[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 113 (Thursday, July 13, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9902-S9903]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                            MORNING BUSINESS

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                         DETENTION OF HARRY WU

  Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, by now most of America knows of the unjust 
detention of Harry Wu by the People's Republic of China. Harry Wu is an 
American citizen and human rights crusader. Since June 19, 1995, he has 
been detained in China. Consular access to detained American citizens 
is required to be granted within 48 hours under the terms of a 1982 
agreement with China. But China did not grant access to Mr. Wu until 
July 10--21 days later. On July 9, Harry Wu was charged with offenses 
which could carry the death sentence.
  Harry Wu was traveling on a valid American passport, with a valid 
Chinese visa. There seems little doubt that he was targeted by the 
Chinese Government for his outspoken and brave efforts to describe 
Chinese human rights 

[[Page S 9903]]
abuses. Mr. Wu himself suffered almost two decades of imprisonment in 
the Chinese gulag. His continued imprisonment is an affront to all 
freedom loving people.
  Mr. President, our relationship with China is at a critical 
crossroads. Our relations with China are at the lowest point in years, 
and the list of disputed issues is long: proliferation, human rights, 
Taiwan and trade. We must, however, choose our course carefully. As 
Henry Kissinger said this morning before the Senate Foreign Relations 
Committee: ``The danger of the existing roller coaster towards 
confrontation to both China and the United States is incalculable.'' I 
share Dr. Kissinger's concern over the dangers of a full-scale 
confrontation.
  But just as we must not casually move toward a conflict that serves 
neither country, we cannot remain silent in the face of outrageous 
conduct. The most fundamental duty of Government is to protect
 the rights of its citizens--and Harry Wu is an American citizen. I 
urge the Chinese to release Harry Wu, and remove this latest flashpoint 
in our relations.

  A major United Nations Conference on Women is scheduled for September 
in Beijing. I agree with the bipartisan view recently expressed by my 
Republican colleague from Kansas, Senator Kassebaum, and the Democratic 
Congressman from Indiana, Lee Hamilton, when they suggested the United 
Nations should quit wasting scarce resources on conferences that spend 
much and achieve little.
  I understand the administration plans to send a senior delegation, 
including two Cabinet officers. In my view, it would be wrong for the 
United States to participate in the United Nations Women's Conference 
at any level or in any fashion as long as Harry Wu is held. This 
morning, along with Speaker Gingrich, Chairman Helms, Chairman Gilman, 
and Helsinki Commission Co-Chairs Senator D'Amato and Congressman Chris 
Smith, I sent a letter to President Clinton urging a U.S. boycott of 
the U.N. Women's Conference as long as Harry Wu is detained. In my 
view, that is the least this Government can do to try to show our 
displeasure with China's action. It is also the only prudent course in 
light of the State Department's briefing that they could not guarantee 
the safety of Americans traveling to the conference.
  I ask unanimous consent that a copy of the letter, and a copy of a 
Wall Street Journal article by Nina Shea, ``Free Harry Wu'' be printed 
in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                                Congress of the United States,

                                    Washington, DC, July 13, 1995.
     The President,
     The White House,
     Washington, DC.
       Dear Mr. President: We are writing to express our support 
     for your efforts to secure the release of Harry Wu. It is 
     unconscionable that an American citizen traveling on a valid 
     passport with a valid Chinese visa was arrested, detained and 
     charged in violation of accepted international law. 
     Furthermore, it is an outrage that access to Mr. Wu by 
     American officials was not granted according to the terms of 
     the U.S.-P.R.C. Consular Convention of 1982.
       Harry Wu has undertaken heroic efforts to expose Chinese 
     human rights abuses. For almost two decades, he suffered from 
     the ravages of China's prison system. Today, Harry Wu is once 
     again subject to China's closed prison system, and there are 
     concerns about his health and safety.
       We are aware that your Administration had planned to 
     participate in the Fourth United Nations Conference on Women, 
     scheduled to be held in September in Beijing. In our view, it 
     would be wholly inappropriate to participate in any 
     international conference in the People's Republic of China 
     while an American citizen is being unjustly detained by the 
     Chinese government. There is ample precedent to deny American 
     participation in international events which only accord 
     prestige to regimes which deserve condemnation--the boycott 
     of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow in the aftermath of the 
     invasion of Afghanistan comes to mind.
       Accordingly, we urge you to announce the United States 
     government will not participate--at any level or in any 
     fashion--in the upcoming United Nations Conference on Women 
     as long as Harry Wu is detained in China. Anything less would 
     send a tragic signal of disregard for the human rights of an 
     American citizen.
           Sincerely,
     Newt Gingrich.
     Ben Gilman.
     Chris Smith.
     Bob Dole.
     Jesse Helms.
     Alfonse D'Amato.
                                                                    ____

