Harry Wu, a prominent Chinese human rights activist who has died in exile aged 79, spent years campaigning to expose and abolish China's Soviet-style work camps and the system of "re-education through labour".
He survived 19 years in a gulag after being labelled a counter-revolutionary during the Mao Zedong-era purges of intellectuals of the 1950s and being sentenced to life in prison.
Rehabilitated with many former rightists in 1979, he tried his hand as a geology professor. An opportunity to move to California in the 1980s opened the door to his life’s work – exposing the conditions behind that iron gate.
Wu sneaked back into China several times to document the conditions endured by those sent to labour camps, before being caught and briefly imprisoned once again in 1995.
But his persistence and courage were rewarded when China in 2013 ended re-education through labour – laojiao – under pressure from activist lawyers advocating the rule of law from within China.
A relic of the ideological Communist courts of the Mao era, laojiao gave police broad powers to imprison people who were not accused of specific crimes for up to four years without charge or trial.
Official Chinese figures put the number of inmates in re-education through labour at more than 100,000 in 2009. Millions of people are estimated to have lived and died in the labour camps over more than six decades.
US congressional supporters brokered his release from prison and deportation to America in 1995, after Wu was captured during one of his trips to China and sentenced to 15 years in prison for stealing state secrets.
The formal abolition of the laojiao system has not been a complete victory. Security forces still deploy ad hoc measures (sometimes termed "legal education") to deter and punish citizens they deem troublemakers, and greater use of the formal court system still results in long sentences.
Harry Wu is survived by his son, Harrison.
– (Financial Times)