his girlfriend. Then his mother committed suicide and he no longer saw anyone. He was tortured and made to “confess”. He spent time in solitary confinement, in a cell three feet high. He had no hope, no purpose except survival.
In the beginning, other prisoners stole his food, so he learned how to beat people up and take their food before they could do it to him. “Be careful,” he warned me over lunch, “or I will steal your dinner!” To this day he is expert at catching frogs in a hedgerow. He learned how to follow rats to get the grains from their nests. He lived like this for nearly 7,000 days and nights. Then one day, after the death of Chairman Mao, he was released. There were no fanfares and no headlines. He remained for a few years in China and then, at the age of 50, went to the US to start life again from the beginning. At San Francisco airport, he stopped dead still in the passport queue and said out loud: “I’m free! I’m free!” Then someone nudged him to move on. In his pocket he had $40.
For the past two decades, Wu has been campaigning to have the word laogaimade an entry in every dictionary in the world. He wants to put this word on the lips of everyone in the world who believes in freedom and justice, as the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did with the word "gulag". He also wants to draw attention to the fact that many of the goods we buy in the West, despite the assurances of the Chinese authorities, are made by prisoners in the laogai.
In the 1990s Wu returned to China several times, usually disguised, to film and gather information about the laogaifor various US television programmes. In 1995, he was intercepted at the border, held for 66 days and sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment. By then, however, the world was beginning to wake up a little to what was going on in China and so Wu was deported rather than reincarcerated.
Harry Wu is, unsurprisingly, a somewhat direct and truculent man. As the Italians like to say, there are no hairs on his tongue. On Sunday last we had a robust exchange, in which we discussed, among other things the ambivalence of the West towards what are by far the most systematic human rights abuses in our world today.
Harry Wu does not want to fill the West’s need for heroes, but instead to awaken its conscience. A hero, he says, would have killed himself a long time ago.