PREFACE
I always assumed that history moved in a linear fashion, ever reaching toward an almost predestined horizon. But sometimes history can surprise us and double back on itself, as if pulled by some powerful, old field of gravity from which it cannot break free.
Indeed, as the Winter Olympics in Beijing drew near, I had just such a sense watching the International Olympic Committee (IOC) pull out of discussions it had been having with the Coalition to End Forced Labor in the Uyghur Region. The rights group had been pressing the IOC to assure the world that official Games merchandise was not being made with prison labor, especially from Xinjiang province where Uyghur Muslims are now being held in new versions of China’s old style “reform through labor (劳动改造)” laogai prison camps.
China’s new Xinjiang detention camps have been well-documented by investigative research and satellite imagery. For instance, scholars from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), identified more than 380 “re-education centers (职业技能教育培训中心),” as CCP propagandists call them, over 60 of which have been expanded this past year. ASPI describes them as part of the largest mass internment of an ethnic-religious minority group since World War II. They are, however, only one element in the Party’s overall campaign to preemptively neutralize potential Muslim separatist sentiment and incipient terrorism by detaining hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, sometimes for nothing more that manifesting deep religious sentiments or active support for their own indigenous culture.
At the same time that the Beijing Olympics was helping bring attention to these repressive policies and institutions, I began organizing some old papers stored in my California home and chanced upon a long-abandoned manuscript. Thumbing through it, I realized it was an article, never published, I’d done three decades earlier for The New Yorker on prison labor in China. Written in diary form, it chronicled an unlikely project I’d undertaken with Chinese dissident Wu Hongda (吴弘达), or Harry Wu, for CBS’s 60 Minutes, a segment that documented his daring return to China in 1991 to steal back into some of the prison camps in which he’d languished as a political prisoner for 19 years. His hope was to show Americans the graphic reality of China’s massive penal colony and how its inmates were still compelled to work in mines, factories and farms to produce raw materials and manufactured goods, some of which were sold abroad illegally.
Click here to skip to the 60 Minutes investigation.
Entitled “Made in China,” the segment went on to create quite a stir. Newsweek put it on its cover. The Washington Post, BusinessWeek, The World Journal, and other publications ran features. The BBC and the Voice of America (VOA) did broadcast stories. The U.S. Congress held hearings on the export of forced labor products from China. And it won an Emmy, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton award, and numerous other plaudits.
Stumbling on this dormant manuscript was like exhuming a document from a long sealed tomb, and reading it reminded me of how durable institutions, even quite odious ones, can sometimes be. Of course, much has changed since 1991. Harry Wu passed away in 2016, his human rights legacy tarnished later in life by accusations of sexual misconduct and extortion. China, too, has been transformed in myriad ways. And, my own life has moved on. But, looking through these now yellowing pages filled me with a recognition of how little China’s Leninist system, especially its penal system, has changed during the intervening years.
For here, in 2022, after an endless series of revolutions, reforms, and rejuvenations, China is still wrestling with the same old issues that had motivated our 60 Minutes investigation three decades earlier: arbitrary detention, political prisoners, forced labor, human rights violations, and what it means to be human. Charges of “genocide” are ricocheting around the world and once again China’s trading partners were trying to figure out how to respond to the challenge of a country surreptitiously selling goods produced with forced labor not only into its domestic market, but overseas markets.
As I read this old manuscript, it seemed as if Xi Jinping was leading his country back to this past. Just as China has reached the edge of attaining its century-long dream of wealth and power, he’s now putting all this success at risk, and for what? Instead of allowing the Chinese people to enjoy the stunning developmental accomplishments they’ve collectively achieved and encouraging the country to matriculate onward, toward a more open, enlightened, just, and democratic society, he’s dragging them backwards in an increasingly regressive way, towards the very Mao era they’d just spent four tectonic decades trying to vacate.
This was not the future for which I, or most of my generation of China scholars, had hoped or worked. But with Xi generating a growing state of antagonism between China and the U.S., as well as with many other countries, I decided to reprise this manuscript. My hope was that it might now help shine light on the gathering darkness of this self-same prison camp and forced labor system that has been a major tool of societal repression in China ever since Mao first took power in 1949.
A HIGHLY UNLIKELY IDEA
February 11, 1991
I get a call from David Gelber, a producer for correspondent Ed Bradley at CBS’s investigative news program, 60 Minutes. Because there’s now a debate raging in Washington about whether or not to grant China “most favored nation” status, he’s interested in doing a story about imprisoned dissidents in China.
Gelber is a smart, nervous New Yorker with the high-voltage intensity that suits a network producer. A story on China’s political prisoners could influence policy, but his idea sounds both unformed and naïve. How would a CBS TV crew ever get into China to cover such a sensitive topic, much less gain access to prisons and “reform-through-labor” camps?
February 13, 1991
Despite my skepticism, I find myself unable to set Gelber’s idea aside. After all, rarely does one get entreated with such an opportunity and resources to do a project like this.
To learn what I can about China’s shadowy reform-through-labor system, I repair to the Center for Chinese Studies Library at UC Berkeley. The few works I find note that this system has incarcerated millions of ordinary criminals and political prisoners alike for nebulous offenses, such as “crimes of counter-revolution” and “crimes of endangering state security.” Most prisoners are detained extra-judicially and held for years, often without formal charges ever being brought.
The prison camp system itself is made up of a vast array of interlocking penal institutions that exist at almost every level of society and in every geographic part of China. They include, among others, detention centers (看守所), lock-up facilities (拘留所), jails and prisons (监狱), “reform thru labor detachments” (劳动改造队), and “re-education through labor detachments” (劳动教育队). Then, there’s a murky category known as “forced job placement personnel (就业)” consisting of inmates who, once they’ve finished their formal sentences, can get reassigned to continue working in their old prison camp enterprises as low cost laborers.
Modeled on Joseph Stalin’s gulag, the Chinese reform-through-labor system is now reported to include more than 1,000 different facilities. The logic was explained in a 1991 Beijing University publication: “Except for those who must be exterminated physically due to political considerations, human beings must be utilized as a productive force with submissiveness as a prerequisite. Reform-through-labor units force prisoners to labor. The fundamental policy is: forced labor is the means, while thought reform is the basic aim.”
“Thought reform” (思想改造), or “brain washing”(洗脑), is an ideological rectification technique perfected by Mao as an adjuvant form of therapy for those miscreants whose “incorrect thought” is not cured by prison and forced labor alone.
As I think about Gelber’s challenge, I keep running into one stark reality: as sprawling as China’s labor camp system is, the prospect of outsiders penetrating it, especially with a video camera, is exceedingly unlikely and very dangerous. And, suffice to say, my Beijing-born wife, Baifang, who is pregnant with our first child, is skeptical about undertaking such a stressful project at this point in our lives.
