Falun Gong Practitioners Systematically Murdered for Their Organs: Refuting the Chinese Regime's "Death Row" Explanation, Chapter XII

This article was first published in March 2010

(Minghui.org) In 2006, The Epoch Times newspaper broke a stunning story about what is undoubtedly one of the most horrible atrocities to be committed by any government, not only in modern times, but in all of recorded history. As documented in the investigative report, "Bloody Harvest," by noted human rights lawyer David Matas and former Canadian Secretary of State for the Asia-Pacific region David Kilgour, there is overwhelming evidence of the Chinese Communist regime's chilling role in systematically murdering Falun Gong practitioners, harvesting their organs while they are alive, and making huge profits from doing so. In response to the international outcry, the Chinese regime has attempted to explain away one of the main pieces of circumstantial evidence--the meteoric rise in the number of organ transplantations in recent years and the extremely short wait times in a culture notoriously averse to organ donation--by stating that it has harvested organs from executed criminals after their deaths. Faced with undeniable evidence, it has attempted to escape culpability for a monstrous atrocity by admitting to a lesser crime. In this report, we will show evidence that directly contradicts this claim and lends further credence to the serious charges leveled against the Chinese regime.

XII. The Chinese Communist government's reactions to allegations of organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners

1. Sujiatun cover-up

Three people with inside information made the allegations of live organ harvesting in March 2006. One was a senior Chinese journalist in Japan with the pseudonym "Peter;" another was a woman with the pseudonym "Annie," whose ex-husband participated in removing corneas from Falun Gong practitioners; and the third person was an anonymous veteran military doctor from the Shenyang Military Area Command. Peter and Annie made a public appearance at a gathering in Washington, D.C., in April 2006. The specific crimes allegedly occurred at the Liaoning Provincial Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine in the Sujiatun District, Shenyang City.

On March 28, Qin Gang, spokesperson for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, denied the charges for the first time--some 20 days after the allegations were made--and invited reporters to investigate on site. However, there was no record of this statement on the Foreign Ministry's official website. On April 14, the General Consul of the U.S. Consulate in Shenyang City, accompanied by city officials, paid a pre-scheduled visit to the Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine for an hour. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in China stated subsequently that U.S. representatives "found no evidence that the site is being used for any function other than as a normal public hospital." Yet, this has not dispelled widely held suspicions that the CCP could have transferred inmates during the three weeks after the initial public exposure and conducted a cover-up. Sujiatun used to be an important military location. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, the Japanese Kwantung Army's largest weapons warehouses were located here, and there was a sophisticated underground defense fortification system. Zeng Kelin, who served as the commander of the No. 16 Military Sub-region of the Eighth Route Army, recalled that, on one occasion when they opened up the warehouses in Sujiatun, they found enough weapons to equip an army of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. In one such underground system found in the Sujiatun District, the tunnels were about 7 feet wide and 6 feet tall, with a total length of about 1¼ miles. [65] A visit to aboveground buildings would not disprove the existence of the underground tunnels. What the outside world is interested in is not the visit that took place three weeks later. They are interested in what the CCP did within those three weeks, as well what happened before public charges were brought against the hospital.

Sujiatun allegations lift the curtain on live organ harvesting

Common sense tells us that the person who reports a case does not have to be the one who solves it. To demand that the reporter come up with all the evidence and solve the case is putting the cart before the horse. The Sujiatun allegations are just a lead supported by three people with inside information. The importance lies not in the absolute accuracy of their descriptions. What is important is the possibility that live organ harvesting has actually taken place. For example, someone passes by as a murder is taking place. He is at a distance and does not see everything. Based on what he does see, he believes there has been a murder, so he rushes to report the case to the authorities, which leads to a full investigation into a criminal organization. Was the person able to describe the crime scene with 100 percent accuracy? Did he know how many people were involved, who the murderers were, how many were killed, and what kind of weapons were used? It is unlikely that he saw everything, yet he still deserves credit for reporting the case.

The Sujiatun allegations have lifted the curtain concealing this nefarious activity. People have started to pay attention to the tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners unlawfully held at hundreds of labor camps and other large-scale concentration camps. What happened to them? This series of reports has looked into the sudden increase in available organs for China's organ transplant market from 2003 to 2006. It has attempted to find out where the organs could possibly have come from. The statistics support the allegations that organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners has indeed taken place.

