Forced Organ Harvesting in China – “Unprecedented Evil on this Planet”
China’s name continues to occupy the American news headlines in recent years, becoming an issue that’s almost certain to come up in every presidential debate. However, one topic concerning China has been largely underreported or perhaps “tactfully” left out. It pertains to an act so heinous that investigators have called it “an unprecedented evil on this planet”. And that topic is the state-sanctioned mass organ harvesting that is still going on in China today.
When a transplant patient skips years in line on the waiting list to go to China for surgery, an organ trade deal is often made. For hundreds of thousands of dollars, a matching organ can be “miraculously” found in weeks or even days in China. If the first transplant is not a match, there might be two, three, or four more organs waiting in the pipeline. How did China become so “advanced” in the science of organ matching?
The truth is, these so-called “voluntarily” donated organs might in fact be coming from one of prisoners of conscience, which include Uighur Muslims, Tibetans, underground Christians, and especially Falun Gong practitioners. Millions of them have been and still are incarcerated in China’s black jails, ready to be killed for their organs, on demand.
If this sounds too hard to believe, this 56-minute documentary video Hard to Believe may help dispel your doubts.
In 2006, when news first broke out that large number of Falun Gong practitioners were being killed to harvest their organs, investigators set out to find the truth.
Independent Investigations Lead to Same Conclusion
David Kilgour, former Canadian Secretary of State for the Asia Pacific region, and international human rights lawyer David Matas, conducted undercover interviews with doctors throughout 12 provinces in China and concluded that the aforementioned allegation was regrettably true.
American investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann came to the same conclusion via his own research, with results published in “2014 - The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem.”
In 2016, the three joined forces to release an updated report built on their decade-long investigation “An Update”.
Dozens of other government and NGO reports, academic articles, and documentaries confirmed similar findings, according to International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China.
Transplant programs of hundreds of Chinese hospitals were meticulously examined. Information from media reports, propaganda materials, medical journals, hospital websites and deleted sites in archives were pieced together, and cross checked with hospital revenue, bed counts, purchase of immunosuppressive drugs, surgical personnel, etc.
Just to what extent do China’s organ transplant practices break away from the norm? Let’s examine the facts.
Unreasonably Short Organ Waiting Times
A kidney or liver transplant patient in the United States normally waits about 2 to 3 years before a matching donor can be identified. Since 2000, the waiting time in China for a matching donor has fallen to weeks, days, or even as short as a few hours in the case of emergency transplants [1][2][3]. The China Liver Transplant Registry in 2006 reported that over 25% of transplants were “emergency.” [4]
How is this possible for a country where a voluntary organ donation system has been virtually non-existent before 2013?
Before 2009, there was a mere total of 120 voluntary donations in China [5]. By 2017, this number reached about 260,000 (only 0.02% of Chinese population) [6]. To put things into perspective, the U.S. maintains the world’s most advanced organ donation system, with more than 145 million [7] people (44% of the population) registered as donors. An organ match apparently is no easy task by Western standard.
Huge Gap Between Transplant Volume and the Number of Criminal Executions
The Chinese regime has openly admitted in the past that most of the transplant organs came from executed prisoners. According to Amnesty International [8] and Dui Hua Foundation [9], the number of death row inmates estimates to about several thousand per year in China, and trending downward since 2000. About 50% of these inmates do not qualify to be donors because of unhealthy lifestyles. However, the Chinese government reported an annual average of 10,000 to 20,000 transplant surgery volume in the mid 2000s [10]. Kilgore, Matas, and Gutmann estimated through their joint investigation in 2016 that the actual number might be 5 times higher, between 60,000 to 100,000 per year.
How to explain this gap between the number of donors and recipients? Where did the rest of the organs come from?
Boom in Transplant Industry Coincided with Persecution of Falun Gong
In March 2010, He Xiaoshun, a member of the Expert Committee of the Human Organ Donation Commission and vice president of the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, stated to the Southern Weekly [11] newspaper, “The year 2000 was a watershed for the organ transplant industry in China…the number of liver transplants in 2000 reached 10 times that of 1999; in 2005, the number tripled further [since 2000].” A staggering 30-fold jump in 6 years!
From 1999 to 2006, the number of transplant centers increased by 300% from 150 to more than 600 centers in China [12]. Such an expansion in infrastructure suggests that authorities were confident in an abundant supply of organs, even without a voluntary donation program.
