Harry Wu, activist and former
political prisoner of China,
and Ethan Gutmann, journalist and author, will co-present a talk, “China's
E-Police State:
American IT Companies and American Values,” on Wednesday, Feb. 25, at 7 p.m. in the F.W.
Olin Center
Auditorium.
Their talk is sponsored by Union's
East Asian Studies program and the Department of Political Science.
Wu, activist and former political
prisoner in the People's Republic of China,
is the foremost U.S.
campaigner against the human rights violations committed by the Laogai system.
Beginning when he was 23 years old, Harry Wu served 19 years in the Laogai
prison system for criticizing the policies of the Chinese Communist Party.
Since his release he has worked to expose the human rights abuses of the Laogai. In research-gathering trips across China,
posing undercover as a U.S.
businessman or police officer, Wu has documented Laogai camps, detention
centers, and instances of Laogai produced goods being exported to the U.S.
He serves as the executive director of the Laogai Research Foundation. He has
also authored three books on the Laogai including: The Chinese Gulag (1992); Bitter
Winds – A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag (1994), and Troublemaker – One Man's Crusade Against
China's Cruelty (1996).
Gutmann is the author of Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire, and
Betrayal (Encounter Books, 2004). He is a visiting fellow at the Project
for the New American Century.
In his recent essay in The Weekly Standard, “Who Lost China's
Internet?,” Gutmann explored U.S. corporate complicity in Chinese Internet
censorship, and the transfer of surveillance technologies to Chinese state
security, while calling for a combined public and private response to China's
Internet crackdown. He has also written extensively on security issues, the
growth of Chinese nationalism, and the U.S.
business scene in Beijing for Investor's Business Daily, the Washington Times, the Asian Wall Street Journal, and other
publications.
For the last several years, Gutmann
was based in Beijing, serving as a
senior counselor for APCO China, the leading public affairs firm in China.
He also worked with Beijing Television as an executive producer. Previously, he
was chief investigator for the America's
Voice Television network in Washington,
and a foreign policy analyst for the Brookings Institution. He received both
his BA and his master's in political science and international relations from Columbia
University.