Human rights activist Harry Wu says "America is great because America has principles." He warns, however, that a preoccupation with business opportunities abroad could "destroy America."
The American market is overrun with inexpensive Chinese goods -- inexpensive because they're made in slave-labor camps known as laogai. Whether it's steel pipe, shoes, or artificial flowers; toys, hand tools, or machines; chemicals, clothing, or perfume; if it came from China, chances are good it was produced by slave labor. Those "low, low prices" certainly are tempting, but they should quickly lose their appeal when the hidden moral costs are revealed.
Many Americans, however, seem only too willing to overlook the sinister underpinnings of those bargains from Beijing -- the intimidation and imprisonment of religious and political dissidents, the involuntary servitude and dire deprivation of laogai workers. Rather than confront their complicity, some consumers prefer to ignore the implications of providing economic support for a tyrannical regime.
Harry Wu spent 19 years in the laogai. In an interview in the April issue of Crisis magazine, Wu describes the dehumanizing conditions in the camps and urges the American people to strike a blow against them by boycotting the consumer goods that eight million slave laborers produce there. "Laogai means labor and reform," Wu explains. "All prisoners, including penal and political prisoners, are subject to hard labor and forcible brainwashing. Brainwashing is meant to destroy you spiritually and mentally. Whatever the party accuses you of is true. You have to accept it. You have to condemn yourself. You have to forget about yourself as a human being."
Wu confides that he was nearly tortured to death during his captivity "because I wanted to treat myself as a human being. So I just tried to stop my life," says Wu. "I reduced myself to the level of a beast."
Wu describes how China, over a 30-year period, "totally destroyed any kind of religion, including Buddhism, Christianity, Catholicism, Muslim practice, anything. They set up one system, Communism." That system is now unraveling. Wu reports that "the ideological crisis has become very serious in China. People are now widely seeking new religions to fulfill their souls. So, the Communist government has had to change its religion policy," says Wu. "Using two hands, it set up its own religion system, the Patriotic Church Associations, in order to show the West we have freedom of religion and also to control people domestically. But, with the other hand, real religion is very seriously suppressed."
Harry Wu wants the believers of America to know that their coreligionists are suffering in China. "When you do your praying," he asks, "please think about them and pray for them. Don't go to welcome these Patriotic Church priests. It's a sham. Your real brothers and sisters are being suppressed in the underground church. If you are a businessman and you also go to church on Sunday, think about it. Do you want to make money from the forced labor of these suffering people?"
