Frontpage Interview's guest today is Harry Wu, who spent nineteen years in Chinese prison camps during the 1960s and 1970s. He was arrested and detained again for sixty-six days in 1995 at the Chinese border while on a fact-finding mission. He is executive director of the Laogai Research Foundation in Washington, D.C., and has held research positions at the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University. He has built a database of information on more than eleven hundred prisons and concentration camps in the Chinese gulag system, or "Laogai," which literally means "reform through labor." He is the author of two autobiographical books, and has received several nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize.
FP: Mr. Wu it is an honor and privilege to have you here.
Wu: I am glad to have this opportunity to say a few words about Communist China and the Laogai.
FP: Are there any Chinese citizens who actually believe in communism and support the Communist Party?
Wu: Both China’s Communist Party (CCP) and the common Chinese clearly understand that the Communist Revolution has failed. Today it maintains a traditional totalitarian regime with a capitalism style under the name of Communism. Today almost no one trusts the CCP, and no one believes that communism is their future, including members of the Party.
FP: Tell us your thoughts on the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. What is your interpretation in retrospect?
Wu: The Tiananmen Movement was a great democracy movement. Since the CCP came to power in 1949, almost every major campaign had been launched by the CCP, but this movement was entirely out of the CCP’s control. However, if compared with the “1968 Prague Spring”, this mass movement in China was immature, both politically and in terms of theory. There were some significant and historical indications to support the importance of this movement - for example, the individual who stopped the military tank, the military troops knocking down the Goddess of Liberty, and the people who damaged Mao’s portrait at the Tiananmen Gate.
FP: How does the Communist system keep surviving with a capitalist system? Will something have to give way soon?
Wu: My understanding is that the communist system means totalitarianism and no private ownership. Today the CCP has no choice but allow the capitalist system to come back to help them to survive, so the capitalist system is growing in China. But the existence of a capitalist system doesn’t necessarily mean freedom and democracy. It is possible that China could still maintain a totalitarian regime with a dictatorship for many years, just as China has had for the past couple thousand years.
FP: Do you think the Chinese people yearn for freedom or for a stern authoritarian father figure? I ask this in the sense that I am Russian and, as the son of Soviet dissidents, I always thought that all people want freedom. But the more I examine my own people, I am not so sure a large percentage of them want anything to do with individual freedom and responsibility. Look at all the statues of Stalin being resurrected. Look at Putin’s re-Brezhnevization. Perhaps most Russians, with their long history of slavery, just want to be led. I am not necessarily saying this is true; I am just asking a question. What do you think?
Wu: There is no doubt that freedom and human rights are a natural part of every human. However, it is true that liberty, human rights and democracy are not a part of Chinese history, culture and tradition. Chinese philosophy always talks about status, order, class and ethics.
FP: What is the atmosphere in China today?
Wu: The people have paid a high cost to learn that communism is a joke. People are seeking freedom and human rights today.
China today is a nation standing at the crossroads of history. It is a nation that, as its people collectively ponder which way to go, will become the most important international issue the rest of the world will have to deal with in this new century.
FP: China will eventually have to face the Islamist threat, no? How will it deal with it?
Wu: Islamists generally do not pose a serious threat to China. Muslims mostly live in the remote, northwestern area of China, not in the central part of the country. If an uprising or rebellion were to occur in this region, the Chinese government would suppress it, just as the Qing government did in the 18th century with a bloody suppression that included the killing of 30 million Muslims.
FP: Is the U.S. pursuing the right policy toward China?
Wu: The U.S. policy toward China is dominated by interests of cooperation. This short-sighted policy is actually rebuilding another communist superpower. The money and technology from the West may benefit the average Chinese person, but it also largely serves as a blood transfer to a dying communist regime. Why don’t we tell the Beijing government that there will be “No Free Lunch?”
I wish people were more aware today that while China is moving toward capitalism, it is state-controlled, and not free capitalism. And that capitalism
does not necessarily entail freedom and democracy.
I would prefer to see a free, democratic and prosperous China rather than a powerful and prosperous but totalitarian China.
FP: You have compared the Chinese communists to Nazis. Can you talk about this a bit?
Wu: Both of them are totalitarian regimes. Both of them lack the freedoms of speech, religion and association. The Nazi system was based on private ownership, but the regime controlled the economy. The communist system in China is partially giving up state ownership, but it entirely controls the economy. In Nazi Germany, Hitler divided people by race and set up Holocaust concentration camps to abolish humans. According to communist class ideology, the CCP divided people by economic status and set up Laogai camps to get rid of people. Genocide is equal to Classicide.
FP: Give us a few sentences on Mao and Deng Xiaping.
Wu: Both were the worst kind of tyrants in history. Deng was involved in every crime of Mao. Deng did his best to preserve Mao’s evil system, continuingly placing Chinese under Communist rule.
