In 1960, Harry Wu began a 19-year incarceration in Chinese labor camps, after being labeled by the government as a counter-revolutionary rightist. Today, the 74-year-old Virginia resident aims to make those camps — called laogai, or “reform through labor” — as infamous as the Russian gulags or the Nazi concentration camps. Wu is the executive director of the Laogai Research Foundation, which runs the newly redesigned Laogai Museum in Dupont Circle. He spoke with The Washington Examiner about his inhuman experience and his unshakable God. Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?
As a boy, I went to a school operated by the Roman Catholic Church. There was an Italian priest there, and he was very kind to me. We were like father and son. There, I was baptized as a Catholic — the first person in my family, in my whole family’s history, to be a Catholic. By 1949, the Communist Party occupied the whole country. The priest was deported; the whole church was shut down. There was no religious activity. As a teen and a university student, I wasn’t really involved with religion — I didn’t really care about it. But still, this was my religion.
