At first i did not look forward to reading this book. But i was at work, and that was the only one i had in my pack so i started reading it. I could not put it down, it was interesting and well written. If anyone has an interest in the Gulag system's, i'd recomend reading this one along with the Russian Gulag books to get an idea of how diffent cultures treat their prisoners.

I have to say that this is a truly fantastic book!

When I first bought it I have to admit I thought It was by the 'other' Kate Saunders (the not quite so famous romantic author)-I have to admit I thought it was a funny title for a romance!!- but despite my usual preference for the softer side of life I loved every beautifully crafted word of this.

All I can say is, if this Kate Saunders wrote romantic fiction as well, I would be first in line to buy it.

"For 19 years, I was one of those prisoners, held for vague offenses against my homeland. My captors said they wanted to reform me, but really, what they wanted was to work me until I dropped. I was lost in the camps that are strategically scattered all over China, where millions of prisoners produce good for Chinese industry. The authorities have different names for the different stages of their camps. I am an alumnus of three stages: reform through labor (laogai), reeducation through labor (laojiao), forced-labor placement (jiuye). For my purposes, I call the entire system laogai." Harry Wu

I have lived or traveled to many different countries excluding China. A friend ask me recently to go to China and I found myself strangely disinterested. China IS an interesting place, a place of the Great Wall, of delicious cooking, fine silk, martial arts, of the original pasta and gun powder, a country full of tradition and culture...so, what's the problem here, I asked myself. Then I remembered a book that really GOT to me...."Troublemaker" by Harry Wu.

As strange as it sounds, I don't want to go to a place where with a bald face, capriciously and callously, insanely and puzzlingly, people are mistreated. Sounds vague? Read on.

There are places in the world where atrocities against humans by other humans are still committed. They give it the name "human rights violation" but it should be called, "people being cruel, mean and destructive to other people." Africa comes to mind. And, North Korea too and other places in the world. It isn't just the developing countries. Even in the U.S., things like this happen. You don't think so? How about the Oklahoma city bombing? How about the dragging death of a black man in Jasper, Texas by some white men who chose the man just because of the different color of his skin?

China is no worse or no better than other places where human are mistreated and humans suffer, but I just did not want to go to China...I was creeped out after reading Harry Wu's book.

Harry Wu spent 19 years in a hard labor camp for making a statement against the Soviet strike down of an Hungarian political uprising. He was a student at the time and idealistic and still very much innocent. He criticized the Soviet's policies not knowing that the Chinese had backed Moscow on what happened in Hungary AND that for making this one statement, his life would be altered forever. When Harry got out of the laogai, the Chinese gulag, he was 42 years old and it was 1979. For ONE remark, he lost 19 years of his life as well as his wife and his youth. His remark was probably more benign than this Amazon.com review I am writing.

What can I say to you...find and read this book if you are interested in China. It will tell you about what goes on under the surface of every day life in China. It isn't about communism vs. democracy, free market vs. collectivism, it is about a human being being mistreated by the collective just because it can happen. Does this sound like science fiction? It sounds like "1984" that people's thoughts and views are sensored and punishments are doled out for them.

So each time you go to a discount store and buy silk flowers, each time you see a "made in China" label on some cheap trinket, you will know that it came from the labor of people shut off in laogais which are scattered all over China, just hidden from view, hoping to go unnoticed. And what of secret organ harvasting and sales? It is still going on: "prisoners" are executed sometimes for their vital organs. If you are young and healthy, then you maybe a target because your organs would be valuable to some rich old man in China or Hong Kong.

Find out what goes on in the world...many things besides the wonderful world of Amazon.com goes on. We are so previlleged to read and be "educated" and write and live this wonderful blessed life, but many of our fellow human beings are in hell on Earth. This book makes you remember this.

This book is a very interesting and thought provoking account of Harry Wu's courage in travelling to China to try and expose more of the injustices of the Chinese forced labour laogai prisons.

