by Shaun Tandon
WASHINGTON — As China’s leadership works to glorify its rule in Tibet, one of China’s most prominent dissidents is on a very different mission — to document his country’s atrocities in the Himalayan land.
Harry Wu, who spent nearly two decades toiling in labor camps as a political prisoner, recently opened an exhibition at his Washington museum on suffering in Chinese-ruled Tibet.
“I’ve heard a few Chinese say that Harry Wu is a traitor to China,” Wu said inside his Laogai Museum in the heart of the US capital.
“And I right away respond — yes, I am. I am a traitor to the People’s Republic of China. Because the People’s Republic of China was established by the communists,” he said emphatically.
In a sharp break with China’s line that it liberated Tibet, the exhibition depicts authorities destroying temples and other religious heritage of the region and setting up labor camps — the exact number of which Wu said is impossible to verify.
The exhibition, which runs until May 30, features photographs and video footage taken secretly in Tibet either by Tibetans or their sympathizers.
One image shows stacks of lumber stacked up outside the new Chambdo prison, with one unnamed inmate saying conditions were worse than in Tibet’s most notorious Drapchi prison.
“On the outside, it looks very modern and many of the facilities are new. But inside it is very tough,” the prisoner said.
He said that at least in Drapchi prison, “you can see the sky and sometimes the mountains from the cells.”
Wu, 72, is lucid and sprightly. In his 19 years inside China’s labor camps — or “laogai” he says he was subjected to torture and near starvation.
The geologist said he was shipped off to 12 different laogai, where he was forced like a slave to work in a bid to change his views. Wu had criticized communism, in particular the Soviet clampdown on Hungary’s 1956 uprising.
He was freed in 1979 and later moved to the United States, where he worked in a doughnut shop to make ends meet before eventually telling his story.
And as he tried to expose human rights abuses in China, he found himself opening his own eyes to a new issue — Tibet.
“I found that of the many different groups of immigrants to the United States — Mexicans, Koreans, Chinese, Japanese or whatever — you always have some of them who commit some sort of crimes and go to jail,” he said.
“You don’t find any Tibetans doing crime. And you can easily make friends with them,” he said.
Wu, raised to think that the Dalai Lama was a feudal oppressor, later met the Tibetan spiritual leader and has since developed views on Tibet that go even beyond what the Dalai Lama advocates.
While the Dalai Lama says he is seeking only greater autonomy for Tibetans under Chinese rule, Beijing brands him a separatist and pressures world leaders not to meet with the Nobel Peace laureate.
Wu, however, firmly believes that Tibet should be — and was — independent.
“Tibet has nothing to do with the Han Chinese,” Wu said, referring to China’s main ethnicity.
He thumped the table passionately as he showed his collection of Chinese government maps, which mark ethnically Tibetan areas in a different color.
Wu said that Beijing’s argument — that Tibetans for centuries accepted Chinese emperors’ rule — was no different from the British saying they should still control India because they once colonized it.
“They have their own systems, they have their culture, their religion, their military. They have a government, they have tax. It is independent — totally different,” Wu said.
China sent troops into Tibet in 1950 and nine years later crushed an uprising which led the Dalai Lama to flee into India.
Marking the 50th anniversary of the uprising last month, China established a new holiday celebrating “Serfs’ Liberation Day,” saying Beijing freed Tibetans from a Buddhist theocracy that enslaved all but the religious elite.
China has also opened a Tibet museum in Beijing, which reinforces the official line on the region seen by most Chinese as an inalienable part of the country.
Lodi Gyari, the Dalai Lama’s chief negotiator with Beijing, sits on the board of Wu’s foundation and said the exhibition provides a useful counterpoint.
“Harry Wu’s work at the Laogai Museum is done for the same reasons that the Holocaust Museum was founded: to remember and to expose these ugly truths so that such things will never happen again,” Gyari said.
“The Tibetan people need to forgive, but we must not forget.”
The Laogai Museum, whose main exhibit documents China’s labor camps, opened in November with the support of a fund established by Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Internet giant Yahoo.
Yang donated the money after Yahoo came under fire for providing data to Chinese police helping them jail cyber dissidents including outspoken journalist Shi Tao, who remains in prison.
Wu said his museum attracted a steady flow of US schoolchildren but few Han Chinese. He said he hoped more Chinese would visit — he even sent an improbable invitation to the Chinese embassy staff.
But Wu believes that instead of trying to persuade Han Chinese on Tibet, Tibetans can help the Chinese by fighting the communist system.
“I’ve told the Dalai Lama — we Chinese cannot support you; you, the Tibetans, should support us,” Wu said.
“Communist China is like a plate — not made of plastic, of paper, of metal but of china. If you take away part of it, you can break the entire Chinese communist system.”
