Nov. 21, 1997 Contact Pauline Austin (541) 346-3129 EUGENE--A Chinese scholar who spent 19 years in jail for criticizing the Chinese Communist Party will speak at the University of Oregon on Tuesday, Nov. 25. Harry Wu will describe conditions inside Chinese prison camps in his speech, "Laogai: The Chinese Gulag." The talk begins at 7 p.m. in Room 150 of Columbia Hall, 1215 E. 13th Ave. Wu captured international attention during the summer of 1995 when soldiers arrested him as he legally entered China carrying videotape recording equipment. He was convicted in a four-hour show trial of "stealing state secrets" and sentenced to 15 years in prison. In the wake of an extensive international campaign on his behalf, the government decided to expel him instead. Thirty-five years earlier, Wu had become a prisoner in 1960 in the Laogai, the Chinese Gulag system, after government officials charged him with being a "counter revolutionary rightist." He spent the next 19 years in a dozen different forced-labor camps. While he was a prisoner, Wu was required to manufacture chemicals, mine for coal, build roads, clear land, and plant and harvest crops. "The world knows that perhaps a few people were killed at Tiananmen Square or directly afterward. Who knows? I say the incident at Tiananmen Square was peanuts. Millions of people have been lost in the Laogai," he says in his book, "Troublemaker." In that book and others, Wu writes of the horrendous conditions in Chinese prison camps, including descriptions of how officials ordered prisoners killed to supply the international demand for human organs for transplant. During his four-day visit to the university, Wu also will meet with students and community groups. The Oregon Humanities Center, the UO Visiting Scholars Fund, the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, the College of Arts and Sciences Dean's Office, the UO International Studies Program, the Associated Students of the University of Oregon Cultural Forum, Eugene Weekly and the UO Departments of Sociology and East Asian Languages and Literatures are sponsors of Wu's UO visit. For more information, contact Albert Leong, UO professor of Russian, (541) 346-4065. -30- #P-6032/Local,OrDailies,PDX