Harry Wu's heroic account of his travels to China to document human rights abuses is an incredible read. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in hearing the truth about China's barbaric policies towards its own citizens. Mr. Wu helps to uncover the socialist mindset held by the Chinese and their leaders which allows them to deny that forced labor exists and that the laogai are actually "reform" camps. I would like to thank Mr. Wu for revealing the truth of what goes on behind the wall of lies that the communists have erected. Throughout the book you will be brought to tears at the inhumanities experienced by the Chinese "workers" and the book brings them vividly to light. It would surprise me if anyone could not understand why after serving over a decade in the camps that Wu would want to return. He makes it clear that he wants noone else to suffer the injustices he has faced. Thank you Mr. Wu. You are truly an American and a hero. I admire you greatly and hope you continue your work.

Syndicated pundit Don Feder once referred to modern day China as "the reincarnation of the Third Reich with lo mien noodles." Harry Wu's autobiographical tome of the hellish conditions inside Chinese labor camps lends substantial credence to that caustic description. As tragic as the nightmare he endured is, the situation in modern China has in many ways has deteriorated even further. Harry Wu is one of many children; such a family would never be allowed under the current one-child policy. Actually, it is easy to see why a depraved and violent population controlling policy has been instituted. As the Wus demonstrate, the family is the hardest institution to destroy, and with large and strong families the norm, China's insensate government would be hampered in its drive for domination over all aspects of life.

More than a few of the horrors he documents have a frightening familiarity. Anyone familiar with the opinion-controlling practices currently at place Ivy League colleges will see an eerie counterpart to China's universities in the late 1950. Harry Wu writes of "the official encouragement of divergent opinions" as the nation transformed over to socialism. Like the modern diversity fad, the semantics did not match the policy. "Divergent opinions" yielded blind devotion to the Communist state, just as diversity training demands the surrender of individuality in favor of group labels and a collective mentality. Hostility to religion has become chic among the U.S. hoi polloi which also corresponds to China's ferociously enforced atheism. As a boy Harry Wu attended a Catholic School, but with little warning the nuns and priests were forcefully expelled from China. In another scary correlations, certain segments of American illuminati similarly disdain large families as impractical or burdensome upon women.

America's most admirable heroes are now under heavy fire from much of the elite establishment. Who hasn't heard George Washington denigrated as a slave owner or Abraham Lincoln as a racist who reluctantly freed the slaves? China also mastered the art of rewriting history. Wu discusses how Confucius was condemned as a reprobate because his teachings brilliantly controverted Communists doctrine.

The labor camp conditions he graphically describes are inhuman and heartbreaking. The fact that he even survived such brutality is astounding; his willingness to return to China and document the still thriving barbarism is nothing short of miraculous. Wu deserves much credit for that act of doughty selflessness.

As the Unites States Congress prepares to debate extending China's undeserved Trade Status, "Bitter Winds" should be read by every concerned American, and those issues should be raised with his or her congressman.

I've been very aware of the Holocaust and all its horrors and injustices. I have seen movies, read articles, read books; all the information is there. But the Cultural Revolution? I only knew that it happened in China - I wasn't even sure what years it occured. I had no concept of its irrational and unjust practices. No idea of the horrible lengths of time people were incarcerated, no idea of the revolting conditions and unspeakable starvation. Harry Wu is right. He did need to write this and inform us. I kept thinking back to my own life during the years he was describing. 1960-61-62? graduating from college, getting married and having my first child. Did I have my head in the sand or did we not have the coverage of events that we have today? I didn't know (or maybe wasn't interested) in events on the other side of the world - except to urge my children to clean their plates because children in China were starving. I had no idea! Harry Wu writes candidly, clearly and courageously. This is a book that I will not forget and will urge friends to read. I travel to China in June for 3 weeks. All the people I will see who are my age (62) experienced some form of repression, indignity, involvement - the list goes on. How I admire them and honor them for their perserverance. Thank you, Harry Wu!

Returning in 1994 from China as a Fulbright Scholar, I could not shake China off. It has become part of my consciousness forever. After writing an essay on classical and modern Chinese literature, with Confucius, Tu Fu, Lu Xun, Lu Wenfu, and other classical and modern writers fresh in my mind, I reread the writings of Fang Lizhi and continued to struggle to understand my experience in China. Appalled by the injustices of a political system that could imprison and destroy so many members of its own culture, from all walks of life, I then read in November of 1994 Harry Wu's Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag.

