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Harry WuHarry Wu, also known as Wu Hongda (吳弘達) is an American citizen who is said to be a Chinese dissident, author of the books Bitter Winds and Troublemaker. The books describe his experience with the Chinese prison labor system, and Laogai, which attempted to catalog and describe all prison labor camps in China. Wu was born in the early-to-mid 20th century. He attended a Christian missionary school. He went to college and was on his way to becoming an engineer. In the 1950s, during Mao's Hundred Flowers Campaign, Harry Wu obeyed Mao and criticized the government. Mao turned around later and arrested those who had criticized the government. Wu claimed that he was sent to prison for being a counterrevolutionary. Some had said that his imprisonment was due to sexual assaults. Wu said that he realized what he saw as the nature of the prison system when one of his fellow prisoners, a young man fresh from the countryside, died due to the horrible conditions and had his corpse thrown into a cart without respect. Wu lived for the next several decades in the prison system. Sometimes he cooperated, but often resisted. During the Great Leap Forward he and his fellow prisoners nearly starved to death. He once went on a hunger strike that was ended only through forced feeding. In his last years he was working in a coal mine prison labor camp. He married a woman for convenience and had a son with her. But the relationship soon soured and they divorced each other. Wu attended a conference in the United States on oil drilling, using it as an opprotunity to escape from China. He slept for a while in a park, and managed to find a job making donuts. Eventually he got a position at a university, and wrote his books and got them published. While in the United States, he also remarried. In 1985, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Wu returned to China in order to try to do more research on the prison labor system. He even sneaked back into his old coal mining camp and visited his friends. Wu was arrested by the Chinese government. The charge was for impersonating a policeman, which would be a felony in the United States. After a tense standoff he was released. He credits the intervention of US political authorities, specifically Hillary Clinton, who was involved in the Beijing Womens Conference. Wu also founded a website, laogai.org, which continues to publish information critical of the Chinese government on human rights issues. In China and among overseas Chinese he is considered to be either a liar, a traitor, a troublemaker, and in general, to have exaggerated the problems in China. There is no record of strong support for Harry Wu among Chinese students, Asian Americans, or Chinese Americans. He does have strong support among some conservative white oriented groups. Wu, Harry Wu, Harry
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