discuss politics. He felt that he had already lost the years of his youth and he wanted to establish a personal life and enjoy his freedom. But slowly he was drawn back into the discussion about prison camps in China and his own experiences. In 1986, Wu was asked to talk about his experiences in the camps in front of a class of college students at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As Wu spoke he started to cry as he felt he was being the voice for the many seemingly forgotten prisoners who had died. Focus on the laogai regime In 1988 Wu met with the curator of the East Asian Studies department at the Hoover Institution at Stanford to explain his interest in studying China's network of forced-labor prison camps. Wu did not have academic experience in social studies, only that of a geologist, but his stories about his time in the camps intrigued the curator, who invited Wu to pursue research as a visiting scholar. From that time on, Wu started compiling a catalog of the labor prison camp system within mainland China. Known in China as the laogai, which translates as "reform through labor", Wu eventually published Laogai: The Chinese Gulag in 1992. In the early 1990s, Wu made several trips into China in order to gather the evidence needed to prove the existence of the labor camps to the outside world — part of this involved visiting various camps and secretly recording images in photo and video. In 1990, Senators Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), and Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) invited Wu to testify before the Senate on laogai. In 1991, Wu did a story with Ed Bradley for 60 Minutes, in which they posed as businessmen interested in purchasing factory goods in mainland China that had been manufactured by the slave labor of Chinese prisoners. In 1992, Wu established the Laogai Research Foundation, a non-profit research and public education organization, considered a leading source for information on China's labor camps; and he was instrumental in proving that the organs of executed criminals were being used for organ transplants. Among Wu's supporters was the AFL–CIO. In addition, the center's stated purpose is to also "document and publicize other systemic human rights violations in China, including ... the coercive enforcement of China's 'one-child' population control policy, and Internet censorship and surveillance." In 1995, by then a U.S. citizen, he