In April 1960, on the morning after he graduated from college in China, Harry Wu Hongda was summarily arrested as a political criminal. Without trial or the chance to speak to his family, he was transported into the twilight world of China's prison camps where he was held for 19 years. After release, he moved to the United States and has since gained recognition for exposing the mainland prison system. In this extract from his new autobiography, Bitter Winds, he describes how he and fellowprisoners tried topetition Mao Zedong for freedom and the punishment that followed DURING the summer of 1965, one of the younger prisoners in my company named Guo Jie began to ask my opinion about contacting people in the outside world. He wanted to make known the fact that rightists still languished in the labour-reform camps even whentheir term was over.
Guo felt frustrated that he could not even send a letter to his mother explaining that he was not being released. Because she was a Party member and the head of a neighbourhood committee in Jiangxi province, the police captain had let him know that sucha letter from a labour-reform prisoner might be damaging for her.
But Guo insisted that he could not continue just to endure passively the injustice of our confinement. He wanted an explanation for why we remained prisoners without a reason, and he wanted to call attention to our fate.
He urged me to help him write a letter directly to Chairman Mao to inquire when we rightists could expect our labour-reform sentences to end. Guo grew more determined about this idea and soon proposed writing letters as well to the Communist Party Central Committee and to the Beijing Municipal Party Committee.
Surely someone, he reasoned, would see the injustice of our punishment and initiate a change. I thought the idea might bring results, but I urged Guo to take care so that his statements could not be labelled reactionary. Almost certainly the letters would be traced back to the camp, and anyone involved would then have to defend his actions to the prison authorities.
Another friend, Chen Quan, also confided to me his outrage at our continued imprisonment, and I asked him and another long-term squad-mate named Li to join Guo in planning the letter-writing effort. I also privately consulted Zhao Wei, the former newspaper editor whose opinion I valued. Zhao was six years older than I and an astute observer of political affairs.
Over the course of several weeks, whenever we were sure we were not overheard, Guo and I discussed how to word the appeals. Most important was not giving the impression that we formed a ''reactionary group''. This was the most serious crime inside the camps. One prisoner making remarks judged to be counter-revolutionary would be punished, but two or three together voicing such ideas would be treated with much greater severity.