On April 4, 2006, the Falun Dafa Association and the Minghui website published a notice announcing the establishment of The Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong in China (CIPFG). Governments, NGOs, media, and individuals were invited to conduct an independent, on-site investigation to gather evidence in China--without intervention--in order to comprehensively investigate the facts surrounding the CCP's holding of Falun Gong practitioners in labor camps and secret concentration camps for persecution.

2. Third party independent investigators denied visas

In response to the invitation from Qin Gang, China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson, journalists from independent media overseas started applying to go to China to investigate.

On the morning of April 19, 2006, Xu Lin, a senior journalist in charge of news reports on China from Sound of Hope radio, went to the consulate general to apply to enter China to investigate. She was denied a visa.

The following day, Zhou Lei, chief editor of The Epoch Times, went to the Chinese embassy in Berlin. Her visa application was denied.

On May 2, 2006, Zhang Fen, San Francisco bureau director of New Tang Dynasty TV, applied for entry into China. Her visa application was denied.

In June 2006, David Kilgour and David Matas applied for visas to enter China to conduct an investigation. Their applications were denied.

The outside world is aware that the invitation from China's Foreign Ministry was just for show. What is ironic is that those Chinese CCP supporters living overseas who have turned a blind eye to the CCP's long history of killing are disappointed in the CCP's decision to reject the visa applications, thinking it is an opportunity to discredit Falun Gong. According to their logic, if there is no live organ harvesting, independent investigators should be allowed to enter China since they would not be able to come up with any evidence, and the allegations would be disproved. Yet the CCP will not issue the visas.

3. Denying the validity of the evidence so far collected

In response to the live organ harvesting charges, the CCP has not allowed any outside investigations and has categorically denied the charges.

Bloody Harvest by Kilgour and Matas gives many accounts of solid evidence, including transcripts of telephone calls in which doctors from different Chinese hospitals acknowledge procuring organs from Falun Gong practitioners. After a period of silence, the CCP used Phoenix TV, its overseas media for united-front propaganda, to deny the charges in the TV program "Investigation of the [two] Davids' Investigation." The video shows doctors listed in Bloody Harvest making statements that actually turn out to support the evidence in the book, in addition to providing contradictory statements. The following are two such examples.

Shi Bingyi's data

Bloody Harvest uses data provided by Shi Bingyi, director of the Transplant Center of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). The article "The bar has to be raised for organ transplantation," which appeared in Jiankangbao [Health Newspaper] on March 2, 2006, quoted Shi's estimate that there had been a total of 90,000 transplant cases in China [by 2005]. He was asked to make a denial on Phoenix TV, avowing, "I did not say that. Why? Because there has been no such number in my head." It is known that Jiankangbao is the authoritative, organizational mouthpiece of China's Ministry of Health. If Shi had not given the total of 90,000 transplant cases by 2005, instead of refuting Kilgour and Matas, he should have argued with Jiankangbao. In fact, Shi knows the numbers have been increasing and has thus been active in taking media interviews. In this report, we have also quoted the numbers when he was interviewed by Science Times as well as Xinhuanet.com.

Telephone investigation involving Lu Guoping of Nanning City Minzu Hospital in Guangxi Autonomous Region

Among the transcripts of telephone calls published in Bloody Harvest, one was a conversation with Lu Guoping, a doctor who worked at Nanning City Minzu Hospital and acknowledged the use of Falun Gong practitioners' organs (see Chapter XI). In the Phoenix TV program, Lu was asked to deny what he said. However, Lu first admitted that it was he who took the telephone call on May 22, 2006. Kilgour and Matas consider this supporting evidence to the original telephone recording. Prior to this, the main doubt people had was whether it was actually Doctor Lu Guoping on the other end of the line. His identity has now been authenticated by the Chinese government.

In a follow-up report by New Tang Dynasty Television, snippets of Lu Guoping's speech on Phoenix TV were shown. [66] Viewers were able to compare the voice on Phoenix TV with the original investigator's phone conversation (see Chapter XI for links); both have the same pronounced dialect, which is hard to fake with current computer technology.

4. Suddenly expediting the overhaul of the organ market

After March 2006, the CCP expedited the overhaul of China's organ transplant market. It issued a qualification regulation, reducing the number of transplant hospitals to 164 from over 600. A temporary regulation on human organ transplants went into effect on July 1, 2006. On May 1, 2007, the (permanent) Regulation on Human Organ Transplantations took effect.

