Harry Wu, the former Chinese political prisoner died Tuesday at 79. In the 1990s, Mr. Wu used his personal experiences and research to bring the matter of forced labor—and the products they exported to the West—into the then vigorous American debate over human rights in China. Thanks to Mr. Wu, the word “laogai” referring to a vast system of prison labor camps entered the vocabulary much as the term “gulag” had for the Soviet Unions two decades before.
The educated son of a Shanghai banker and his wife, Mr. Wu was sentenced to jail for 19 years at the age of 23 for speaking out against invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union, then a Chinese ally. He survived prison by becoming “a beast.” A prisoner could become a “millionaire” by tracking rats and finding a store of seeds, corn and grains of rice. Finding a live rat was even better.
