Harry Wu, a prominent Chinese human rights activist who has died in exile aged 79, spent years campaigning to expose and abolish China’s Soviet-style work camps and the system of “re-education through labour”.
He survived 19 years in a Chinese gulag after being labelled a counter - revolutionary during the Mao Zedong-era purges of outspoken intellectuals of the 1950s and was sentenced to life in prison. In a 2013 interview, Wu said when he was handed his sentence he felt “like an iron gate had closed behind me”.
Rehabilitated with many former rightists in 1979, he tried his hand as a geology professor. An opportunity to move to California in the 1980s also opened the door to his life’s work — exposing the conditions behind that iron gate.