VIDEO: Inside the Chinese Communist Party’s Barbaric Organ Harvesting of Young, Healthy Minority Citizens
Some U.S. lawmakers are finally taking action
Jennifer Zeng is the kind of person you meet with whom you will never forget: softly spoken, wide-eyed, and with a smile that seems to mask a thorny past of pain. She was born in China’s Sichuan province in 1966, the year of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution – the massive sociopolitical purge to cement communism – began. And from her first breath, Jennifer's existence signified the ramifications of the oppression of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Since her father was part of a secret “intellectual” crowd, he was always on the oust of Beijing’s militant leadership and subsequently ostracized. Jennifer’s father’s unfavorable CCP standing meant Jennifer was born in a clinic where her parents couldn’t afford to pay bribes for the best medical care. As a result, a blood transfusion that had gone wrong in her first few days left her with hepatitis C. However, the liver-ravishing condition would, decades later, save Jennifer’s life.
“My childhood was very lonely. And because society looked down on my family, I was discriminated against. Even the school would not let me play with other kids,” she says wistfully, her eyes darting into another world. “We had to be very careful, and life was very hard.”
Jennifer did not know how much harder it would become.
It wasn’t until 1997, when Jennifer was in her early 30s and working in Beijing, that she stumbled upon furtively distributed books about an emerging spiritual adherence called Falun Gong. It was a belief system outside the purview of authoritarian leadership. For two years, she’d meet other practitioners to pray and meditate under the shroud of secrecy.
Then, in the summer of 1999, after hearing that other Falun Gong believers were apprehended, Jennifer went to the State Appeals Office to plead their case. But authorities abruptly rounded her up too. Inside the labor camps, time was double-edged. The seconds of torture were elastic — stretching on, with one always waiting for the tenuous band to snap.
CCP authorities arrested Jennifer for the second time in February 2000, dragging her out of her workplace – an investment consultant company. Officials viciously interrogated Jennifer at a labor camp in China’s Da Xing County. Before officials drew her blood, she informed them she had hepatitis C. While she was left to starve over the coming weeks, many around her – including her cellmate – dropped dead from forced feeding.
That’s when Jennifer realized that officials harvested the organs of Falun Gong practitioners to meet the demands of a government-run for-profit organ industry. She was eventually released from this torturous captivity, but not for long. That April, heavy-handed police officers plucked Jennifer from her sleep just after the witching hour with no explanation.
When Jennifer refused to renounce her religion as “evil,” prison guards lugged her into a filthy courtyard and whipped her raw with electric rods until she lost consciousness. Yet, the worst pain wasn’t physical. Instead, it was watching once bright-eyed humans descend behind the curtain of madness.
“At night, you would hear the screams of those tortured. Sometimes, I felt I would collapse and lose my sanity. That was the most terrible fear for me,” Jennifer continues. “You could see the moment when someone would lose their sanity – when they couldn’t handle the mental torture anymore. Their eyes changed. Their minds went somewhere else.”
As soon as she was freed months later, Jennifer knew China was no longer home. The only way she would survive was to be somewhere safe to tell the world what was happening to the Falun Gong practitioners.
The CCP declared in 2015 that it would no longer carry out forced organ harvesting – claiming only voluntary donors would have organs extracted after death. However, even with strong (and mounting) evidence from leading global investigators and testimony from the likes of Jennifer, the CCP has continued its unfathomable organ-harvesting assault against minorities, from the Falun Gong to the Muslim Uighurs to the Buddhist Tibetans.
Experts estimate that the human organ trafficking industry in China is worth $1 billion a year and is fueled by harvesting organs from China’s 1.5 million concentration camp inmates, namely members of marginalized detainees.
In 2019, a dedicated, seven-person-panel tribunal chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who led the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic in the International Criminal Trial for the former Yugoslavia, found that doctors could procure multiple organs for the same patient in quick succession in the case of rejection or have as spares.
“It is not uncommon in China for a patient to receive multiple transplants of the same organ,” the report noted. “Furthermore, the vast array of transplantable organ types and their prices openly listed on hospital websites give the impression that any body part can be replaced as needed.”
The Tribunal stated with “certainty” that “in China, forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time.”
But finally, U.S. lawmakers are at least taking a little action. In late March, the House of Representatives compellingly passed the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023 (HR 1154), authored by Rep. Chris Smith, Co-Chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, to combat this heinous practice. The legislation includes hefty sanctions on any person funding, sponsoring or facilitating organ harvesting or trafficking in persons for the removal of organs, criminal and civil penalties, and sanctions that include blocking and prohibiting involved persons from entering the United States.
Smith’s bill now moves to the Senate for further consideration.
“What has become apparent through open-source investigation and witness accounts is that there is one country, one country in particular, which is engaged in state-sponsored harvesting of human organs from otherwise healthy human beings, on a systematic and industrial scale in absolute violation of ethics governing transplantation,” states Smith, who has chaired 77 congressional hearings on the CCP’s egregious human rights abuse. “Under Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party, the cruelty of murdering 60,000 to 100,000 young victims every year—average age 28—to steal their organs is unimaginable.”
Indeed, this concept was for me too. Hence, in 2019, I started seeking survivors and associates to record their testimony and experience, hoping somehow that somewhere, somebody would listen. The chilling recounts still give me nightmares.
Han Yu was kidnapped on July 20, 2015, and detained for 37 days in Beijing’s Haidian District Detention Center. In May 2004 – three months after her father disappeared into a detention center – Han Yu received a call that her father, a Falun Gong practitioner, was dead. But it wasn’t until almost a month later that the family was allowed to view the body at Liangxiang District Xiao Zhuang village morgue, with dozens of authorities surveilling their every move.