What is more, to penetrate the enormity of this penal archipelago, much less to document the flow of minerals, raw materials, crops and manufactured goods that the different prison enterprises produce, would take a very unusual person: an experienced but smart Chinese maverick who could, if it became necessary, drop quickly out of sight and melt into Chinese society — a difficult feat to accomplish even in Deng Xiaoping’s more open China.
March 12, 1991
Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Richard Solomon, has arrived in Beijing where he declares the U.S. has now succeeded in “institutionalizing” a “dialogue” on human rights with the Chinese Government that he feels is a “breakthrough.” We’ll see.
March 17, 1991
Now that I’m paying close attention to the Chinese press, I see daily reports of political trials. Today, three more pro-democracy movement activists have been sentenced in the city of Xi’an for “counter-revolutionary incitement.” Their sentences range from three to five years.
Who are these people? What did they really do? Do they have any regrets? Are they afraid? Do they have spouses and children? What are the conditions like in their prisons? Gelber hopes for answers to all these questions.
As a writer, I personally find it frustratingly difficult to even know how to begin imbuing such cases with any sense of vividness. Since journalists are not allowed to speak with detainees or prisoners, and since relatives and friends are usually too terrified of retribution to speak out, it’s almost impossible to do anything more than record the most basic facts about their cases.
The idea of finding a way for 60 Minutes to shed light on this opaque subject continues to seem unlikely.
March 19, 1991
Today, the editor-in-chief of the overseas edition of the People’s Daily, Shao Huaze, comes under investigation by both the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of State Security over the publication of poem entitled, “Lantern Festival,” that cleverly maligned Premier Li Peng by having a character in each line say: “Li Peng Must Step Down to Appease the People’s Anger,” when read diagonally rather than horizontally.
Such a repressive atmosphere hardly bodes well for getting into China, much less being able to pull off a foreign TV program documenting prison labor.
March 25, 1991
I read today about a recent American Bar Association (ABA) delegation trip to China on which they visited a Shanghai “model prison” to which foreigners are regularly taken. After touring its factory production lines, delegates were treated to a meeting with the deputy warden. In their discussion, ABA President John. J. Curtin asked where goods made in the prison were sold. He was assured they were only sold on the domestic market. However, when the delegation was departing, they happened to pass by a production area where the roving eye of President Curtin’s wife, Mary, spotted a Seagram’s logo on some cardboard boxes. When she asked prison officials if she could have a sample, they became agitated, refused her request and denied the cartons were being made for export.
As it turned out, the sharp-eyed Mary Curtin had spotted packaging for bottles of Seagram’s Wine Cooler that were being made by prisoners who’d carelessly (or, perhaps intentionally?) left their work out in plain view.
“We’re an innocent party,” claimed the manager of Shanghai Seagram’s Ltd., Philip Leung, when questioned later about the incident.
“Without our knowledge, subcontracting was done at the prison the ABA visited,” Seagram’s spokesman, Robert Kasmire, tried to explain. “When Seagram’s found out about it, we ended that relationship.”
But how many other foreign companies or buyers unwittingly, or even wittingly, continue to have supply lines that reach back into Chinese prisons?
“Can a reform enterprise develop a foreign-oriented economy?” muses Ding Banghua, an officer of a provincial prison bureau, asks in another article released by Human Rights Watch. “The answer must be affirmative,” he replies to his own question. “Some enterprises have already done so with flying colors… After 30 years and more of hardship of getting started and vigorous development, the laogai enterprises throughout the country have great potential for… earning foreign exchange.”
March 30, 1991
I’m in Moscow with my wife to visit two old friends, Adam and Arlie Hochschild. It was here in this motherland of socialist revolution that Stalin perfected his system to ship off millions of people with whom he politically disagreed to a vast network of remote labor camps.
Adam is working on a book, The Unquiet Ghost, about the ways in which some contemporary Russians are now seeking to come to terms with their gulag and the Stalin era. He’s even travelled to Siberia to visit some of its old labor camps and tells me one particularly horrifying story about a camp in Kolpashevo along the Ob River, where a mass grave had recently been disinterred by the flooding river, sending bodies, semi-preserved by the permafrost, floating downstream.
Such stories remind me that similar prison camps in China still stretch across the country and are still filled with prisoners. Just like those bodies on the Ob River that are now reappearing, the ghosts of China’s reform-through-labor system will someday also resurface and demand atonement. Many Chinese people are tempted to believe that the psychological impact will remain limited to those unfortunate enough to be interned, and they are reluctant even to talk about them. But it would surprise me if the malignant consequences of the CCP’s camps remained so discrete. After all, tens of millions of victims and their families and friends were affected.
April 13, 1991
Back in San Francisco, a colleague at Stanford University calls. I tell him about the 60 Minutes challenge, and he immediately mentions a man named Harry Wu, who is researching China’s prison labor system at the Hoover Institution there. As we’re talking, I recall that I’d actually heard Wu speak at Columbia University about his experience in Chinese camps some months ago.
Wu is from a Christian banking family in Shanghai, and was arrested as a “counter-revolutionary rightist” (反革命右派) in 1960 and not released until 1979. Then, after waiting four years for a Chinese passport, in 1985 he managed to get to the U.S. at the invitation of UC Berkeley’s geology department. Subsequently, he became a resident scholar at the Hoover Institution, where he’s been compiling documentary evidence on China’s reform-through-labor, or laogai, system.
I find Wu’s phone number and call him. He remembers meeting me. When I ask if he still knows people inside China and the camps who might be able to help do a story, he demurs so completely that I feel foolish having even posed the question.
“It’s not that simple,” he finally replies, almost dismissively. “After being in the camps for so long, I, of course, have my networks, but these are friends and we trust each other because of what we all went through together. But they’re very personal contacts and not transferable to anyone who wasn’t inside, so they’d be no use to you.”
The finality with which he says these things doesn’t leave much room for continuing the conversation. Nevertheless, I ask him if he would meet me at the San Francisco airport the next day, before I leave for New York.
April 15, 1991
Harry Wu arrives at the terminal just as I’m checking in. He’s a handsome man of medium height in his 50s whose bespectacled eyes radiate both intensity and sadness. When we sit down for a cup of coffee, he tells me that he’s working at Hoover to create a Chinese language archive on the history of the reform-through-labor system in China.
“I hope it will give people in the outside world some idea of its scope and scale,” he tells me.
When I again raise the question of his contacts in China, he’s no more forthcoming. And when I ask about the possibility of finding a Chinese person who knows something about the labor camp system and might help us work with a hidden video camera to document it, at first he doesn’t respond. Then, he stuns me by quite matter-of-factly saying,
“You know, the one who should go back in is me.”
“You’d go back with a camera?” I ask.
“I could,” he smiles.
“But, such a caper might land you right back in the camps!” I respond, certain he’s joking.
