Bitter Winds

"Harry Wu’s is an amazing story because not only do we have this account of his 19 years in labour camp detention, but it’s also during key moments of Chinese history, including the Cultural Revolution . He is sent all over China to a number of different camps and is in better or worse shape, and better or worse-regarded, in different ones. He was a college student when he went in and he’s basically a middle-aged guy when he comes out. He ends up, eventually, getting to America and educating everyone about this whole system. The difference in China is that the Nazi and the Soviet systems both fell at some point. The Nazis managed to destroy records, but there were survivors of a lot of camps. Between the records that they could find, some of the trial processes and the living witnesses, we have a pretty good understanding of what happened. With the Soviet system, we were able, in the mid-90s, to get copies of a lot of records. We found out when material was sent to different camps or when people were transferred. The files of prisoners and the charges that were drummed up against them were often lies, but we could see, ‘oh they were charged with this and they were sent here.’ We can reconstruct the framework of that camp system. But with China, the same government that instituted these systems of pretrial detention is still there. Even though it’s changed quite a bit, it’s never fallen. There’s never been an open moment and we’ve only our ever gotten these little bits and pieces of what the system looks like. It’s the one where we know least well how many people were detained and where they were detained. We have little snapshots, but we don’t have a comprehensive understanding of the system. So having the perspective of somebody like Harry Wu, who went to so many camps across so many years, and then could actually leave to speak freely and campaign against the system, is a real gift. The book is also valuable for his intense personal perspective. He writes about things much more frankly than even some of the other authors on my list. He writes about one prisoner approaching him for sexual favours. He writes about his own humiliations and realizing that he has become like a dog for the commandant by the role he has taken on in the camp and he’s disgusted with himself. He writes about—Buber-Neumann does as well, but he does it even more tellingly—the cruelties that the prisoners become willing to inflict on each other, either just out of frustration and anger or directly to curry favour with people who are running the camps. Many people die that are near him. He’s not isolated; people are literally dropping dead of starvation to his left and to his right. The magnitude of the forced labour and the suffering comes across. He also shows how people in these camps become invisible to the larger population. We see this a little in Soviet novels and nonfiction accounts that came out, but for Harry Wu’s family, it’s too dangerous for them to affiliate with him. So even when he is not in full detention, even when he’s not an exile anymore, they don’t want anything to do with him. They blame him for his own problems. All of those supports that you might imagine when you get out, when you come home, that you can re-enter your family, and society—Harry Wu shows us that’s not how it happens. In these kinds of states, when you get out, the detention continues in terms of the isolation that you have from the rest of humanity. It’s not enough just to leave the camp. “With China, the same government that instituted these systems of pretrial detention is still there” The goal of these camps, of course, is to take a segment of the population and stick them over here as somehow separate from, and unworthy of, the rest of humanity. What he shows is that that never goes away. We also see that, to some extent, with the jail system in America, so it isn’t a completely isolated phenomenon, but the concentration camp context belies this idea that, ‘oh you have camps and people get liberated and it’s all over.’ That’s not the Chinese story at all and it’s important to hear that. With Harry Wu, there were some things at the end of his life that got complicated. He was accused of prioritizing his museum instead of using funds to help Chinese people who had suffered as a result of detention. There were a number of things that he was accused of. In my book I don’t go into addressing a lot of that, because I think it’s hard to unravel. But I think that this book is a really important literary contribution to concentration camp history. He went back. He sneaked back into China and recorded a bunch of stuff and did a 60 Minutes segment on it. He was not that politicized when he went in, but he got caught up in it as a student, because many students were arrested at that time, and he ended up becoming incredibly politicized and very much an activist and I think contributed a lot. Perhaps it’s not surprising that having suffered so much and seeing his life’s mission as publicizing it, that he got particular obsessions and acted on them in particular ways. It was built on the Soviet model. I don’t want to attribute it all to the Soviet Union, but each concentration camp system came out of some kind of international understanding of concentration camps. During the Cold War , there was the Soviet model (e.g. Vietnam) and there was also the colonial model (e.g. Algeria). There were two versions of it that sprang up. There was this international influence of pre-existing ideas, but then there’s local culture. This is why society is so vulnerable, because you have these local fissures in the culture, in the legal system and in the attitudes towards race or politics. So the Chinese system was inspired by the Soviet model, but also built on Chinese traditions. So you had this idea of correcting thinking, of stopping the incorrect thought before you could even think of heading toward action. With the Soviet model, you’re going to re-educate the citizen through labour, to be a worthy citizen of the new society. The Chinese took it one step further, which is you’re going to reconstruct the whole way of thinking, so you have correct thinking. They had these sessions where for hours they would have to confess all the incorrect thoughts they had had. And if you didn’t think enough bad things to catch yourself at it, then you could be in trouble as well. Prisoners learned to correct each other, sometimes to physically harm each other. These propaganda sessions and discussions became really integral parts of Chinese camp culture and were psychologically damaging on a whole additional level. A lot of other camps systems had only done a little of that or hadn’t explored it fully. The thing to remember about the Chinese system is that there were so many more people in China, that this system was just huge. If we knew the real numbers, it would probably dwarf the Soviet gulag system, which didn’t last as long either. Technically, China has supposedly now got rid of the last of the pre-trial detentions. But there are still all these surreptitious ways of holding people called ‘black jails.’ That’s for the general population. But we now also know about the Uyghur camps, based on these prior ideas of detention that were used for society as a whole, which they’re now narrowing down and targeting at a specific population and using comprehensively against that population. So I would say the Chinese system is a little different in the use of psychological torture, the fact that it never stopped, and the fact that it has evolved so clearly from its historical roots and is still keeping much of that, to be used in a 21st century way. In particular, China embraced the rhetoric of anti-terror that became so popular after 9/11 . They took all that rhetoric from the West and they said, ‘Yes. We’re going to use it against Uyghur Muslims.’ That anti-terror rhetoric was actually there from the beginning of the camps. That’s how concentration camps started. So, in some ways, we’ve come full circle. I do think there is a new global language about detention that suggests that, ‘if somebody is a terror threat, it’s all right to do it’ that people around the world have accepted. I worry that we are now back where we were in the 1920s and 1930s where this kind of detention, if you can just convince people that there’s a terrorist threat, becomes acceptable against everybody. For my book, I sneaked into the Rohingya camps in Myanmar and I talked to people in the towns too, who were fine with the Rohingya being detained. They were in favour of it. I was able to ask why. I couldn’t go back and ask that of Germans in the 1930s or Brits in southern Africa during the Boer conflict, but I could ask these people and the rhetoric was the same rhetoric we hear about the Uyghurs. It was the same exact rhetoric that we hear from President Trump about Muslims and about Mexicans. And it’s the same rhetoric that we heard more than a hundred years ago about the first Cuban camps. And so I think the Chinese model shows you what can happen when you have a government that basically isn’t restrained, how the camps can take on local features, import old features and then bring in new rhetoric to justify what is basically political exploitation of a vulnerable group."