The Inside Story of Live Organ Harvesting as Carried Out by the Chinese Communist Party

Ever since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began its persecution of Falun Gong, the practitioners who have gone to Beijing to appeal have often been arrested. Many of them have refused to disclose their names and addresses so as not to facilitate the CCP’s policy of guilt by association. The whereabouts of these tens of thousands of practitioners has been a mystery for many years.

In 2000, the organ transplant business in China suddenly began to boom. The business even created an international tourist fad for organ transplants. In the past, the patient was always expected to wait for the needed organs to become available, but, in China, the needed organs were waiting for the patients, which begged the question: Where did this huge supply of organs come from?

In March 2006, two informants from China exposed the horrific story of the CCP's harvesting of organs from living Falun Gong practitioners.

As a result, two apparently separate incidents – the large number of missing Falun Gong practitioners and the rapid growth of Chinese organ transplants – were connected. People have long wondered why, in the past, one had to wait for years for a transplant, yet, in China, the wait was only a week or two in many hospitals. And how was it that if the transplant failed, a new organ could be arranged right away? Clues finally began to emerge from behind all the secrecy.

Perhaps because the crime of taking organs from the living to make huge profits was simply unimaginable, at first the rest of the world refused to believe it. During the Roman Empire 2000 years ago, Christians who were steadfast in their belief were often fed to the lions. Nonetheless, being fed to the lions was a routine method of executing death row inmates at the time, and it was not specifically designed for the Christians. When people recall such barbarism today, they think it was just something that happened in the past. Who would believe that such a large-scale “harvesting of live organs” could be happening now?

The CCP refused to grant visas to any independent investigation groups from the international community. But Falun Gong practitioners and others continued with their investigations through various channels and urged the international community to pay attention to the CCP’s harvesting of organs. After the initial shock and disbelief, people finally took this “unprecedented evil on this planet” seriously.

Six years have passed. On May 24th, 2012, the U.S. State Department published the 2011 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. For the first time, the report noted that media and human rights groups had been consistently reporting cases of live organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners. The report was also the first time that the United States mentioned this issue in an official government report. In the meantime, when the U.S. State Department renewed its DS-160 application form for non-immigrant visas, it added six questions to the “Security and Background” section. One of the new questions was: “Have you ever been directly involved in the coercive transplantation of human organs or bodily tissue?”

Following the 2009 publication of the report, Bloody Harvest: Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China, another report titled, State Organs: Transplant Abuse in China, was published in 2012. State Organs compiles the opinions of many scholars and experts from four continents. Based on these two publications, it appears that thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have been killed to meet the Chinese authorities’ demand for live organs.

To mark the 13th anniversary of the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong, in July 2012, thousands of practitioners gathered in front of Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Many U.S. politicians boldly and unreservedly condemned the crimes of the CCP’s harvesting of live organs.

On August 3rd, 2012, The Huffington Post published an article by Peter Worthington titled, “China's Grim Human Harvests.” The article describes the dark story of the CCP’s harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners’ organs.

On August 7th, World Affairs journal published an article titled, “Bitter Harvest: China’s ‘Organ Donation’ Nightmare,” by Ethan Gutmann, researcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The article describes the inside story of the CCP’s harvesting of live organs, which is the central issue in the scandals involving Wang Lijun, Bo Xilai, and Gu Kailai.

On September 12th, the U.S. Congress held a hearing to investigate the Organ Harvesting of Religious and Political Dissidents by the Chinese Communist Party. Extracting organs from living Falun Gong practitioners was a central topic. The Committee on Foreign Affairs has since published the testimonies of the speakers at the hearing on its website.

On September 17th, the United Nation's Human Rights Council held its 21st session at the U.N.’s Palais des Nations. In the “Freedom of Peaceful Assembly,” an international human rights forum, the harvesting of organs from Falun Gong practitioners in China was the focus of the meeting. On September 18th, The Epoch Times global Editor-in-Chief, Ms. Guo Jun, spoke at the conference and urged an investigation into the CCP’s crimes of live organ harvesting. About 100 representatives from different countries and international NGO’s listened to this important message and expressed their deep concerns. The international education organization proposed that the United Nations treat the harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners’ organs as an urgent matter for investigation. Representatives from many countries expected the UN and the international community to enter China to investigate.

On September 18th, Congressman Chris Smith wrote an article titled “China’s Illegal Organ Harvesting” and published it in the Washington Times. The article states that the CCP's military has been involved in illegally extracting organs from involuntary inmates, especially prisoners of conscience, in prisons and forced labour camps for huge profits.