“Of course, but don’t forget, I know that world better than anyone, and I’d understand how to read almost any situation.”
You know, the one who should go back in is me.
Harry Wu, April 15, 1991.
April 20, 1991
Gelber is ecstatic about the prospect. I’m now having daily talks with Wu and each time, after some initial expression of hesitation, he quickly becomes a fountainhead of observations, information, and schemes.
“Everyone knows about Nazi concentration camps and Stalin’s gulag,” he tells me. “However, few outside of China know anything about the CCP’s system of prisons and forced labor that have swallowed up millions like me.”
The more we talk, the more obvious it becomes that he’s drawn to the subject like a moth to flame. In each talk I’ve learned more about Wu’s life, including how his stepmother committed suicide after he was arrested and how, while he was imprisoned, several of his siblings were manipulated by the Party into attacking their father, a banker.
And rather than being daunted by undertaking the kind of project Gelber has dared imagine, Wu seems energized by it, as if it was his own unfinished business.
I, however, am still painfully aware of the challenges and risks. Wu not only has a reputation here in the U.S. as an outspoken critic of China’s prison system, he also does not yet have a U.S. passport, only a “green card.” If he’s picked up by authorities in China, the U.S. government would have no legal right to intercede on his behalf.
April 26, 1991
Today, Wu tells me that he’s made out a will, just in case anything happens to him while he’s in China. I’m caught off guard and suggest that before he leaves, maybe we should also do an on-camera interview with him and let him explain why he’s decided to go back to his old prison camps. That way, if he should be detained, we’ll at least have a video testament to use in his defense.
April 27, 1991
This afternoon, we take a CBS camera crew out to an old gun emplacement in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge on the Marin County side to let Wu talk.
“Even though I wanted to forget the suffering of the past after arriving in the United States and had wanted to heal the wounds in my heart, the 19 years of sorrow would not stop returning to my mind,” he explains as the camera whirrs. “I could not forget what I’d experienced or those who still suffer inside the camps. If I didn’t undertake this task, who would?”
When he finishes, he hands me an essay he’s just written explaining in greater detail why he’s agreed to attempt this risky return home. He calls it his “last will and testament.”1In 1995, The New Yorker published Wu’s essay.
May 5, 1991
Wu calls me with some surprising news.
“When I go back to China, I’m going to go together with my new wife, Chen Ching-li,” he blurts out.
“But why?” I ask, incredulous that he’d even think about taking his new Taiwan bride with him! A second honeymoon to the Chinese gulag?
“Last night she told me that if this project is something I feel I must do, she’ll not only understand, but since we are now man and wife, she’ll go with me.”
“Won’t that make it doubly risky for you?” I protest.
“No, quite to the contrary,” he explains. “If we go together, we’ll just look like an ordinary couple from Taiwan touring China. And, by doing everything legally, if anything happens, I can always insist that I wasn’t breaking any laws, that I was just showing my new wife my old life.”
“But…” I begin.
“So, I don’t want to use any fake papers, false names, or tell any lies,” he cuts me off. “We’ll go as ordinary tourists who can even openly book hotels and plane reservations through travel agents. This way I don’t think Chinese officials will suspect anything.”
In a blink of an eye, Wu has transformed what had been a covert operation into an open trip. It’s a masterful plan.
A MARKED MAN
May 20, 1991
We now have an itinerary. If he can get a visa in Hong Kong, Wu will visit several of the camps in which he’d once been imprisoned between 1960 and 1979, including the sprawling Qinghe Farm (also known as Beijing No. 1 General Reform-Through-Labor Detachment) near the northern coastal city of Tianjin. Wu was imprisoned there twice, once during the post-Great Leap Forward famine during the early 1960s (when his body weight fell to 72 pounds) and again in 1967, during the peak of the Cultural Revolution.
In the manuscript of the book he’s been working on, the sections describing his time in Qinghe stand out. During the so-called “three difficult years” (1959–1962), when famine killed upwards of 40 million people in the wake of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, Wu writes that the prisoners in Qinghe “no longer looked human, but like some other kind of creature, or ghosts… Their eyes were sunken deep, no longer appearing Asian, without brightness, like eyes on stone statues, apparently not focusing or noticing anything… No thinking, no expression.”
Wu describes how, as the famine deepened, “even the breathing of the living prisoners was so weak that it made almost no noise. By only one sign did we know that a fellow prisoner had died: when he failed to sit up at mealtime.” Bodies were then taken away on mats. “The duty prisoners would lay the mat out, place the body on it, and roll it up like an egg roll, folding the ends,” he writes. Then, “they’d tie a small rope around it and carry it out to the storage room.”
After visiting Qinghe, Wu wants to try to get into Tuanhe Farm (Beijing No. 1 Reform Thru Labor Detachment) outside of Beijing where he was thrown into solitary confinement and tortured.
When we talk today, he admits that trying to penetrate these camps will be dangerous, because it’s impossible to know what to expect.
“But, the fact that I’m the first will also be an asset,” he insists. “The guards don’t expect such audacity and thus won’t be on the lookout for intruders like me.”
And Wu not only has knowledge of each camp’s geography, but a few old friends are still there as “forced job placement personnel.” He thinks they will help him gain entrance so he can shoot some video inside with a hidden camera peeking out of a hole in a shoulder bag.
I’ll be in Beijing, acting as support for Wu and picking up his shot video cassettes to get them safely out of the country and back to Gelber in New York.
June 4, 1991
My wife, Baifang, is already in Beijing, but I’ve scheduled my own arrival so that I’ll just miss the tense second anniversary of the 1989 June 4th Massacre. Nonetheless, as I head to the airport today, things are still locked down tightly in China. As of last night, all outgoing satellite transmissions by foreign news agencies were halted. And in Beijing’s tourist hotels, authorities are censoring incoming CNN and BBC broadcasts, causing screens to go suddenly black when news items critical of China come on.
My plan after arriving is to give a talk to the Beijing Foreign Correspondents Club (BFCC) to connect up with the press corps, in case something happens and we later need them. Then, I want to lay low and enjoy a few quiet days with my wife before Wu arrives.
June 6, 1991
In my hotel, I’m awakened by a call from Jan Wong, the Toronto Globe and Mail’s Beijing correspondent and outgoing president of BFCC. Without any pleasantries, she announces, “I need to meet with you.”
“Is everything alright?” I ask.
“Let’s just talk at lunch,” she responds.
When I arrive at the designated restaurant, she’s waiting with James McGregor, the Wall Street Journal’s Beijing bureau chief and her successor as president of the BFCC. From the somber looks on their faces, I know something’s wrong.
“Yesterday the manager at the Sheraton Great Wall Hotel, where we scheduled your speech tomorrow, called to say that Public Security Bureau police had appeared and ordered the hotel to cancel the event,” Wong starts. “They…”
“What’s the reason?” I interrupt, fearful that Chinese authorities have also learned about our 60 Minutes project.