That confidence may very well have come from the knowledge that millions of Falun Gong practitioners were detained in China’s black jails.
Falun Gong is an ancient Chinese spiritual discipline in the Buddhist tradition. It resembles Yoga or Taichi on the surface with its distinctive gentle exercises and sitting meditation, while at its core lies moral principles centered on “Truthfulness, Compassion, Tolerance”.
After being introduced in China in 1992, Chinese people were immediately attracted by its health benefits and holistic approach to wellbeing. By 1999, Falun Gong had rapidly grown to be the most popular practice of the sort in China, with an estimated 100 million followers, well exceeding the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) membership of 60 million at the time, and from all walks of life.
Dictator then Jiang Zemin was struck by the reality that Communist ideology was losing ground to spiritual teachings deeply rooted in traditional Chinese culture. To continue the Party’s rule of terror, Jiang wasted no time in launching a nation-wide crackdown on Falun Gong in July 1999, with the order to “ruin their reputation, bankrupt them financially and eliminate them physically”.
Millions of everyday citizens in China have since been fired from their jobs, expelled from school, jailed, tortured, or killed simply for practicing Falun Gong.
David Matas revealed in his research that Falun Gong practitioners who has survived this persecution were consistent in describing their experiences of brutality, reporting having undergone periodic organ “health checks” for no clear reason. For example, large samples of blood drawn repeatedly and unusual eye exams that didn’t seem to be consistent with standard health examinations.
For the millions detained in concentration camps or prisons – China’s Gulag system – how many have been entered into China’s data system for organ transplant matching?
On Demand Organ Transplant
Unlike anywhere else in the world, Chinese transplant surgeries are being done on demand. In the documentary Medical Genocide, Professor Jacob Lavee, President of the Israel Transplantation Society, shared a story of a patient who was told by an insurance company to go to China in two weeks for a scheduled heart transplant surgery in 2005. As a physician, he was shocked by the fact that such a surgery could be arranged ahead of time. “Someone has to die on the very day of the operation.” (Dr. Lavee spearheaded the effort to urge the Israeli government to take action against “transplant tourism”. In 2008, a law was passed to ban Israelis from going to China for transplants and to disallow insurance companies to reimburse expenses for illegal organ transplant operations anywhere around the world.)
In the same video, it was disclosed that one hospital in Southwest China claimed to have “donors seeking matched recipients”, and also promised that “in case of failure, [we will] continue to perform transplants until one is successful.”
David Kilgour encountered a similar case that became engraved in his mind. A man went to China twice for transplant surgeries. Four sets of kidneys were brought to him the first time, but none turned out to be compatible. Three or four months later, he returned to China and another four sets of kidneys were offered to him. One eventually worked, “but eight human beings had been killed…”. Kilgour described China’s organ harvesting practices as “a crime against humanity.”
The China Tribunal (an Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China) chaired by the prominent war crimes prosecutor Sir Geoffrey Nice, QC., echoed this sentiment by declaring the Chinese regime’s forced organ harvesting as one of the world’s “worst atrocities” committed in this century.
In March 2020, the China Tribunal reached its final judgement after reviewing over 6 months of witness statements and somber personal accounts. The Tribunal’s members concluded, unanimously and beyond reasonable doubt, that forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced in China for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims.
Specifically, it confirmed that “Falun Gong practitioners have been one – and probably the main – source of organ supply.”
“…victim for victim and death for death, the gassing of the Jews by the Nazis, the massacre by the Khmer Rouge or the butchery to death of the Rwanda Tutsis may not be worse than cutting out the hearts, other organs and the very souls of living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people.” It wrote.
Furthermore, “Governments and any who interact in any substantial way with the PRC [People’s Republic of China] …… should now recognize that they are, to the extent revealed above, interacting with a criminal state.”
Mounting evidences have consistently pointed to a Holocaust-like mass murder occurring in the digital age of 21st century, right in front of our eyes. While flocking to China for a much-needed organ replacement, foreign patients including Americans may unwittingly become accomplices to this despicable crime. Government offices and medical communities, to an extent have been informed about this horrendous atrocity. The U.S. Congress passed a resolution in the House in 2016 to condemn this inhuman practice, but twenty years have passed, the nightmare of forced organ harvesting in China is still ongoing.
“This is a new form of genocide, and it’s using the most respected members of society to implement it. This is one of the central tests of our time. We can’t avoid this any longer.” – Ethan Gutmann
Interested readers may refer to the following links for more information.