FP: Why is there tyranny in the world?
Wu: People are selfish, and they want to have a good life. Some clever people, assisted by philosophers, create an ideal (-ism) to try to tell the people that they are able help them have a good life, giving them power and authorization, and they become tyrants after they receive this power.
FP: Why do you think the Western Left so adored Mao, the world's greatest mass murderer?
Wu: These Western leftists are very decent people, but unfortunately they act as ideologues when standing with a brutal tyranny in the world.
FP: Well, I disagree completely with you about these Western leftists being “decent” people. I don’t know anything decent about people who reach out in solidarity to mass murderers. People who support death cults do not support them for good reasons; they support them because they know exactly what the death cults are and exactly what they do -- and they enjoy living vicariously through the perpetration of mass death and suicide. But we will have to have a debate over this issue in another time and place my friend.
Wu: Not all leftists are the same, the ones are you referring to are different from the ones I am talking about.
FP: Well, the leftists who support and venerate mass murderers like Mao do so for the same reason, and they are not decent people. But we'll have to have this out in another forum I guess.
Let us move on to the issue of abortion. The government of China has instituted a policy that has resulted in the murder of one million baby girls every year for the last ten or more years. Will this ever end? What is behind this barbaric crime? Where are the West's feminists? Why are they silent on this crime against women?
Wu: Giving birth is a fundamental right of human beings, but it is restricted in China. For every woman, regardless of her marital status, if she doesn’t have a permit from the government, she is not allow to give birth, and each family is only allowed to have one child. The Chinese government’s justification for this national policy is that its population is growing too quickly because of economic development, and China has limited natural resources, so in order for China to become a prosperous nation, it must deprive people of their fundamental rights.
Forced abortion and forced sterilization are the primary measures used to implement the national policy. The West cares deeply about the abortion issue, but only with regard to their own society. I don’t believe they are hypocritical or discriminatory, but they do have a double standard.
FP: I believe they are just that: hypocritical. Leftist feminists in the West who pretend they care about women focus on the issue of abortion in their own society only as a weapon to wage war on their own society. If they truly cared about women’s rights, they would care about women all over the world, including the little baby female fetuses that are killed precisely because they are female. But leftist feminists in the West couldn’t care less about women, a fact demonstrated by their complete indifference to issues such as this in China and, for that matter, in the Middle East, where honor killings, female genital mutilation and forced marriage prevail under a vicious and sadistic system of gender apartheid -- in the face of the deafening silence of the West’s leftist feminists.
But let us move on. Tell us about some of your experiences in the Chinese Gulag. How did you prevail?
Wu: By the CCP’s definition the word Laogai means “Reform through Labor.” All of the inmates are forced to labor and forced to undergo brainwashing. No one can refuse the hard labor, and everyone has to uphold communism. No hero may survive the Laogai. The way I survived was by reducing from a human being into a beast. I am a survivor. I am a witness. I am not a hero.
FP: When you look at back at your long years in the Chinese Gulag, what meaning do you see in it? Do you have any regrets? Perhaps to have done something differently?
Wu: If my fate and my experience in the Chinese Laogai were an individual case, then I could forget about it and never want to talk about it again. Unfortunately, millions of other people shared the same fate. Why, when the people of the world condemned the Holocaust, did they deny the Gulag and ignore the Laogai?
Life is short for every person, and everyone has the same destination, the graveyard, so everyone has to enjoy their life, but they should not lie, they should tell the truth and do something good for others.
FP: Will China one day be free?
Wu: Free from Communist tyranny? Yes, and it will be soon. But as for China turning into a free and democratic country, there is still a long way to go.
FP: Mr. Wu thank you kindly for joining us today. It was a true honor to have you here. Any final thoughts?
Wu: When I heard Martin Luther King say “I Have a Dream” in 1963, I was in a Laogai prison camp. I was told that I had no value, I was nothing, and that even if I were to die, that would only pollute a piece of land.
Everyone has the right to have a dream. But for many years I could not. Not only did the authorities not allow me to have my own dream, I also didn’t want to have a dream. Dreams are nice, dreams are wonderful, and dreams create energy, but dreams also sometimes cause serious problems. Should I have a dream of freedom? Should I have a dream of love? I did have these dreams. Dreams also cause suffering and pain. Because I supposed that I could never become a free man. Under oppression, dreams are torturous.
But since I have become a free man, I can dream now. My son, he's my dream. I hope that my son, and all Chinese boys and girls, will never lose their freedom, will never lose their faith like me.
I want to have a dream like Martin Luther King did: “Freedom belongs to everyone.”
FP: You say you are not a hero sir, but you are a true hero to all of us here at Frontpage. Thank you Mr. Wu for joining us. Thank you for your courageous and noble fight for freedom. It was a true honor to speak with you sir.
Wu: Thank you Jamie.