Harvesting Organs from Living Falun Gong Practitioners—“An Unprecedented Evil on This Planet”—Is Ongoing

It has been said that the documents Wang Lijun turned in when seeking asylum at the United States Embassy in Chengdu City included evidence of Bo Xilai’s orders to harvest organs from living Falun Gong practitioners. Other evidence revealing the roles of Wang Lijun, Bo Xilai, and Zhou Yongkang in persecuting practitioners and taking part in the harvesting of organs from living practitioners was also reported by overseas media.

Is the Need Being Met Through Donations by Death Row Inmates or Killing to Harvest Organs?

Professor Arthur Caplan, director of the Centre for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, is an acknowledged expert in his field and was once regarded as one of the ten most influential scientists in the world. On March 13th, Professor Caplan gave a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine entitled “The Ethics of Using Prisoners as Sources of Cadaver Organs.” In the lecture, he highlighted the horrific crimes of harvesting organs by “killing for need” in China.

According to Professor Caplan, killing based on need is the only possible way of guaranteeing a liver within three weeks. Many hospitals in China, especially military hospitals, once openly enticed customers by advertising this guarantee. In countries such as the United States or Australia, it usually takes several years, and sometimes more than ten, to get an organ.

Media Disclosure: Huang Jiefu Summons Two Spare Livers in One Day

Reports from Chinese media provide ample evidence of the widespread existence of “killing based on need.” According to Urumqi On-line and Sina.net, on the afternoon of September 28th, 2005, Department of Health Deputy Secretary Huang Jiefu and Political and Judicial Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Luo Gan attended meetings at the First Affiliated Hospital of the Xinjiang Medical University to demonstrate an organ transplant operation.

According to the report, Huang Jiefu performed a liver transplant for 46-year-old patient Yao Shufa. They contacted the First Affiliated Hospital of the Zhongshan Medical University in Guangzhou City and the Southwest Liver Hospital of the Third Medical University in Chongqing City to ask each of them to prepare a reserve liver in case the transplant failed. The report also noted, “At 6:30 p.m. on September 29th, a matching liver was shipped from Chongqing. Three medical staff from Zhongshan Hospital in Guangzhou also rushed to Xinjiang Province, bringing with them a liver and circulation equipment.”

Huang’s operation lasted from 7:00 p.m. that evening until 10:00 a.m. the next morning. Huang announced success after observing the patient for 24 hours, and he decided that the reserve livers would not be needed. But the question remains: How could two death row inmates with matching livers just happen to be executed that same day?

Changchun City Evening News reported a “heart harvest” case on March 4th, 2006. Xie Baoshi, 28, from Zhejiang Province needed a heart transplant. The hospital found a heart the next day. According to the report, “At around 10:00 a.m. on September 28th, director Miao Lining of the Internal Medicine Kidney Department of the Jilin University Second Hospital rode in an ambulance for 30 miles to retrieve the heart for transplantation. It took him only ten minutes to harvest it and put it in a special cooling liquid. Then he drove back to Jilin University Second Hospital at a speed of 180 km (~110 miles) per hour. The new heart was pumping in Xie Baoshi’s body three hours later.”

On May 19th, 2006, Southern Daily reported a liver-kidney transplant operation at the Liver Transplant Centre in Zhongshan Third Hospital. “Surprisingly, good news from another province was heard the next day—a matching liver and kidney were found. At 6:00 p.m. on May 17th, the liver and kidney were flown to Guangzhou. The operation was successfully completed in eight hours.”

Wang Lijun Discloses Evidence of Live Organ Harvesting

According to evidence provided by the World Organisation to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG), Wang Lijun participated in live organ harvesting. On October 21st, 2004, CCTV, the voice of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), reported in its news broadcast that the Centre for Crime-site Psychoanalysis of the Jinzhou City Police Department was the only psychoanalysis centre for the Chinese police. According to a description by Wang Lijun, “Witnessing a person walking toward the execution field, and, within a few minutes, extending his life into the bodies of several other people is a shock to even a veteran policeman.”

Obviously, he is describing the site of human organ harvesting. Wang Lijun said at the “Guanghua Innovation Special Award” ceremony: “This site, and its technological achievement, is the result of thousands of on-site practices. It's made possible by the contributions of many people. All the the Guanghua Technology Foundation personnel, led by Chief Secretary Jinyang, have visited the research centre many times. They came to the forefront—the dissecting site, or the organ extraction site—to witness the organ extractions.” It means that within two years of its foundation, the “research centre” completed thousands of cases of organ harvests and transplants.

Death Row Inmates or Falun Gong Practitioners?

The WOIPFG record shows that between 2000 and 2005, the number of executed death row inmates in China averaged 1,616 per year. Due to the limitations of organ type matching, the cold-blood or bloodless time, and the time and location of the execution, the utilisation rate is only 30 per cent. Statistics on a Chinese organ transplant website show that in 2003, the number of Chinese citizens donating organs after death was zero. Even after many years of effort by the CCP to encourage organ donation after death, there were only 22 families of the deceased agreeing to donate organs in 2006.

