Harry Wu, Who Told World of Abuses in China, Dies at 79
By SAM ROBERTS

Harry Wu, who was brutalized for 19 years in Communist Chinese prison labor camps and who had ever since then refused to let the world overlook human rights violations in his former homeland, died on Tuesday in Honduras, where he was vacationing. He was 79.

His death was confirmed by Ann Noonan, administrator of the Laogai Research Foundation in Washington, which Mr. Wu founded in 1992.

Mr. Wu, the son of a wealthy Roman Catholic family from Shanghai, was arrested in 1960 when he was 23 and just short of graduating from college. He was accused of criticizing the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of being insufficiently supportive of Mao Zedong’s regime.

He later wrote that he had not initially been told why he was imprisoned, but that eventually a guard “opened my file and said, ‘You are a counterrevolutionary rightist and you are sentenced to life.’”

Shuttling among farms, mines and prison camps, he said, he was beaten — his back and arms were broken in fights with his fellow prisoners — and placed in a coffinlike concrete case. He lost 75 pounds before he was released in 1979 when he was 42, three years after Mao’s death.

Mr. Wu moved to the United States in 1985, arriving with $40 to take an unpaid post as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and supporting himself by working nights at a doughnut shop.

He became an American citizen in 1994 and a tireless critic of the “reform through labor” system, known by the contraction laogai (rhymes with now-guy), which he refused to let the world disregard, even as Washington and other capitals sought commercial and political ties with China.

He compared laogai to the Soviet gulag and to Nazi concentration camps, and blamed the system for the deaths of millions of political prisoners and intellectuals. He even successfully campaigned to introduce the word laogai into the Oxford English Dictionary.

Mr. Wu returned to China undercover a number of times to expose prison conditions, including the sale of organs from executed inmates. In 1995, he was arrested and sentenced to 15 years for espionage. He was detained for 66 days but released by the Chinese after a campaign by human rights advocates that included pressure on Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, to boycott the World Conference on Women in Beijing that year.

After his detention, Mr. Wu was deported to the United States, where he lived in California and for a time was a research fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. He moved to Washington about 10 years ago. In 2008, he opened the Laogai Museum, to memorialize victims of the Communist regime.

Survivors include his former wife, Ching-Lee, and his son, Harrison Lee Wu, who live in Virginia.

“I’m happy to be a troublemaker for the Chinese Communist Party,” Mr. Wu wrote (with George Vecsey, a former New York Times reporter) in the book “Troublemaker: One Man’s Crusade Against China’s Cruelty” (1996), “because the Chinese Communist Party is a troublemaker to democracy and freedom.”

Hongda Harry Wu was born in Shanghai on Feb. 8, 1937. His father was a banker, and his mother also came from a prosperous family. (She committed suicide after her son’s arrest.) Mr. Wu attended Jesuit schools and enrolled in the Beijing Institute of Geology.

Once he left China, he became an advocate for labor rights and religious freedom, opposed the death penalty and China’s one-child policy, and supported the Dalai Lama, the campaign for a free Tibet and Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace laureate, who is serving a prison sentence in China for advocating political reforms.

In an interview in 1998, Mr. Wu acknowledged that he had risked his life by returning to China but insisted that while he wanted to live, he was also committed to fulfilling a mission.

“If God say to me, ‘Harry, I know you suffered, I wanted to give you a favor, what do you want?’ I want 20 years back,” he said. “It’s not possible. That’s why today I work very hard. I am 61 years old. I know the time for me is very short.”

中共的眼中釘吳弘達 宏都拉斯度假意外死亡

知名人權鬥士、設於華府的勞改基金會創辦人吳弘達（Harry Wu），廿六日陪同來自中國大陸的親戚在宏都拉斯度假時，與同行親戚友短暫分離後不知所蹤，後被發現死於水中，享年七十九歲。

吳弘達因常奔走於國會山莊，為中國勞改營的受苦民眾維權而知名。多年來他為人權事業奮鬥，為國際勞工權益和宗教自由發聲，曾多次獲頒國際獎項和榮譽。他並於二○○八年在華盛頓特區首開勞改博物館。

吳弘達一九三七年出生在上海富裕家庭，父親是銀行家，母親是地主。國共內戰後他選擇留在中國大陸。他曾因批評前蘇聯入侵匈牙利，被貼上「反革命」標籤，在北京地質學院就讀期間因言獲罪，一九六○年被打成反革命分子並關進勞改營十九年。

吳弘達於一九七九年被釋放，一九八五年移民美國。他先在柏克萊加州大學出任地質學客席教授，後開始撰寫他在大陸的遭遇。

一九九五年他潛回大陸又被捕，並被控盜取機密，判刑十五年。在美國政界、人權團體和外交官斡旋下，同年大陸在當時是美國第一夫人的希拉蕊出席北京第四屆世界婦女大會前夕，遣返已是美國公民的吳弘達。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/world/asia/harry-wu-who-told-world-of-abuses-in-china-dies-at-79.html

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytimes.com/china/20160428/c28wu/zh-hant/

2016-04-28．聯合報．A13．國際．本報系記者曾慧燕、羅曉媛