Laogai Research Foundation (LRF) executive director Harry Wu and LRF Washington, DC director Nicole Kempton participated in this year's Independent Media in Exile Conference organized by the World Press Freedom Committee.  Wu spoke during the conference's opening reception (see his speech reprinted below) and Kempton presented Friday on LRF's Laogai Archives, a growing online collection of documents, photographs, and videos which uncover currently censored information by the Chinese government. The Laogai Archives also includes LRF's prison database, an extensive listing of the prisons and reeducation through labor camps that makeup China's Laogai.

Read more about the conference and Harry Wu's speech from the World Press Committee's "Interesting Times":

Harry Wu knows all about the consequences of defying a dictatorial regime. After he had the temerity to criticize the Communist Party, he was sent to the Laogai, the Chinese gulag, for 19 horrendous years.

His jailers were able to break many things, but never his will to survive and prevail. He eventually was forced into exiled in 1985 and arrived in the United States "with 45 dollars in my pocket," he says.

He quickly started working on showing the world the horrors of the Laogai. But not until the age of the Internet did he really become a true thorn on the side of the Beijing bosses.

He founded the Laogai Research Foundation, perhaps the world's most comprehensive archive of original documents from the darkest years of the Chinese gulag.  (More after the jump)

Today he spoke at the opening ceremony of WPFC's Independent Media in Exile Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, and praised this wonderful tool called the Internet.

"The internet is a great tool for all of us in exile who wish to reach an audience in our home countries, and is a powerful force for freedom of expression," he said. Thanks to the Internet, "history will never again be erased, and repressive regimes everywhere will be powerless to stop the voices of truth and freedom from being heard."

Today, his voice certainly sounded loud and clear and there was nothing the Chinese censors could do about it.

Here is the full content of his remarks:

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I am very pleased to have the chance to speak to you tonight. Thank you to Sida, and to Fojo Media Institute and the World Press Freedom Committee of Freedom House for organizing this important conference.

In order to let you know a little bit about me and how I came to be an exiled Chinese, I would like to begin by sharing with you two critical movements in China’s recent history: the classicide of the early 1950s and the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s.

The world has condemned genocide again and again, and yet few in the West are aware of the victims of what I refer to as “classicide”— the extermination of an entire class of people. Michael Mann first used this term “classicide.” I use this term because genocide, as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, does not include the category of  “class.” This means that the mass killing of a group due to their religion is considered genocide; the international community does not, however, consider the mass killing of a group due to their class to be genocide. Thus the term classicide is important for describing what happened to members of the upper class in China in the early years of Communism.

Classicide in China targeted an unprecedented percentage of the population. Particularly vicious in the years immediately following the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, class violence was constant through the Mao era, and was encouraged by the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, in order to crush all dissent and control the people through fear.

Classicide in China began even before the CCP won the civil war. When the CCP entered a new region, one of the ways they would keep power over the locals was to encourage the peasant class, which was the majority, to turn against the landlords, who owned most of the land. Though the CCP called this “Land Reform,” in reality it was little more than vigilante justice and mob violence. Anyone owning land, no matter how little, became a target of this violence. These landlords were publicly humiliated, beaten, and in many cases killed. Their children and relatives found themselves at the bottom of the new socialist society.

After the CCP came to power, it continued its Land Reform policies on a much larger scale. In what became known as the “Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries” campaign, the Party divided the population along class lines: landlords, capitalists, rich peasants, middle-class peasants, and poor peasants. Former Kuomintang or KMT soldiers and supporters were also targeted. All but the poor peasants were subjected to criticism, and landlords, capitalists, and rich peasants were given particularly harsh treatment, subjected to long prison sentences, violence, and even execution. A person’s class was determined by that of his parents and grandparents. This meant that no matter a person’s current economic situation, if his or her parents or grandparents had at one point owned any amount of land, that person was labeled a landlord.

Classes were also divided according to previous political views, including  “Rightists,” “Counterrevolutionaries,” “Historical Counterrevolutionaries” and “Rotten Elements.” The term Rightist was typically used to define someone belonging to a faction within the Party not completely in-line with Mao, while Counterrevolutionary was used for members of the political opposition.   “Historical counterrevolutionaries” were those unfortunate enough to have worked with the KMT government, even at the lowest of levels, or to have conducted political activities in the past that could be seen as ‘opposing the Party.’ The label was also applied to the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of these individuals. The term “Rotten Element” was perhaps the most arbitrary of them all, and could be used against anyone who fell out of favor with the local party secretary, often resulting in job loss and other economic and social consequences. No matter one’s economic situation or political outlook, once assigned a class label a person could not escape it, even in death.

No one is sure how many people died during these early campaigns. Some estimate that at least a million landlords were executed during this time, and the true number could be even higher. The combination of the violent Land Reform campaign and the mass executions and arrests of the “Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries” campaign resulted in the near total elimination of China’s landlord class, as well as the silencing of political dissent.  Many of those who managed to escape death or arrest in these early campaigns were targeted in Mao’s subsequent campaigns.