“I saw obvious injuries on his face. The severe bruise below his left eye stood out even after the makeup. There was a trace of stitches starting from the throat down to where his clothes covered,” Yu recalled. “I tried to unbutton the clothes, but the police saw and quickly dragged me out. Later another family member went in and continued unbuttoning and found stitches that went to the stomach.”
She suspects her father was a victim of organ harvesting. However, Hu stressed that authorities did not provide the family with an autopsy report, and authorities quickly cremated the remains.
“We were not even allowed to cry when he was buried,” Hu continued, reflecting on the throngs of authorities that trailed their every move and prohibited any photographs from being taken. “After hearing about organ harvesting, I couldn’t imagine what had happened to my father before his death. It happened, and it is happening.”
Jiang Li also believes her father, Jiang Xiqing – also of the Falun Gong faith – was a victim of the harrowing practice. He was arrested on May 2008 and sent to a forced labor camp. On the afternoon of January 27, 2009, she and three other family members visited him.
“His mental and physical health was normal. Then at 3.40 p.m. the next day, the labor camp called my brother and said he had died and immediately hung up,” she said. “Seven of my family members arrived at the mortuary house at 10.30 p.m. with the guidance of police officers. They read out the regulations – we could see the body for only five minutes, no cameras or communication devices, and we could only go to the freezer room to see Jiang’s head and not his whole body.”
But when her older sister touched his face, she screamed that his philtrum was still warm and his upper teeth were biting his lower lip. He was alive.
“We pulled out my father’s body halfway. We touched his chest, and it was warm. He was wearing a down jacket. My older sister prepared to perform CPR,” Li continued. “But we were each forcibly dragged out of the freezer by four people. Uniformed and plainclothes officers pushed my father’s body into the freezer. They demanded we quickly sign for cremation and pay the fees.”
The family has since attempted to seek some sense of justice – their lawyers ended up behind bars, and law enforcement raided their family home. Then, in 2010, Li said she was terminated from her job without explanation and detained.
Survivors routinely point to frequent physical screenings, ultrasounds, and X-rays as further corroboration that authorities monitor victims to determine whose organs are healthy enough for transplantation purposes, as most are pushed to the brink in allegedly tortuous interrogation sessions.
Yu Ming, 47, another member of Falun Gong and newly arrived in the United States, claimed that he was “kidnapped” multiple times by law enforcement, the last time in August 2013, when she was locked up in the Shenyang Detention Center.
As time went on, his friends disappeared. The family of one Falun Gong companion, Gao Yixi, recalled seeing “his eyes opened wide, his stomach deflated and no organs inside.”
He secretly recorded footage of undercover interviews at major military hospitals in mainland China over the past few years and turned it over to the Tribunal as evidence for illegal organ transplants.
“Only a pile of ashes is given to the family members,” Gao lamented. “We cannot be silent.”
Still, evidence continued to grow over the years – broadcast to the international community but falling on deaf ears. In 2020, the BMC Medical Ethics journal accused the CCP of falsifying data and covering up the illegal extraction of vulnerable minorities and political prisoners. In 2022, an article published on Monday in the American Journal of Transplantation – the leading scientific journal in the world on transplants – again determined that China is a significant harvester and trafficker of forcibly acquired organs and that Chinese authorities routinely violated the Dead Donor Rule, which prohibits harvesting an essential organ from a living person and prohibits causing the death of donors to harvest their organ. In 2020, however, activists asked the United Nations to launch an investigation into the allegations of forced organ harvesting, but it took no action. Instead, the UN and World Health Organization (WHO) sickly praised China’s organ donation program as a life-saving model for other countries.
Of course, the CCP still boasts that it maintains Asia’s most extensive voluntary organ donation system. Moreover, officials claim that “countries and anti-China forces have been hyping up lies and distorting facts on organ transplantation to smear China.”
Nevertheless, the verifiable evidence at this point is overwhelming – and expanding.
Xinjiang, also known as East Turkistan, has made headlines with the revelations that upwards of one million belonging to the Muslim minority have been carted off into concentration camps. Chinese leaders categorically denied misconduct, insisting that Uighurs are in “re-education camps” and doubled down that the government respects religious rights. However, four Uighurs testified before the China Tribunal that they had been organ scanned while in detention.
Salih Hudayar, ambassador to the U.S. for the East Turkistan Government in Exile and a leader in the beleaguered Uighur community, told me that the Chinese government claims “written consent is required for all organ transplants.” Still, in reality, it is unlikely there was any such consent, and if there were, it would have been “extracted through torture”, Salih says.
“Voice prints and retina scans were collected in 2016-2017 in East Turkistan, and some of us fear they might be used for organ matching,” Salih continues. “We fear that today, the Chinese Communist Party may be harvesting the organs of not just Falun Gong practitioners, but also Uighurs, Tibetan Buddhists, Chinese Christians and other prisoners of conscience.”
Some experts estimate China slaughters more than 25,000 people every year in Xinjiang alone for their organs, with a crematorium on-site to hurriedly dispose of their bodies. But the demand doesn’t only come from within China. “Organ tourists” hail from Japan and Korea to wealthy Gulf States seeking “halal organs.”
But is the U.S. doing enough to back the helpless against such barbaric bullying?
“State-sponsored forced organ harvesting is big business for Xi and the Chinese Communist Party, and shows absolutely no signs of abating,” said Smith. “We must act – decisively.”
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