The documentary “Free China: The Courage to Believe,” co-produced by New Tang Dynasty Television and World2Be Production and directed by director Michael Perlman, is now being debuted around the world. In the film, Falun Gong practitioners recount their personal experiences, describing the brutal persecution they experienced under the CCP. The film also discloses the CCP’s crimes of live organ harvesting. The movie has won awards at the Houston International Film Festival, the Los Angeles Film Festival, and Philadelphia's Free Speech Film Festival. The documentary also received outstanding reviews in its screenings for the European Parliament and the U.S. Congress.

On October 4th, 106 congressional representatives co-signed a letter asking the U.S. State Department to publish all the information that it has obtained regarding the harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners’ organs. The letter also stated that the United States should take measures to stop the atrocities being committed by the CCP if it possessed such evidence. When President Obama went to George Mason University to campaign for the U.S. presidential election, a local Falun Gong practitioner personally handed him a letter outlining the latest developments regarding the CCP’s organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners, and urged him to respond forthrightly to the letter from the 106 congressional representatives.

On October 2nd, Kirk Allison, Director of Human Rights and Health at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, issued a statement suggesting that the university’s granting of an honorary PhD degree to CCP Department of Health Minister Chen Zhu was an insult to the victims of organ harvesting. The statement was cosigned by 21 heavyweights in the area of biological ethics, medicine, and human rights.

The most volatile news in 2012 was Wang Lijun’s attempted escape to the U.S. consulate in China in February. According to reports by The Epoch Times, as well as other media, Wang’s escape not only led to a delay in Gu Kailai's death penalty sentencing for the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood and Bo Xilai's expulsion from the Communist Party, but the escape also exposed all three individuals’ deep involvement in the crime of harvesting live organs from Falun Gong practitioners.

Wang created the “on-site psychology study center” in the Jinzhou City Police Department (in Liaoning Province) to conduct experiments on organ transplants. He claimed that the results he obtained in the two years of research were the “essence of the integrated results of thousands of on-site cases.” Where did he get so many organs? Gu was the black minion behind the Dalian Corpse Factory (also in Liaoning Province). The two largest corpse factories, Von Hagens Plastination Co. and Hoffen Bio-Technique, were both located in Dalian City, Liaoning Province. The earliest account of organ extractions from Falun Gong practitioners was at Sujiatun in Shenyang City, Liaoning Province, which occurred when Bo Xilai was the provincial governor. Although the CCP avoided mentioning the organ harvesting when they declared sentences for the crimes committed by Wang, Gu, and Bo, in reality, organ harvesting is at the core of the issue. Jiang Zemin, Zhou Yongkang, Bo Xilai, and numerous others all had Falun Gong practitioners' blood on their hands, and they have now been labeled as “the gang of bloody debt.” They thus attempted to save themselves by supporting Bo Xilai to win power within the CCP.

Apple Daily in Hong Kong and France's Agence France Presse also reported the case independently and noted Bo Xilai and his wife's direct involvement in the harvesting and selling of Falun Gong practitioners’ organs for profit. Apple Daily suggested that the organ harvesting exposed by Falun Gong practitioners was, to a certain extent, true. But few people knew that Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, was directly involved, and that she was in charge of the operation and establishment of the global organ sales network.

The Chinese journal Economics published an article titled “Behind the Illegal Sale of 51 Kidneys” on September 10th. Although it described people in poverty selling their kidneys to make a living, it gave readers a peek into the operation of the large-scale harvesting of organs from Falun Gong practitioners through its description of the fabricated “donation documentation of death row inmates” and the “documents for donating organs among relatives.”

The Chinese do not have a tradition of donating organs. The organs from death row inmates is limited in number, yet the supply remains stable and high, even as the number of death row inmates is decreasing. The underground selling of kidneys by the poor can only account for a minuscule number of cases, and one cannot sell his or her heart or lung. To support the exploding organ transplant market, a huge, new organ supply source was essential. Jiang Zemin, [former leader of China and instigator of the persecution] and the CCP initiated the persecution of Falun Gong, which was slandered and demonized, and its practitioners became the sacrifice.

Today, the international community has begun to look more closely and speak out. We urge more people with inside knowledge to step forward and speak out for justice. We believe that the crimes of Jiang Zemin and his gangsters, as well as of the CCP’s of harvesting Falun Gong practitioners’ organs, will soon be widely exposed to the world.