Official Chinese records show that the number of organ transplant cases in China are between 10,000 and 20,000 a year. For example, there are 4,000 whole-liver transplant cases per year, although the actual number could be three to four times as many. With a 30 per cent utilisation rate, it would take at least 13,000 death row inmates to supply the needed livers. Yet, the actual number of death row inmates is much less.

In the report, “Falun Gong Practitioners Systematically Murdered for Their Organs: Refuting the Chinese Regime's ‘Death Row’ Explanation” published on the Minghui website, detailed records show that the organs of death row inmates could not possibly meet the demand coinciding with the drastic increase in organ transplant cases between 2003 and 2006. Bloody Harvest, a report published by renowned human rights attorney David Matas, and former Canadian Secretary of State for the Asia-Pacific, David Kilgour, is consistent with the Minghui article’s conclusion: Live organ harvests from Falun Gong practitioners in China is widespread.

In 2009, the WOIPFG published a policeman's eyewitness account of organ harvesting from a Falun Gong practitioner. The policeman, working under Wang Lijun, said that Wang issued an order to “kill and eradicate” all Falun Gong practitioners.

In a recorded statement, the policeman from Jinzhou said, “Without any anaesthesia, the scalpel went directly into her chest and blood squirted out. The woman screamed 'Falun Gong is good.' She was a teacher. The humiliation she was subjected to before this was even worse. We have many depraved policemen. They used clamps and scopes to sexually abuse her. She was good looking, and they raped her. Wang, now the chief of police in the Chongqing Police Department, gave orders to 'kill and eradicate' the practitioners.”

The WOIPFG's recorded evidence includes an investigation into the courts, hospitals, and jails suspected to have participated in harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners. The investigation reached the same conclusion as that of the Bloody Harvest report.

The most intense years of the Jiang Zemin regime’s persecution of Falun Gong were from 2003 through 2006. In an attempt to force practitioners to give up their belief in Falun Gong, CCP leader Jiang Zemin ordered the police to “kill without hesitation;” “ruin their reputations, bankrupt them financially, destroy them physically;” “disregard the law in dealing with Falun Gong practitioners;” and “kill and count it as a suicide.” Orders such as these make it more difficult to legally scrutinise the crime of harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners.

“An Unprecedented Evil on This Planet” Is Ongoing

Professor Caplan called killing to harvest organs “the worst atrocity in the field of organ transplantation.” David Matas and David Kilgour called such acts “an unprecedented evil on this planet.”

According to the Chinese media, on March 22nd the deputy secretary of the Department of Health, Huang Jiefu, said that China would establish a system for organ donations in Hangzhou, and he promised to “eradicate the past twisted ways of obtaining transplant organs from death row inmates in three to five years.”

In response to Huang’s statement, Professor Caplan said, “This system of harvesting organs from death row inmates ought to be changed in three to five minutes [rather than three to five years]. We shouldn't be putting up with five more years of executing prisoners on demand... Waiting five years, if then, to see a cadaver system instituted in China, given this barbarity of how the organs are being obtained now, is five years too long.”

Harvesting Organs from Living People Is a Crime Against Humanity and Is an Affront to the World

Beginning on March 1st, 2010, all visitors applying for a visa to the United States are required to fill out form DS-160. Beginning in June of 2011, the section of the form that asks about an applicant's background now includes a question related to organ harvesting: “Have you ever been directly involved in the coercive transplantation of human organs or bodily tissue?”

In 2004, the Canadian Royal Calvary added the names of 45 high-level Chinese officials who have persecuted Falun Gong practitioners to their watch list, thereby refusing them entry into Canada, deporting them, or prosecuting them. The list includes Jiang Zemin, Luo Gan, Liu Jin, Zhou Yongkang, and Bo Xilai, all who share responsibility for the crimes of harvesting live organs from Falun Gong practitioners.

In recent years, over 30 high-level officials, including chief culprits Jiang Zemin, Luo Gan, Zhou Yongkang, and Bo Xilai, have been sued for “crimes against humanity” or “genocide” in over 30 countries. According to Wikileaks, a major concern of Chinese high-level officials going abroad is being sued by Falun Gong practitioners in the United States.

Preventing Live Organ Harvesting Is Everyone’s Responsibility

Live organ harvesting is a serious insult to human dignity and a disgrace to humanity. Everyone should call for its termination immediately. Allowing such criminal activity to continue is a danger to the entire world.

The recently passed Article 73 of the addendum to the Chinese Criminal Law states: “When one is involved in crimes related to national security or terrorist activities, the police can put the suspect under supervision without informing his or her relatives.”

This Article 73 legalises secret abductions. A citizen's rights can be set aside at any moment, and no one is to be held responsible. If a citizen can be legally made to disappear, does it mean that he can also be legally made to donate organs? Such a law puts every citizen in danger. A regime that disregards human lives is evil beyond measure.