Prison expert blocked from going home
A LEADING chronicler of penal institutions in China has been denied entry into the country.
Mr Hongda Harry Wu, a research fellow with the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, was denied a visa when he made an application in Hongkong. No reason was given.
His wife, who arrived with Mr Wu last week, was told her application was rejected because she was ''the wife of Hongda Wu''.
Mr Wu, 58, who left for the United States in 1985 after being locked up for 19 years in a laogai or reform-through-labour institution, went back to China in 1991 to research Chinese prisons and prison labour.
His writings and videos of laogai prisons, farms and factories, which were made available to an international audience after his return to the US, focused world attention on what he calls the Chinese Gulag.
''I want to go to China to see friends and relatives and to do some more research'', Mr Wu said yesterday. ''There is no reason why the authorities should bar me and my wife.
''I want to ask the New China News Agency [in Hongkong] just how long their blacklist is.'' He said Beijing could not brand him a counter-revolutionary.
''Haven't they published a White Paper on human rights and indicated they are willing to conduct exchanges with the West?'' ''My writings and videos are based on Chinese data and on-the-spot film-making. I have never made things up.'' Mr Wu said China's record on human rights should not be judged by individual prisoners Beijing had released.
He said the laogai system, where thousands were incarcerated without recourse to judicial procedures, was ''at the heart'' of the abuses in China.
''Beijing has released [student leader] Wang Dan and sent buying delegations to the US to curry favour with the administration of Clinton,'' Mr Wu said.
''Human rights should be a major question in Sino-US relations, and be made a condition for the renewal of Most Favoured Nation status for China.'' -WILLY WO-LAP LAM
