Laogai Research Foundation executive director Harry Wu made a visit to the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, to congratulate his friend Congressman Frank Wolf on the release of his new book, Prisoner of Conscience. Harry met Rep. Wolf across the street from the Heritage Foundation, and the two "prisoners of conscience" walked in together for the press conference on the book release.
First elected to US Congress in 1981 and now the most senior legislator from Virginia, Rep. Wolf grew to champion human rights and religious freedom around the globe after witnessing starvation and death in famine-struck Ethiopia, and meeting persecuted dissidents in Ceauşescu's Communist Romania. As he visited some of the most dangerous places in the world, he saw firsthand the need for members of Congress to speak out for persecuted people around the globe. In Prisoner of Conscience, he shares intimate stories of his adventures from the halls of political power to other dangerous places around the world and what he has learned along the way.
During the Q&A session, Harry Wu asked Rep. Wolf why the Obama administration has rarely confronted China on its human rights violations. Harry mentioned China's status as the second-greatest organ-transplanting country in the world, 95% (more than 10,000
organs) of which come from executed prisoners. He touched on the forced abortion and forced sterilization resulting from the One Child Policy, and reminded that Roman Catholicism, Falun Gong, house churches, and other religions are still illegal inside China.
Harry thanked Rep. Wolf for his work on the 1992
Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the US and China, forbidding the Chinese from importing prison-made products into the United States. He then lamented, "But they continue! What is our Customs service doing? Many, many Christmas lights, garments, tools, even auto parts continue to come to the United States, but we forget about it. That's why I really want to ask: What is the Obama administration doing today about this?"
Rep. Wolf replied, "They are doing very little. I think they're almost doing nothing." He mentioned a scene in his book, in which he and
Rep. Chris Smith visited Beijing Prison Number One, which was in fact a sock factory where imprisoned Tiananmen Square dissidents were manufacturing golfing socks for export to the West. By the time the US Commerce department identified the injustice, the sock-making façade had closed and the prison had converted itself into some other factory.
Rep. Wolf elicited gasps from the audience when he described how surgical vans drive up to execution sites to extract the freshest organs from executed prisoners with select blood types, fetching up to $55000 per organ. "It's not always a dissident; it may be a pickpocketer," he added.
He went on to quote
The Boxer, his favorite Simon and Garfunkel song: "Man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."
Harry Wu and the LRF are enormously grateful to Rep. Frank Wolf for forcing Americans to hear the cries of China's millions of laogai prisoners and not to disregard to victims of state oppression around the world.
