HARRY Wu Hongda has been shopping.'Let me show you something,' he says, disappearing from his living room for a few seconds, then re-emerging with an innocuous looking plastic bag, from which he dumps a dozen boxes of tea on to the coffee table.
'All of these brands come from Chinese laogai [forced labour] camps. I bought them in the US. Most of it came through Hong Kong.' Mr Wu has been buying more than tea. Next he produces a handful of photos of Chinese-made tools and hoists, bought in Wan Chai hardware stores, which he again claims have been manufactured in the camps.
Hong Kong is very much on his mind at the moment. The Laogai Research Foundation, which he runs from his bungalow in the sunshine suburbs of San Jose, California, is compiling a 'list of shame' of every Hong Kong retailer, trading company and other business involved in the selling of goods he believes come from the laogai system. Still keeping 'mum' on the companies, he hopes the document will be published in the new year.
After three years of trying to spread the word from the United States about China's reform-through-labour system, the man who spent 19 years in the laogai is now convinced Hong Kong, which serves as a key transit point for the exports, must be targeted foraction. 'I came back from Hong Kong two weeks ago,' he says. 'It is the biggest transfer centre for forced labour goods. Most Hong Kong people are very selfish, it's all money and more money. Their own parents, their brothers and sisters, even they themselves, may have experience of the laogai system, but they earn money from prison-made products.' There is a long, pensive pause, before he looks up and adds, almost whispering: 'It's a damn tragedy.' He believes publication of a list of local firms connected to laogai products will help raise the issue's profile. 'It is very frustrating. I can talk about the issue in Canada, New York, Sydney, London. Why not Hong Kong, or Taiwan?' Hong Kong's central role in the transfer of prison-made goods has been cited before, during the 1991 publicity following Mr Wu's return to China to help the US television show 60 Minutes film inside several camps and their front factories. Then came Mr Wu's book, Laogai, a largely academic treatise on the Chinese gulag system, followed by congressional hearings and intense pressure on then US president George Bush to take a foreign policy stand on the issue.
To avoid linking it to Most Favoured Nation trading status, Mr Bush persuaded China to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) allowing inspections of any sites. Before 1991, not one Chinese product had been cited under a 50-year-old US law banning the import of forced labour goods. Since the 1991 push, 24 types of goods have been cited for detention orders. So all in all, Mr Wu's campaign is coming up trumps.
Or is it? The slightly world-weary demeanour of the 56-year-old activist suggests otherwise. Then there are the hefty sighs which greet most questions on how the world community is tackling the issue. No, Mr Wu is not satisfied. While sceptics may call himobsessive, a kinder word may be 'focused'. And after 19 years spent undergoing brainwashing, beatings and starvation in the gulag system Mr Wu, the son of a Shanghainese banker, cannot be denied the right to be as focused as he likes.