Overview

Detailing the story of one man's struggle to survive the Chinese Gulag and his daring return to China to tell the world what happened there, this is the true story of Harry Wu. In April 1960, the morning after his graduation from college, Wu was summarily arrested as a political criminal and, without a trial, found himself cast into a world of torture, interminable labour under extreme conditions and mass starvation. In this narrative, he relives the 19 harrowing years that followed. Finally released from prison in 1979, Wu was allowed to leave China for the USA in 1985. Determined to reveal the truth of the Gulag, he returned to China in 1991 with an American news crew. Posing as a US businessman buying prison goods, he took a hidden camera into the camps and captured on film, for the first time, images of the life behind the walls of the Chinese Gulag.

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Nineteen years in Mao's libor camps - as chronicled by Wu (resident scholar at the Hoover Institution) and Wakeman (To the Storm - not reviewed). When the Communist forces took Shanghai in 1948, Wu (then 11) was living in a milieu of Western affluence and traditional culture. Although his father was a high-ranking hank official, the family remained in China, and in 1955 Wu, eager to build the new socialist society, went to the Beijing Geology Institute. He was devoted to his studies and to baseball, but he soon found that college life was dominated by political activities. His middle-class background and independent mind meant that he was repeatedly denounced for holding wrong opinions, even though he accepted Communism, and in April 1960, the morning after his graduation, he was summarily arrested as a political criminal and made to undergo reeducation through libor. His narrative takes us through years of deprivation, torture, and starvation in a world where the dead were carted out daily and the living were bombarded with ideological slogans. Among many others, we meet the peasant thief Xing, who teaches the young intellectual Wu the art of survival; and Lu, who loses his hope and sanity before finally succeeding in suicide. Wu was sustained by the insight that in such a world human life had no value, that the society was rotten if people didn't count, and that he would have a purpose if he tried to change that society. And thus, after his release and emigration to this country, he risked everything by returning to China in disguise with a CBS camera crew, and now has written this book. As an addition to the genre of Gulag literature, a remarkable and heroic story, recounted with great simplicity and nobility. (Kirkus Reviews)

In 1960 Harry Wu, a geology student in Beijing, was arrested. Though never charged, his banker father and his independence of mind were enough to sentence him to 19 years in the Chinese prison system. He laboured on farms and in mines, and at one point during the famine years of the early 1960s, spent time in a camp where those suffering from malnutrition were simply left to die. In addition to the brutality of the system, there were criticism sessions which were often an excuse for rivalries to escalate into violence. It was a soul-destroying experience, alleviated only by friendships which could often come to sudden, cruel ends. And at any moment there was the risk that any tiny infraction of the rules would be betrayed by fellow prisoners. Wu's passionate and vivid description of his experiences is the first account to emerge of Chinese concentration camps, and as his daring return years later with an American film crew reveals, it is a system that is still in existence. A harrowing yet compulsively readable book. (Kirkus UK)

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