A year and a half ago, a man who had spent more than 19 years as a political prisoner in China made headlines by criticizing Israel.
His name was Harry Wu, and he gained the world’s attention by attempting to re-enter China, hoping to continue his research into that country’s slave labor system.
Wu, now a Bay Area resident, is a Chinese version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian dissident whose novels helped alert the world to the horrors of the communist system.
Wu is not the literary talent Solzhenitsyn is, but he has written books on the laogai, the Chinese gulag, and on his own travails inside the camps. He has introduced the world to the millions of prisoners now languishing in the laogai, and has written of the atrocities that continue under the Chinese system and of cultural genocide in Tibet.
Wu has also proven how foreign businesses have profited by trading in the products produced by Chinese slave labor camps.
The Los Angeles Times called Wu “an all-around pain in the you-know-what.”
In August 1995, Wu charged that Israel’s military ties to China were helping to perpetuate “evil.”
“If the Israeli people are really concerned about concentration camps, concerned about the Nazi fascists,” he declared, “they have to apply the same principles to China.” Many Jews, rightly wary of loose comparisons to the Nazis, thought this unfair. Why, they asked, should Israel be blamed for its dealings with China when many other nations do the same thing?
Though Wu’s statement may have been a cheap shot, he was not far off the mark. Let’s face it: Israel’s arms deals with China will allow the Chinese to evade restrictions on purchases of U.S. military technology. Israel also hopes to separate China from hostile Arab regimes. This might bring short-term gains, but eventually Israeli technology might strengthen a regime that poses a potential threat to democracy everywhere.
This could put Israel in conflict with the U.S., its only real ally.
In his latest book, “Troublemaker: One man’s crusade against China’s cruelty,” Wu does not repeat his denunciation of Israel. Instead, he tells of his research into Jewish suffering and how it helped him better understand his own country.
“When I came to the United States, I realized that China was not always the center of the universe, certainly not for mass tragedy,” Wu relates. He says he “became engrossed with the Holocaust,” finding haunting comparisons between the madness of Kristallnacht and China’s chaotic, devastating Cultural Revolution.
Visiting Dachau, Wu was stunned to learn that the slogan over the concentration camp’s entrance, “Arbeit macht frei,” means “Work makes you free.” It was identical to slogans at the Chinese camps where millions of prisoners perished.
When he visited the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, Wu said he was “transfixed” by the computer database of victims, and knew there was no such resource for the families of laogai victims.
“I understood why the Jewish people repeat to themselves, `Never again.’ The Jewish people do not forget their own. The rest of the world must never forget them either,” Wu writes. “I dared to confide in one of the museum officials my dream that someday the word laogai would be as well known to the world as `Holocaust.'”
The museum official “understood my emotion and encouraged me to protect the memory of my own people.”
The emphasis on memory seems to be something Wu has in common with Jews. He is still racked with survivor’s guilt about those who didn’t make it out of the laogai. Collecting evidence about Chinese government atrocities and prisoners who disappeared is what motivated him to make his dangerous forays into China.
“Today in America, you hear ignorant people say, `Oh, the Holocaust was exaggerated. Maybe it never really happened,'” Wu writes. “I have heard the same thing said about the laogai system.”
Yet for all his efforts, Wu seems to have found few allies. American business lusts after the Chinese market. One American Jew who does business in China told me that the Chinese didn’t have the same definition of “freedom” that we did.
Was it so long ago that those of us who demanded freedom for Soviet Jewry were hearing the same excuse about Russia? I have talked with university and business representatives who expressed vague hopes about how their contacts in China will help democratize the country.
But those promises ring hollow as the Beijing gerontocracy is strengthened, not weakened, by economic expansion. Today there is no political freedom and few individual rights.
When it comes to China, American corporations and universities appear to love commerce more than they loathe communism. George Bush showed that he didn’t really care about human rights in China. Neither does Bill Clinton. Similarly, there is no difference of opinion on this issue between Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Why are American Jews, who have been so vocal on such diverse human rights tragedies as those in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda, still largely silent about China?
There was no Jewish population to save in those cases, but we still spoke out.
The National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council’s 1994 Joint Program Plan quoted Leviticus 19:16, “Thou shalt not stand by idly at thy neighbor’s blood,” as the basis for its strong position on Bosnia.
Will NJCRAC (which holds its annual plenum next month) ever take a stand on China? Wu asks us to take our principles seriously, but American Jewry still answers with a yawn.
Why can’t Israel do better than an amoral stand on China? There is no good answer to this question. A year and a half ago, Wu may have overstated his case regarding Israel and American Jewry. But what really hurts is that he was probably right.