“Apparently they didn’t like the title of your talk: ‘The Silence of Chinese Intellectuals,’ or the fact that you’re on the board of Human Rights Watch.”
“I don’t think anything like this has ever happened before, at least not during my years here,” says McGregor. McGregor is referring to the unprecedented nature of having a private event, organized exclusively for foreigners in a rented hotel room, officially cancelled.
I’m deeply alarmed but cannot, of course, tell them about the 60 Minutes project. However, the realization that the Chinese government is sufficiently upset by my talk to take such a precipitous action fills me with regret for ever having agreed to give it in the first place. Now, to my great consternation, I find myself under government scrutiny at precisely the time when I most need to be unnoticed.
Still, as I head back to our hotel, I cannot help thinking how self-defeating such actions are for China because they alienate the very people -– in this case, foreign journalists -– that they spend fortunes trying to win over with propaganda. Such behavior recalls the Chinese expression, “To pick up a stone only to drop it on one’s own foot.” By closing down this BFCC meeting, the CCP has created yet another international incident, whose effect will only be multiplied by the global media.
Such responses are fed by an aquifer of insecurity and inferiority that has long been pooling up beneath the surface of things. And the result is ever more pernicious cycles of perceived insults, defensiveness, counter-reactions, nationalism, and then more foreign condemnation that leads to an even deeper sense of Chinese grievance. And, the more China feels scorned by the outside world, the more prideful, defensive, stubborn and patriotic it becomes.
As Lu Xun, China’s greatest modern writer, wryly put it: “Whether we are massacred by our own people, or by foreigners does not amount to the same thing. For instance, if a man slaps himself, he will not feel insulted, whereas if someone else slaps him, he will feel angry. However, when a man is so far gone that he slaps himself, he fully deserves to be slapped by anyone else who passes by.”
The more China feels scorned by the outside world, the more prideful, defensive, stubborn and patriotic it becomes.
Schell, writing on June 6, 1991.
June 7, 1991
Although I’ve decided not to warn Wu against coming to Beijing from Hong Kong, I’m worried. Furthermore, because I’ll now most certainly be under surveillance, it will be doubly risky for me to do anything like transport video tapes out of the country for him. I’m now also compromised in ways that would make it difficult for me to help him, should anything happen.
Making matters worse, as I pass the hotel newsstand, I notice that the International Herald Tribune has published a front-page article about my ill-fated BFCC talk entitled, “China Bars US Scholar’s Lecture.”
What is more, I must now be careful about seeing my own Chinese friends and acquaintances. Of course, when they learn what has happened, many will withdraw. Although this is to be expected, it’s nonetheless a demoralizing, sad fact of Chinese life. When someone gets into political trouble here, colleagues, friends and associates avoid them out of fear that even peripheral involvement will infect them, too, with political contagion.
I recall that when Wu was arrested during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, he was never told exactly what his crimes were. In fact, to this day he’s not sure why he was imprisoned for 19 years. Such vague accusations create an atmosphere of uncertainty and suspicion that is far more effective in making a person feel culpable than a specific charge. Why? Because a specific charge can be rebutted, whereas an accusation without a specific charge invites one to accuse oneself of manifold other things of which the indicting authority may not even be aware. After all, if there is a punishment, should there not also logically have been a crime?
In China, however, it is not a crime that presupposes a punishment as much as a punishment that presupposes a crime. The Party hopes victims of political accusation will find criminality enough in their own hearts and then form an indictment of themselves that will be far more damning and crippling than one ever conjured up by the authorities.
June 10, 1991
When Baifang and I arrive back at the hotel this morning, a front desk clerk passes me a folded, hand-written note: “Contact Director Men Bo at the Beijing Public Security Bureau’s department of foreign affairs on Beichizi at 2:30 pm.”
My heart sinks.
All too soon, we’re standing in front of the compound that houses the foreign affairs department of the local public security bureau branch office, part of the vast Ministry of Public Security, the police network whose primary responsibility is to maintain internal social order across the country. We wait while the gatekeeper announces us to the “great within (大内),” as the Forbidden City was known during imperial times.
Finally two crisply uniformed police officers appear. “You are to be questioned in different rooms,” one of them announces in wooden English.
“I’m very sorry,” I respond as calmly as I can, “but I will not be separated from my wife.”
After some back-and-forth, we’re brought into a meeting room filled with elephantine, stuffed chairs. Baifang and I are motioned to sit together on a couch, while several other police officers sit against the walls facing us. Then, like a judge, Men Bo takes a throne-like chair behind a table facing us, with a woman taking notes beside him.
After taking our passports, our ostensible infraction surfaces: I arrived in China on June 5th and joined Baifang at the hotel, where she had already registered. But I myself did not register at the hotel and failed to do so until three days later, after being summoned by the manager.
“Did you, or did you not, violate the regulations of the People’s Republic of China by entering one of our hotels without registering?” Men asks.
“I admit to registering several days after arriving, because I assumed — until the hotel told me otherwise — that my wife’s registration was sufficient for a married couple sharing a room,” I offer.
“So, you admit you’re in error,” rejoins Men, displeased with the caveats in my confession.
“That’s for you to determine,” I reply.
“You realize this is a very serious matter,” he counters. “You’ve violated Chinese law. To require guests to register at a hotel is an internationally recognized sovereign right.” As he says this, he pulls out a pamphlet entitled, “The Laws of the People’s Republic of China On Entry and Exit of Aliens.” Then, he opens it and begins reading as if from scripture.
“I admit to registering a few days after I arrived in Beijing,” I interrupt. “But, what is the real reason you’ve ordered us here?”
…[H]e pulls out a pamphlet entitled, ‘The Laws of the People’s Republic of China On Entry and Exit of Aliens.’ Then, he opens it and begins reading as if from scripture.
We go back-and-forth like this for more than two exhausting hours. At one point, the junior officer with our passports floats the idea that we’ve doctored our visas. Then, I have to physically stop them from leaving the room with our passports.
How quickly such experiences enervate and undermine one’s sense of innocence and powers of resistance! Maybe that’s the main function of an interrogation: just wear the victim out.
I can tell that Baifang is getting exhausted, and all I want is to get us out of here. So, I agree to sign an “abbreviated transcript” that I cannot read because it’s written in very cursive Chinese. At the bottom of the last page, I write: “This is only a rough precis of our PSB interrogation on June 10, 1991.”
After we’ve each signed our names, we’re permitted to leave.