Arrested in 1960 for reasons no real judicial system in the world would recognize, Harry Wu spent the next nineteen years of his life in one brutally subhuman labor camp after another until he was released in 1979 and eventually given permission to leave China for the United States. The victim of slave labor, starvation, and torture, Wu, at times broken physically and near death, endured with the hope of some day telling the world of his experience:

"My travels in 1991, when I returned to China to film [secretly] the conditions within the labor camps, fulfilled part of a consuming mission. Even though I had found safety in the United States, I had never found rest. Always I recalled the faces I had left behind. Always I worried that while I had escaped, the labor-reform system continued to operate, day by day, year by year, largely unnoticed, unchallenged, and therefore unchanged. I felt urgently the responsibility not just to disclose but to publicize the truth about the Communist Party's mechanisms of control, whatever the risk to me, whatever the discomfort of telling my story. Each time I revisited my past, I hoped it would be the last time, but I had decided that my experiences belonged not only to me and not only to China's history. They belonged to humanity." (285-286)

Like so many accounts of the Soviet gulag, Harry Wu's is a voice of witness, of moral memory, compelled from within to speak the truth in the hope of finding justice before the universal court of humankind. Without relating the many tragic incidents of Wu's book, let me just say his words sank into me and left me deeply shaken, struggling further to understand the country I had just visited, struggling further to understand what the African-American writer Ralph Ellison was fond of calling "human complexity." Fang Lizhi's own words on Harry Wu's 1994 book are worth quoting: "The injustices he chronicles are still going on today. His special point of view on history and politics makes it possible to understand why a democratic China is a dream that shall never die." I was once more deeply distressed when Harry Wu was arrested in June of 1995, while entering China as an American citizen and on an American passport. His ordeal confirmed for me the side of Chinese political reality that I had painfully sensed and observed while there, and which all so unfortunately still continues as attested by the suppression of the Falun Gong and others.

It was while visiting Shenzhen, the city of the new economic policy, that I noticed the assistant to the mayor pick up from the meeting room table a copy of a speech he proceeded to read to our Fulbright group. Well worn, soiled, with the pages curling from repeated reading to one collection of foreigners after another, the paper described in glowing terms the achievements of Shenzhen's economic miracle. After handling us in apparently the usual way, when someone perceptively asked what the residency status of the three million workers in Shenzhen was, the mayor's assistant tried to put a good face on the fact that two million were on temporary internal work papers, primarily male, since a proportionate number of women and children are excluded from the

"city," and subject to dismissal at any time back to the countryside. Looking out the bus window as we drove to the train station to Hong Kong, I could not but think of the Soviet Union's Potemkin villages.

Harry Wu's 1995 experience further confirms that such injustices as he chronicles are continuing today. In 1994 one of the unexpected sights I saw with my own eyes, by chance, in crowded Beijing traffic, was a man handcuffed and blindfolded, sitting in the back of a jeep with two policemen, on his way somewhere he could not see. A few days later a Chinese friend who grew up in Beijing told me that only political prisoners are ever blindfolded. Far from China needing business now and human rights later, China needs, as all countries need, human rights and democracy first and foremost and forever.

I remember reading that Eleanor Roosevelt, as chairwoman, served in 1947 on the Human Rights Commission with China's representative, Dr. Peng-Chun Chang, as vice-chairman. Together, along with members of eighteen other nations, they helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. According to her own testimony, Dr. Chang repeatedly challenged the Western representatives, reminded them of the importance of the ideas of Confucius on human rights, and argued philosophically for their incorporation along side those of Thomas Aquinas and other Western thinkers. It is historically accurate to say the resulting document is truly representative of the best of China's own philosophical thinking on human rights, basic human values.

I do not know whether Fang Lizhi or Harry Wu is aware of the contribution of China to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I do know I believe the following words by Fang Lizhi articulate the most profound vision of human life and experience now available to the consciousness of late twentieth-century human beings, East or West, a vision toward which we all must

continue struggling to evolve:

"The values that underlie human dignity are common to all peoples. They are the universal standards of human rights that apply without regard to race, nationality, language, or creed. Symbolized by the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these principles are increasingly accepted and respected throughout the world." ("Keeping the Faith" 262)