Harry Wu AKA Hongda Wu Born: 8-Feb-1937 Birthplace: Shanghai, China Died: 26-Apr-2016 Location of death: Undetermined Location, Honduras Cause of death: unspecified
Gender: Male Race or Ethnicity: Asian Sexual orientation: Straight Occupation: Activist Nationality: United States Executive summary: Human rights activist As a young man in Beijing in 1960, Harry Wu was arrested after speaking out against the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and spent the next nineteen years as a forced laborer in several different prisons for "counter-revolutionaries". Upon his release from prison in 1979, Wu made his way to America, where he taught geology, became an international activist for human rights, and is now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has written extensively on Laogai, China's system of "reform through labor". He founded the Laogai Research Foundation in 1992, and made several clandestine trips back to China to gather more information on the Laogai. He was arrested in 1995 as he tried to enter China through Kazakhstan, subjected to a show trial, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Amidst international condemnation of China, he was instead released. Wife: Ching-Lee Son: Harrison
University: BA Geology, Beijing College of Geology (1960) Teacher: Geology, China Geoscience University (1980-85) Teacher: Geology, University of California at Berkeley (1985-87)
Freedom Award (Hungarian Freedom Fighters Federation) 1991
Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders 1994
Hoover Institution Human Rights Foundation
National Endowment for Democracy Naturalized US Citizen Chinese Ancestry
Author of books:
Laogai: The Chinese Gulag (1992) Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China�s Gulag (1994, memoir, with Carolyn Wakeman) Troublemaker: One Man's Crusade against China's Cruelty (1996, memoir) In the Dragon's Teeth: What the World Doesn't Know about China (2008)
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