June 11, 1991
At 6 am, I’m up, dressed, and down in the hotel lobby for breakfast. I’m distracted, however, by yesterday’s People’s Daily hanging on a rack outside the restaurant that carries an article entitled, “The Tree Wishes To Remain Calm, But the Wind Will Not Allow It.” The column attacks the overseas press corps for the way they’ve been covering the June 4th anniversary. And it describes foreign journalists as a “hostile foreign force” that “harbors hatred” for China and is just “waiting for some kind of sensational major news” in order to “change the choice and the will of the Chinese people” who are set on “walking the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics (中国社会主义的特色).”
Having effectively stifled their own domestic press, CCP leaders find it intolerable that foreign journalists not only continue to criticize their one-party rule and point out China’s endless human rights abuses, but do so right on Chinese soil.
June 12, 1991
Now that I’ve been marked, the Public Security Bureau seems to be everywhere. I see tails assigned to follow us in our hotel lobby. They trail our cab. And they even follow Baifang and me into a second-hand shop that sells books and stone-rubbings — until I approach one and start asking him which history books most interest him.
I’m wondering if it would not now be best just to detach myself from the 60 Minutes project, so as not to jeopardize it or Wu? However, I can think of no way of doing so that Wu would not view as a betrayal.
June 13, 1991
Wu has arrived. After going to the Qinghe reform-through-labor camp, he’ll then try to penetrate Tuanhe Farm, an agricultural labor camp on the outskirts of Beijing where he spent four years laboring in vegetable fields and a brick kiln.
June 15, 1991
Once I pick up the tapes from him, I’ll get them to my friend James Husky, a U.S. diplomat, who has offered (without my even asking!) use of the embassy’s diplomatic pouch to send items out of China. But since I don’t dare get in direct touch, I ask a friend to contact Wu’s wife and ask him to meet me at the United Airlines office, an ideal place to get together, because it’s a public space to which we both have cause to visit.
With its poster of the Statue of Liberty on the wall, the airline office is strangely reassuring. What is more, it’s located on the second floor of a new high-rise building, so it’s not visible from the street. And being neither a Chinese nor a joint-venture company, no security officials are watching the door.
Except for the woman at the ticket counter primping her hair, the office is empty when I get there. When Wu arrives, he gives a subtle nod and sits down on the couch beside me where I’ve placed a large envelope filled with fresh video cassettes and some cash. Then, I open my briefcase as unobtrusively as I can and set it down between us. Without any prompt, Wu drops a large envelope inside and takes the envelope I’ve prepared for him.
“Tape,” is all he says without looking at me.
“How are you?” I whisper.
“We’ve had some trouble,” he whispers through clenched jaws. “We were stopped by guards at Tuanhe and had to throw one camera away.”
“Still have the other?”
“Yes.”
“You OK?”
“Yes, but it was close. Leaving today for Taiyuan on the train.”
“I leave for the U.S. in two days. The PSB is all over me, but don’t think they’ve made a connection between us.” Wu nods, but some concern registers on his face. “When you think you’ve shot enough, just get out,” I urge. “Don’t take any more risks than necessary. OK?”
“OK,” he says almost inaudibly.
‘IMPORTANT NEW CONTACTS’
June 23, 1991
Today Wu arrives back in San Francisco.
His safe return and the recognition that we’ve pulled off this whole caper without a major hitch floods us both with a sense of relief and triumph.
June 24, 1991
Gelber and his associate producer, Doug Hamilton, have just arrived in California and they are extremely eager to see the video. They are staying at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley. By the time we all assemble and arrange ourselves around a TV monitor in Gelber’s suite, everyone’s on the edge of their chairs.
Leading up to this, Wu has told me that posing as a businessman in Shanghai he’d gained unexpected access to a prison where factory managers were eager to do business. He even negotiated a contract with one of them to sell and ship wrenches to the United States and I can’t wait to see the video.
But, as we start playing the cassettes, the screen fills with one disjointed scene after another of jerking camera shots showing dusty, gray streets, endless flat fields and nondescript brick buildings.
“Because there were guards everywhere, we had to be so careful shooting,” says Wu, a hint of defensiveness in his voice.
We go through more tapes. More fields. Another brick building. Some enigmatic gate placards. Another field. Another section of wall. A stretch of road. I feel a sinking feeling and glance over at Gelber. He’s started tugging at his hair, a nervous thing he does when he’s unsettled.
Unfortunately, even in the video of the contract negotiation in the Shanghai prison, half the camera frame remains obscured so that all we can see is the tantalizing lower half of the bodies of the talking prison officials. We’re all straining forward, as if trying to peer into a room through a tiny crack, hoping that somehow the camera will magically pan up.
Although the images of the prison office are frustratingly incomplete, the discussion that Wu has managed to record is fascinating. Speaking with the manager and assistant manager of the prison factory, he’s succeeded in getting them to explain how they illegally export prison-made tools to the U.S. without getting caught.
“Our annual export quantity is about 1.2 to 1.5 million pieces,” says the Manager proudly.
“And how do you get your tools into the American market?” inquires Wu.
“Well, our products are never exported directly,” he replies. “We always go through an import-export company under the aegis of our Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade.”
“But, as far as I know the U.S. has a trade law against importation of products made by prison labor,” counters Wu.
“You see, we export indirectly!” explains the manager again.
“Then, I guess that’s OK,” laughs Wu, seeming to be convinced.
As we listen to this incriminating reparti, it’s tragic to realize that Wu has failed to get usable video images along with the damning audio. From any journalistic perspective other than TV, he’s accomplished an unimaginable reportorial feat. But, Gelber and Hamilton are looking at the screen like anglers dreaming of an enormous fish that has just managed to shake the hook and get away.
Without a single ten-second segment of commercially broadcast-able video in all these tapes, we are all downcast. Wu feels the sense of failure and gloom settle over the room. Wu sits silently, his face ashen.
June 25, 1991
Baifang and I invite Gelber, Wu, and Hamilton out to our ranch in West Marin County for a final farewell dinner. As we look out over the Pacific Ocean towards China and eat, it’s a beautiful summer evening. But a wistful sense of failure hangs over the table. We’re halfway through our dinner when a long awkward pause falls over our conversation. Then, Wu pipes up.
“OK,” he announces peremptorily, “I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to go back.”
“You’re what?” Gelber asks, looking straight at Wu with astonishment.
“I want to go back to China, especially to Shanghai and meet those managers at the Laodong Steel Pipe Factory, where we screwed up the video. I know that those guys will let me back in, because they want to sell stuff so badly.”
I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to go back.
Harry Wu, June 23, 1991
A stunned silence grips the table.
“Harry, I don’t understand why you’d ever be willing to do this?” says a skeptical Gelber.
“For them,” replies Wu. “For all the prisoners who’ve been put in those camps and are still there. I want to tell the whole world about them. This is my best chance. Let’s look at the trip I just made as a practice run. This time, I’ll be less nervous, more confident, better able to understand the current circumstances. And, of course, I’ll have learned how to shoot better video.” He smiles. His mind is made-up.
