Wu Says He Will Continue Work Activist Says He Lied, Told Jailers He’d Halt Fight For Human Rights

“I lied to them,” said the human rights campaigner Harry Wu, leaning forward in his study Friday as he recounted his two months of imprisonment in China, “and so what?”

“I said that if they released me I would stay away from politics and have a good life with my wife,” he said in an interview just hours after his expulsion from China and return to his home here, 30 miles south of San Francisco.

Wu, whose arrest had become an irritant in U.S.-Chinese relations, declined to say whether he would continue his secret forays into China, investigating forced labor camps. But he said he would continue his human rights work.

“Why should I be honest with them?” he said. “I deal with men as men deal with me, and they lied to me from the very beginning.”

And then he turned to politics, and the decision by Hillary Rodham Clinton to attend a women’s conference in Beijing next month.

“She had to judge by herself to go or not to go,” he said. “But if my release is part of a deal, if this is a condition for Mrs. Clinton to go to China, I will be angry about it.”

He added: “The release of Harry Wu does not mean the Chinese human rights record has improved. The police told me, ‘You are lucky you are an American citizen.’ This made me very sad.”

In a detailed account of his ordeal, Wu said he was keenly aware of the special treatment he received as an American. He was kept in an air-conditioned room in a medical building, was fed the same food as his guards and was told to shave before the monthly visits of a U.S. consular official.

Wu, 58, who spent 19 years in Chinese camps as a young man before coming to the United States in 1985 and becoming a citizen, has made a career of publicizing abuses in the labor camp system, returning in secret to China four times to compile his reports.

It was during his most recent visit, June 19, that he was seized at the border. This week he was convicted of spying and stealing state secrets and sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment and expulsion. Immediately after his sentence was read, he said, the judge smiled, patted him on the arm, and told him he could go home.

At the start of his two months of interrogations, Wu said, “I played it tough because I didn’t know what they wanted. They said, ‘Do you know what is your problem? You have caused us big trouble. We have wanted you for a long time.’

“I said, ‘Here I am, like meat on the chopping block for you. Whatever you want, you can chop.”’

The interrogations focused on television documentaries he had made about conditions in Chinese labor camps, Wu said.