My own family was targeted early on for being capitalists. My father had been a banker in Shanghai before the revolution. We managed to make it through the earliest years in relative safety, probably because we lived in a city. But once I went to college, it because very clear to me that I was not from a “good class background.” I was given a smaller stipend than the students from revolutionary or peasant backgrounds; I was repeatedly asked to join political groups on campus in order to prove myself. Still, my father wisely told me to stay out of politics, and I obeyed his wishes.

Then in 1957, Mao began the “Hundred Flowers Campaign.” Everyone was encouraged to speak out publicly about the political situation, and to offer their ideas on how to improve the government. Many spoke out; I did not. Finally, a meeting was called and I was singled out for not criticizing the government. I was tired of constant criticism from my classmates, and I was afraid if I did not speak I would be targeted. So I finally spoke out. I criticized the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and I criticized the unfairness of Mao’s earlier political campaigns. I had fallen into their trap. Not long afterwards, I was labeled a “Counterrevolutionary Rightist.” In 1960 I was arrested and thrown into the Laogai, China’s gulag, and that was when the real nightmare began.

I spent the next 19 years in the Laogai. I watched my friends in prison starve to death. I worked long hours in fields and in coal mines. I fought other prisoners and stole food. I was released from prison in 1979 a middle-aged man. My whole family was destroyed by Mao’s campaigns. As soon as I had the opportunity, I fled to the United States. Years later I would go back to China to document the Laogai, and for that I would be permanently exiled. Although my memories of China are filled with sadness, the fact that I can never go home again is also a great loss.

I tell you these stories for two reasons. The first is that these stories are a part of who I am and what I have experienced. But the second, and perhaps more important reason for sharing these stories with you today is that I cannot share these stories freely in my homeland of China. Even though these terrible events took place more than fifty years ago, the truth about what happened continues to be censored by the Communist regime to this day. The Communist regime remains in power; they do not want the people to know the crimes they have committed.

China suffered from large-scale classicide, followed by the Anti-Rightist Campaign, followed by a famine, followed by the Cultural Revolution. And yet there is no Truth and Reconciliation Commission of China. There are no museums inside China to honor those who suffered. The only history books that attempt to tell the truth are written outside of China. This makes it difficult for individuals like me to come to terms with their suffering. And it makes it impossible for the society to learn from the violence of the past, which is the only way to prevent violence from happening again in the future. Even if today China becomes a democratic country, still the Chinese people must know the truth about those dark years.

On October 1st of this year, the 61st anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, we opened the online Laogai Archives. Although the site is nowhere near completion, the Laogai Archives contains original Chinese government documents from the Mao period through the present day, which have been scanned so that anyone, anywhere in the world, can read these original documents. We also have put photographs, videos, and our foundation’s reports online, as well as all of the information we have on the Laogai, the forced labor camps that imprisoned me fifty years ago and that imprison Liu Xiaobo and millions of others today.

In our own small way, we hope to counter the decades of suppression, silence, and censorship, and show the Chinese people the truth about their history and their government. The true extent of the horrors of Soviet Russia were not known until the opening of the Soviet archives. Our archives are much smaller, and far from complete. But we do have one advantage over the Soviet archives—we are opening our archives in the age of the internet. The internet is a great tool for all of  us in exile who wish to reach an audience in our home countries, and is a powerful force for freedom of expression. Repressive regimes may try to censor the internet, but they are never fully successful—the people want to know the truth. Today, despite investing millions to block information from coming into China, millions of Chinese get around the so-called Great Firewall with ease. So, we may have fewer documents than the Soviet archives, but what we do have is much more accessible than anyone could have imagined even a few years ago.

I mentioned Liu Xiaobo, the recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and a long time champion of freedom and democracy in China. Liu Xiaobo saw the power of the internet, both for exile media and for dissidents to express themselves from within China. In an article he wrote in 2006 for our Chinese-language online magazine, Observe China, Liu Xiaobo said:

"As someone who writes for a living, and as someone who participated in the 1989 movement and who joined the democratic movement [in China], my gratitude towards the Internet for personal and public reasons cannot be easily expressed."

The success of Observe China is due almost entirely to the internet. Although our website is hosted and managed in America, most of our contributors and readers are actually within China. Indeed, as more and more mainland Chinese gain access to the internet, I think that the distinction between exile media and dissident media is increasingly blurred.

The Chinese government also realizes the power of the exile and dissident media and the internet. When he was arrested, the evidence of Liu Xiaobo’s “crime” included three articles he wrote for our Observe China website.

Recently, another regular contributor, the author Yu Jie, was detained for a day and questioned about several articles he had written for us. Now, in the short run, this shows the power of the Chinese regime to monitor the internet and those dissidents who publish articles online. But it also shows how powerless they are—they were powerless to stop Liu Xiaobo and Yu Jie from publishing these articles.

They were powerless to stop the thousands of Chinese who regularly read our magazine. I encourage all of you to support exile media, and to support groups who create software for getting around government censors.

With your help, exile and dissident media will continue to flourish on the internet. With your help, history will never again be erased, and repressive regimes everywhere will be powerless to stop the voices of truth and freedom from being heard.

Thank you.