“We could give you some real lessons on using the camera,” Gelber says tentatively.
“Why not?” Wu responds with some of his former elan.
“If you returned, do you think it would be possible for Ed Bradley and a crew to meet up with you and shoot a few scenes of you in country?” Gelber asks with new hopefulness.
“No problem… If you can get visas,” Wu shoots back.
“Would there be any way for Bradley to get onto Qinghe or Tuanhe farms and shoot a few moments with you reminiscing about being imprisoned there?” The questions are tumbling out of Gelber now, each more far-fetched in my view than the last.
“All possible,” nods Wu, sensing that the hounds are back on the scent.
“Let me ask you something that may just be ridiculous,” continues Gelber, looking right at Wu now. “Is there any chance we could get Bradley into a meeting with some prison factory managers? You know, maybe he could pose as the president of your U.S. trading company who wants to order goods in China?”
“Sure” replies Wu as if he’d been waiting for this question to be posed.
“God damn it!” exclaims Gelber. “This could be great!”
June 27, 1991
Wu is now so completely possessed with the idea of going back to China, it’s difficult not to be drawn into his wake of enthusiasm. Despite everything, he keeps hoping he can have an impact. I keep wondering if it has something to do with the fact that he’s a Christian. As Lu Xun wrote a century ago, “Hope can neither be said to exist nor not exist. It’s like the roadways that now cross our earth. Originally they were not even paths. It was only after many passed by that these pathways became actual roads.”
July 1, 1991
“I’ve made some important new contacts,” Wu announces when he calls this morning. He’s been faxing product inquiries to prison factories all over China.
“What kind of contacts?”
“In Qinghai,” he announces proudly. “And I’ve decided to go to Qinghai.”
“Qinghai?” I respond, never expecting he’d consider going all the way out to this remote Western province.
“Yes,” he replies. “In fact, I just got a response from a prison factory in Xining, the capital, that tans yak and sheep hides. I pretended I’m an overseas Chinese businessman, and I told him I wanted to visit their factory and import some leather into the U.S.”
This unexpected news fills me with the same electric buzz of fearfulness that kept my nerves jangling throughout his first trip. To go all the way out to desolate Qinghai — next to China’s most westward province, Xinjiang — sounds almost suicidal. Qinghai is a vast border region where the Tibetan Plateau and the Taklamakan Desert merge with the barren grasslands of Kansu, Mongolia’s Gobi desert, and the deserts of Xinjiang.
I’d been there myself in 1981 on a mountaineering and trekking expedition and the starkness of its treeless mountains and the barrenness of its grasslands mark it as a place of almost fathomless isolation. It was these qualities that made Qinghai the perfect place for prison camps. For even if an inmate did manage to escape from the confines of a prison compound, it was all but impossible to escape from the surrounding wilderness. As a result, Qinghai, like Xinjiang, became a favored place to send ideological criminals with long sentences, and Qinghai became known as “China’s Siberia.” Indeed, whenever the province’s name is mentioned, Chinese often still reflexively lower their voices and begin casting furtive glances around.
…[E]ven if an inmate did manage to escape from the confines of a prison compound, it was all but impossible to escape from the surrounding wilderness. As a result, Qinghai, like Xinjiang, became a favored place to send ideological criminals with long sentences.
“If you get in trouble, Qinghai’s not a place where it’ll be easy to drop out of sight,” I protest.
“Of course it’s dangerous,” he counters. “But then, anything I do in China will be dangerous!”
There’s no dissuading him.
July 9, 1991
Wu has also received an eager reply from the factory managers he spoke to before, at the Shanghai Laodong Steel Pipe Plant.
He faxes the response to me and I notice two things immediately: First, the initial lines are in bowdlerized English, suggesting the two managers are at least accustomed to doing some business abroad; and second, in one line, the manager says he’s willing “to discuss specific details face to face.”
“If they’re willing to meet with Wu,” I find myself beginning to wonder, “Would they not also be willing to meet his boss?”
Suddenly I dare imagine Gelber’s dream coming true: of secretly filming Chinese prison officials clinching a deal for prison-made goods destined for the U.S. market with 60 Minutes anchorman, Ed Bradley, masquerading as a U.S. businessman.
July 22, 1991
Wu and I agree to meet one last time before he takes off for Hong Kong. If he gets a visa in the colony, he’ll have two weeks in China to prepare the way for Bradley, Gelber, myself, and the crew — assuming all of us can also get our own visas.
As soon as he arrives at my house today, Wu says, “There’s something I want you to keep for me.” Opening the trunk of his car, he hands me a cardboard box: “This contains all the materials I gathered on my last trip.” Then, he hands me a manila envelope inscribed in English and Chinese: “Don’t open unless I’ve not returned by September 1st 1991.” I don’t ask him what it is.
August 2, 1991
Gelber phones tonight. The CBS crew’s visas have been approved, but mine was rejected.
“They gave no reason,” Gelber tells me glumly. “All the consular official said was that ‘you should not expect to go back to China now or anytime in the near future.’ ”
Since the beginning of my association with China I’ve always tried not to let fears of being denied access influence what I’ve said or written. However, it’s impossible to ignore the stark reality that the Chinese government holds a critical life and death sword over the head of each foreign journalist and scholar. If they deem someone too critical, they have the punitive power to refuse a visa application or to expel that person as “unfriendly” (不友好) once there. Not only does such retribution physically cut that person off from their subject, but it casts them into a netherworld of stigmatization. In effect, one becomes as politically untouchable as all those tens of millions during Mao’s revolution who were labeled “anti-Party elements,” “counter-revolutionaries,” “rightists,” “capitalist roaders,” “revisionists,” “bad elements,” “enemies of the people,” etc., and left indelibly marked as outcasts.
China has become such an elemental part of my personal and professional life as a writer, that if I become banned, I might have to change professions. After having had such a close personal and professional association with this country for so many decades as well as being married to a Chinese wife, the prospect of an impenetrable wall going up is a particularly sinister form of excommunication.
“So, what should we do? I don’t think we can pull this off without you, Orv,” says Gelber. “I’ve never even been to China.”
“You just go ahead,” I reply numbly. “Wu is already there and waiting. You can’t turn back now.”
“OK, but I want you to at least come with us to Hong Kong,” he insists.
‘BUSINESS IS BUSINESS’
August 7, 1991
I’ve arrived in Hong Kong, this vestigial colonial enclave still clinging to the south China coast like a tiny barnacle on the hull of a large ship. In six years it will be absorbed into the People’s Republic of China, depriving the outside world of the porthole through which it has been able to look into China since 1841 without being trapped in its powerful gravitational field.