              [From the Wall Street Journal, July 3, 1995]

                             Free Harry Wu

                             (By Nina Shea)

       On June 19, Harry Wu, a 58-year-old American, was arrested 
     by Chinese authorities at the Kazakhstan border. Mr. Wu's 
     passport was in order and he had recently been issued a 
     Chinese entry visa, valid until Sept. 11, 1995. No 
     outstanding charges or arrest warrants were pending against 
     him. No incriminating evidence was found on him or his 
     American traveling companion at the time of the arrest. No 
     charges have been made public against him to date. While his 
     companion has been expelled from China, he remains held 
     incommunicado at an undisclosed location.
       The reason the Chinese are detaining Mr. Wu is obvious. In 
     his book ``The Power of the Powerless,'' Vaclav Havel wrote 
     that ``living the truth'' is ``the fundamental threat'' to 
     the post-totalitarian system, and thus it is ``suppressed 
     more severely than anything else.'' Mr. Wu is a bald critic 
     of the repressive human-rights policies of Beijing, and the 
     Chinese fear nothing more than the truth he witnesses.
       Mr. Wu made a daring trip to China last year to conduct 
     independent investigations into the forcible removal of 
     prisoner organs for transplant and the export of prisoner-
     produced goods to the U.S. His award-winning documentation 
     aired on American and British television. Mr. Wu's 
     autobiography, ``Bitter Winds,'' is a devastating expose of 
     the Chinese prison work camps, or laogai. Mr. Wu knew well of 
     what he wrote; after criticizing the Soviet invasion of 
     Hungary. He was arrested at the age of 23 for being a 
     ``rightist,'' a charge that was ``corrected'' at the time of 
     his release in 1979, after he had served 19 years in the 
     laogai.
       Harry Wu is a hero of our time. He is a human rights 
     dissident of the stature of
      Mr. Havel, Andrei Sakharov and Anatoly Shcharansky. Like 
     them, he suffered for his principles and spoke of the 
     atrocities of dictatorship from personal experience. And 
     like them, he risked all to give relentless voice to 
     others who are victimized into silence. Through the Laogai 
     Institute, the human rights group he founded, Mr. Wu has 
     painstakingly tracked down other deeply traumatized, 
     former prisoners of the laogai who are in exile throughout 
     the world, encouraging them and providing them with 
     opportunities to tell their stories.
       Mr. Wu's last public appearance in the U.S. was at a Puebla 
     Institute-Wethersfield Institute seminar in New York in May, 
     where he briefed American businesses about continuing human 
     rights persecution against Christian churches in China. At a 
     time when the West would rather believe that China, with its 
     new markets, has changed, Mr. Wu would not let it be 
     forgotten that China's one-party Communist political 
     structure and military apparatus remain intact and 
     operational.
       In New York, he told the American business community: ``The 
     core of the human rights issue in China today is that there 
     is a fundamental machinery for crushing human beings--
     physically, psychologically and spiritually--called the 
     laogai camp system, of which we have identified, 1,100 
     separate camps. It is also an integral part of the national 
     economy. Its importance is illustrated by the fact that one 
     third of China's tea is produced in laogai camps. Sixty 
     percent of China's rubber vulcanizing chemicals are produced 
     in a single laogai camp in Shenyang. One of the largest steel 
     pipe works in the country is a laogai camp. I could go on and 
     on. The laogai system is: ``Forced labor is the means;
      thought reform is the aim.'. . . The laogai is not simply a 
     prison system; it is a political tool for maintaining the 
     Communist Party's totalitarian rule.''
       For now, Harry Wu has disappeared once again into China's 
     closed penal system. But the U.S. must not forget him. 
     Because he is an American citizen, and because he embodies 
     the best of the indomitable human spirit, the Clinton 
     administration must take extraordinary steps to secure his 
     release. If Mr. Wu is not freed, the U.S. should withdraw 
     from the Fourth United Nations Conference on Women to be held 
     in Beijing in September. This conference is a world-wide 
     summit on the state of human rights as they pertain to women. 
     Since China lost its bid in 1993 to host the Summer Olympics 
     due to its poor human rights record, it has been eager for 
     the prestige accorded a country chosen for this paramount 
     human rights gathering.
       At the very time China is violating the human rights of a 
     heroic American citizen, it would be nothing less than craven 
     for the U.S. to lend prestige to China by designating a high-
     level human rights delegation for the Beijing conference--one 
     to be led by first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and United 
     Nations Ambassador Madeleine Albright and Timothy Wirth, 
     assistant secretary of state for global affairs. To conduct 
     international diplomatic business-as-usual on the topic of 
     human rights theory as a guest of the very country that is 
     imprisoning, without any human rights, one of our own 
     citizens would be a cynical betrayal, not only of Mr. Wu but 
     of human rights in general.

     

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