The international community welcomed regulations over and management of China's organ market. However, the introduction of regulations does not negate the crimes committed in the previous years. Simply brushing off the prior period by describing it as "chaotic" and praising the new regulations is nothing short of assisting a cover-up.

At the same time, the CCP closed down the websites of certain organ transplant hospitals and related organizations. The website of the Chinese Society of Organ Transplantation, affiliated with the China Medical Association, is one that disappeared. It went offline in March 2006 and has remained inaccessible as of November 2009 (see Appendix 10 for details). Also, major hospitals have removed statements regarding the extremely short waiting periods (as short as a week or two) that had been listed on their websites. And, the CCP has called off organ transplant tours targeting foreign organ recipients.

We cannot help but ask, what is the purpose of removing or changing the content of these websites? What is being covered up?

Note: Much of the data and relevant information cited in this report has been taken from Internet archives at the website http://www.archive.org, which is evidence that is outside the control of the CCP for deletion or revision.

5. Use of death row organs: from outright denial to a high profile admission

The CCP had been quite clear and consistent in denying the use of death row organs.

In March 2006, Qin Gang claimed in a press conference that reports of organs being removed from death row inmates in China were complete lies that had been fabricated to mislead the public.

On April 10, 2006, Mao Qunan, a spokesperson for the Health Ministry, denied overseas media reports that China arbitrarily took organs from death row inmates. He claimed that the primary source of organs in China was volunteer donors upon their passing away.

On October 10, 2006, in response to BBC reporter Rupert Wingfield-Hayes' article "Organ sales 'thriving' in China," China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Qin Gang said, "Some foreign media fabricate news when reporting on organ transplants in China to attack China's legal system."

However, on August 26, 2009, China Daily, China's official English newspaper, made a high profile admission for the first time that executed prisoners were currently providing two-thirds of all transplant organs. This was interpreted by the international community as the official number backed by the Chinese government.

However, the CCP's transition from categorical denial of the widespread use of organs from death row inmates to a high profile admission took place as serious charges were being brought against it: procuring organs from living Falun Gong practitioners. How can people today believe the CCP's denial of these serious new charges any more than its consistent denial of using organs from executed inmates?

Some Chinese organ transplant experts tried to increase the reported percentage of organs from executed prisoners as early as 2005. We cannot tell whether their purpose was to make public the use of death row organs or to cover up an even greater crime. However, the latter is a strong possibility, since these experts have been well aware of the facts of harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners.

Admitting the wide use of death row organs and denying allegations of organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners, while resolutely opposing any independent investigation into these allegations, is the CCP's current stance. Its overly high profile campaign to reform death row organ procurement and its overly sensitive attitude to charges of live organ harvesting indeed raise suspicians of a systematic cover-up.

6. Another peak in organ transplants?

The establishment of an organ sharing system across China, the legislation to allow organ donation from brain dead patients, raising awareness of volunteer organ donation, and encouraging donation among family members may end up expanding China's organ market to surpass the large figures from 2003 through 2006. Given China's one and a half million patients waiting for organs, organ transplantation will continue to make headlines. Experts and scholars are expected to join the media effort to promote and extol the new rules and regulations. Through these efforts by the CCP, will the crimes against Falun Gong practitioners killed for their organs be covered up and forgotten?

During the drafting of this report, the authors have been reminded by kindhearted people that the CCP may publish carefully manipulated data to defend the skyrocketing of China's organ market during the years from 2003 to 2006. Regardless, given the fact that the CCP instigated the persecution of Falun Gong in the first place--and on such an unprecedented scale and with such cruelty--which led to allegations of live organ harvesting, any further actions the CCP takes can only diminish its credibility in the eyes of the Chinese and the world over and ultimately accelerate its demise.

References

[65] CCP Sujiatun District Organization Department, "Japanese Army Fortification System Appears in Our District," August 8, 2005, http://www.sjtdj.gov.cn/xuancuan/show.asp?ids=2643

[66] New Tang Dynasty Television, "Doctor Lu Guoping's Voice at the 18^th minute of the Phoenix TV footage," Zooming In, No. 94, http://www.ntdtv.com/xtr/gb/2009/04/08/a278863.html#video