Gelber and cameraman Norman Lloyd are already ensconced at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel when I arrive. At dinner, Lloyd shows us one of his new “lipstick camera lens” for secretly filming in Shanghai, if our meeting with prison officials comes through. This optical device is capable of shooting wide angle shots through a slender, elongated lenses and Lloyd has rigged two of our cameras with them and hid them inside special briefcases.
August 10, 1991
After a failed attempt at getting a visa in the Portuguese colony of Macau, I miraculously succeed through a friend’s travel bureau right here in Hong Kong. And so, at 4 am, just as dawn is breaking, I pack, check out, take the Star Ferry across Hong Kong Harbor and head for the train station where I buy a ticket on the Kowloon-Canton Railway to Lo Wu. It is the same line I’d taken on my first trip to China in 1975 when Mao still lived and the Cultural Revolution had not yet ended. Since then, I’ve always travelled to China by plane, but never with the same trepidations about being questioned, stopped, detained or expelled as I have now. I feel I’m returning not to the China I’ve come to know, but to a China now irradiated with threat and tension.
By evening, I arrive at Shanghai’s Portman Hotel, a 40-story colossus featuring fountains flowing down one side of an exterior glass wall and a lobby accessorized with a giant gold nugget sculpture, an apt symbol of China’s new fixation with wealth. The hotel’s impressive decor, the managers’ formal morning coats, and the soft classical music make it hard to believe that there are still such things nearby as Public Security Bureaus, reform-through-labor camps, police-state surveillance, and arbitrary detentions, just outside the door.
I find Gelber’s room. He tells me that Wu has also arrived. I take the elevator up to the 38th floor and am relieved to find the floor attendant desk unmanned. When I knock on Wu’s door, I see a fleeting shadow move behind the peep hole. The lock turns. The door opens. For a moment Wu just stares. Then a huge smile breaks on his face.
“他妈的! Son of a bitch!” he whispers in Chinese. “You got here!” We give each other a fraternal hug. Then he hustles me inside, locks the door, turns on the TV to muffle our conversation while he updates me on everything: the close call he had when stopped in Canton by customs officials; the interviews he managed to get with ex-prisoners on camera; and the managers at the Lanzhou No.2 Reform-Through-Labor Detachment in Gansu Province who are eager to make a deal and dream of breaking into the export market.
“Then, from Lanzhou I took the train to Xining in Qinghai Province,” he continues with an almost childlike excitement. “You wouldn’t believe how many camps I got into there. Xining, the provincial capital, has a street, Nanshan Road (南山路), that must be four miles long and has one prison factory outlet after another along it. And many have agents in Hong Kong. And, do you know how big the Tanggemu camp is?” he asks, shaking his head as if overwhelmed by the mere thought of its size. “It’s 80 kilometers across and has more than 20 detachments with thousands of prisoners.”
As Wu recounts his exploits, I’ve become aware of a rancid, decaying smell that’s out of place in this modern hotel room. As I glance behind him, I spot the skull of a gazelle and several animal hides in the corner.
“Oh yeah!” exclaims Wu, following my gaze. “I got those at the Qinghai No. 2 Reform-Through-Labor Detachment in Xining. They tan sheep and yak hides.”
He hands me a sheep skin to examine as if he’s a leather merchant proffering sample wares to a customer. “I saw scores of prisoners with shaven heads wading around in huge vats of toxic tanning chemicals there. I signed a contract for 200,000 square feet of lamb skin, and the manager wants me to invest half a million U.S. in his factory!”
Wu throws up his hands in amazement. Rarely have I seen him so jubilant. At last, he’s managed to reverse fortunes on his former captors.
August 11, 1991
Bradley has arrived in Shanghai.
Tomorrow morning, when we meet the Shanghai Laodong Steel Pipe Factory officials who’ve been selling their tools to the U.S. for some time, Lloyd will use our two briefcase cameras tricked out with his new lipstick lenses. Wu and Bradley will both be wired with hidden cordless mikes. Wu will await the prison officials in the lobby and then usher them upstairs to the special suite where Lloyd, posing as Bradley’s business assistant, will be waiting to ply the group with snacks and drinks. After clarifying the terms of a deal for a tool shipment, he’ll call Bradley in to meet their new partners.
Bradley will acknowledge that he’s aware of the “special nature” of the Shanghai plant, but will express a willingness to do business anyway, if the prison factory can guarantee that once the tool order is placed there will be no problems exporting the goods to the United States. He’ll also ask for details about the process of laundering the transaction through a state-run Chinese export-import company to hide the origin of the goods. Finally, Bradley will insist that he’ll only sign a contract if his assistants, Wu and Lloyd, are allowed to visit the factory’s production-line to satisfy their concerns about quality control.
When the negotiations are over, everyone (except me) will race for the airport to catch a 6 pm flight to Tianjin, where Wu, Bradley, Gelber and the crew will rent a van and to try and get into the Qinghe Farm. My responsibility will be to drop the tapes off with our “pigeon” who will fly them to Hong Kong, where I’ll pick them up again.
Bradley listens patiently and asks a few questions. While his equanimity is reassuring, his apparent obliviousness of the sensitivity of the situation is not. What seems foremost in his mind is not tomorrow’s sting, but getting to the hotel’s well-equipped gym to work out on a Stairmaster.
August 13, 1991
I’m up at dawn, all too aware that today will be the most important single day of our project.
I find Wu pacing his room in a natty, double-breasted pin-striped suit that makes him look like someone who’s just walked out of Shanghai’s French Concession circa 1930. When it’s time for him to squire the prison officials up to our special suite I wish him luck.
As Gelber and I sit and wait, we feel as if we’re in a hospital awaiting word from the operating room on a complex surgery.
At 11:30 am the phone rings.
“I’m out,” says Bradley with no suggestion of emotion.
“How did it go?” I blurt out.
“Everything went fine, just fine,” he says, his calmness now wonderfully reassuring. “Wu’s downstairs at lunch with the prison officials.”
Moments later there’s another knock. It’s Norman Lloyd with the briefcase cameras. He immediately scrambles to start copying the tapes for our Hong Kong-bound pigeon. Since it would take several hours to copy everything from all three cameras, he’s frantically searching for just those important sequences that Gelber most wants to protect, in case anything happens to the masters.
My flight to Hong Kong is fast approaching and the minutes go by like hours. At last, Lloyd finishes his exacting task. I stuff the cassettes into an envelope, dash out the door, and grab a taxi, a tiny Romanian-made Dachia. When it finally pulls up at our pigeon’s hotel, I sprint into the lobby and, like a relay racer handing off a baton, give her the envelope, tell her to call me in Hong Kong when she gets in, and then run to catch my own flight.
August 19, 1991
After somehow managing to get onto the vast Qinghe Farm outside of Tianjin in a rented van, and then do some interviews with officials, everyone arrives back safely and triumphantly in Hong Kong.
But, Wu’s not done yet. Almost immediately he manages to entreat two unknowing agents from the Winmate Trading Co., who represent the Qinghai prison that processes leather goods, to come to our hotel to discuss a deal.
When the two agents, a man and a woman, arrive at the Mandarin Oriental, Wu squires them authoritatively upstairs to a suite where our hidden cameras are once again set up. The highlight of the encounter comes when Ned Hall, our soundman, who is this time playing the role of Wu’s trading company boss, asks the two agents: “Are the laborers themselves prisoners?”
“Yes,” replies the man matter-of-factly.
“Have you had experience with this kind of labor in the past, and have you found it to be dependable?” he presses.
“Yes,” affirms the woman emphatically. “They have their own regulations, and also we send our people to keep checking the quality. Once we report to them that the quality is not up to standard, the prisoners will have punishment of beatings, or some other things.”
September 15, 1991
This evening our program, now entitled “Made in China,” finally airs over the CBS network.
The two lip-stick cameras hidden in the briefcases show the two Hong Kong agents casually mentioning beatings in the Qinghai leather goods factory as well as the prison officials in Shanghai brimming with eagerness to sell their wrenches to Ed Bradley, who looks the perfect representation of a model U.S. corporate CEO.
And, there’s Wu visiting the Xining prison factory’s leather showroom, that proudly displays a banner from the Ministry of Justice commending the prison as “An Advance Unit For Repressing Rebellion and Cleansing Chaos,” an award it had won for helping to suppress the “l989 turmoil.” And alongside this banner is a framed certificate from the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade (MOFERT) explicitly granting the prison factory export rights beginning in l988.
But perhaps the most damning sequence is Bradley’s sit-down interview in Beijing with Vice-minister Tong Zhiguang from the Ministry of Foreign Relations and Trade. Soon, he will head a trade delegation to the U.S. to iron out controversies that have been bedeviling Sino-U.S. relations, such as pirated intellectual property, unfair trading barriers, and exports made with forced labor.
After declaring he has hard documentary evidence of Chinese prison enterprises surreptitiously and illegally exporting goods to the U.S., Bradley asks Tong if he thinks this is possible.
“As a matter of policy, the Chinese government never allows the export of what you call forced labor product,” replies Tong.
“Do you think that the government of China is capable of enforcing a policy of no forced labor exports?” presses Bradley.
“Absolutely,” replies Tong. Then, he pivots to object to the way the U.S. conditions “most favored nation” status on human rights concerns.
“So continuing China’s most favored nation trade status should have nothing to do with human rights in this country?” asks Bradley.
“No, not in my way of…” begins Tong.
“Should have nothing to do with forced labor in this country…” repeats Bradley.
“No.”
“It is only about business?”
“Business is business,” says Tong with deadpan finality.
PLUS ÇA CHANGE
After “Made in China” aired, I was prepared to publish my journal entries with The New Yorker until I realized that the consequences of putting out a piece on China that was so politically sensitive would be disastrous for my wife, my family, and myself. So, with enormous reluctance, I withdrew it, dropped the manuscript in a box and put it in on a closet shelf, where it sat in undisturbed repose like a Dead Sea Scroll for three decades.
Harry Wu was eventually drawn to new projects. In 1994 he began another risky venture with the BBC about the laogai camps in Xinjiang. While there, he began investigating the Chinese organ transplant business that was selling organs harvested from executed prisoners to wealthy recipients. The BBC documentary that followed made Wu even better known as a crusader against China’s penal system.
Then again drawn like a moth to flame, Wu decided to launch another investigation, this time into the shadowy Xinjiang Production and Construction Corp (新疆生产建设兵团), a quasi-military organization known as the bingtuan, which had for decades controlled large numbers of enterprises using prison labor in Xinjiang. On June 19, 1995, he set out for China yet again, entering Xinjiang from Kazakhstan. Unfortunately, this time he was stopped at the border.
After 66 days in detention and a show trial, he was found guilty of committing “grave offenses” (including spying and stealing state secrets) and was sentenced to 15 years. However, with his wife working the media back in the U.S. and even First Lady Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger weighing in on his behalf, he was also given a “supplementary penalty,” namely, “expulsion from China.” It was a clever ruse for Beijing both to be able to condemn him and get rid of him as an irritant to U.S.-China trade relations.
After Xi Jinping ascended his latter-day dragon throne in 2012, no one was quite sure what his reign would portend for such neo-Stalinist institutions as China’s laogai system and its other penal institutions. But they suddenly acquired new importance after two bloody Muslim terrorists attacks were launched in 2014, the first in Kunming that killed 31 people and the second, a series of assaults in Xinjiang, that killed many more.
With its “Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism” (严厉打击暴力恐怖活动专项行动) launched in response to the attacks, the Chinese government supercharged the preemptive controls against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang that already existed. As Human Rights Watch reported, up to a million people were arbitrarily detained in 300 to 400 facilities, which include “political education” camps, pretrial detention centers, reform-through-labor detachments, prisons and what the CCP calls “Vocational Skills Education Training Centers.” The report claimed that many in Xinjiang were being detained simply for “attending religious events and ceremonies; studying religion; having a household with a ‘dense religious atmosphere’; wearing a headscarf or having a wife who wore a headscarf; or having a beard.”
The object of this Draconian crackdown against Uyghurs, explained Maisumujiang Maimuer, a Chinese religious affairs official on a 2017 Xinhua Weibo page, was to “break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins,” and then to “completely shovel up the roots… of these two-faced people until the end.”
A UN human rights panel was soon accusing Beijing of turning Xinjiang “into something that resembled a massive internment camp shrouded in secrecy, a sort of no-rights zone.” Later, reports found the central government had even begun a mass transfer of Uyghurs from Xinjiang to work in factories elsewhere in the country, many of which happened to be in the supply chains of well-known global brands, such as Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen. The use of modern technology, such as facial recognition software, has ensured this sophisticated new system runs smoothly.
Before Harry Wu died in 2016, he wrote in one of his books that he believed the West’s strategy of “engagement” was doomed. “In my view the United States is still hoping that China’s hybrid form of capitalism will turn to democracy,” he wrote. “More likely it will lead to the creation of a new form of totalitarian, super-nationalistic military state.”
Now, as the 2022 Winter Olympics Games open in Beijing, despite Xi Jinping’s proclamation that the Games should project a “positive image of sunshine, prosperity, power and openness” (阳光富强开放的良好形象), the world finds itself facing a more bitter reality: that even after all the intervening years since our 60 Minutes story aired, China’s penal and forced labor systems has not only endured, but have evolved, modernized and expanded to produce more goods and products than ever for the global marketplace. And nowhere in China are these facilities now more concentrated than in Xinjiang, where Harry Wu was arrested on his last ill-fated trip to China.
Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York. He is a former professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. His debut novel, My Old Home: A Novel of Exile, was published in March 2021.
