Falun Gong Practitioners Targeted for Forced Organ Harvesting, Says Israeli Media Report

(Minghui.org) An article by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on December 2, 2020 titled “China's ‘XXX Files’: ‘25 Thousand People Disappear Each Year, Their Organs Are Harvested’” revealed a shocking testimony of a Falun Gong practitioner who was almost killed for her organs in China.

Ms. Liu Huiqiong, a Falun Gong practitioner in Beijing, was arrested in 2001 for her faith. The then-29-year-old was taken to a forced labor camp in Beijing. The guards interrogated her and beat her. One of them said to her, “I’ll remove your organs and burn what’s left of your body.”

When the guards took her to a hospital for physical examination, she told the doctor that she had a heart problem. The doctor replied that her heart was fine. She then asked the doctor whether they would remove her heart. The doctor said, “That will be decided by someone at a higher level.”

Ms. Liu started a hunger strike afterwards. Eight days later, she weighed 88 pounds and the doctor decided that her organs were no longer good.

Ms. Liu also told Haaretz that she “underwent blood tests, blood pressure tests, X-rays and ECGs during her incarceration.” “Sometimes they would take us to a hospital; other times, a large vehicle full of medical equipment would come to the camp and the checkups would be done in it.”

“Each of us was given a number by which the doctors would follow up on our situation. The doctors only knew the numbers, not our names. Sometimes they would ask for a specific number to be taken to the hospital. Those people never came back.” she said.

Another piece of evidence Ms. Liu revealed was a fabricated form to cover up the organ harvesting atrocities. She said before she was taken to the hospital after her first arrest, the guards gave her a form with a copy of her fingerprints already on it and told her to sign without being allowed to read its content. She took a quick glance and noticed the form had already been filled out, but the name and address weren’t hers; they belonged to someone else she didn’t know. Although she resisted, the guards still forced her to sign it. Later, another woman who was arrested with her told her that it was a consent form to donate her organs if she dies.

Ethan Gutmann, an independent investigator, told Haaretz, “The Chinese Communist Party [CCP] first experimented with the live organ harvesting of death row criminals on the execution grounds of Xinjiang as early as 1994. By 1997, surgeons were extracting livers and kidneys from Uighur political and religious prisoners for high-ranking CCP cadres – small-scale, but it set a precedent.”

He added that the persecution of Falun Gong in 1999 has brought an explosion in transplant activity in China.

In his book The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem, Gutmann highlighted that the CCP’s harvesting of organs from non-consenting, living dissidents occurs on the scale of “60,000 to 100,000 transplants per year.” He added that “Beijing has no intention of dismantling its vast transplant infrastructure.”

An international tribunal based in London also condemned the forced organ harvesting atrocities in a report published last year, which stated that such practice against innocent victims was a “crime against humanity” and one of the world’s “worst atrocities committed” in modern times.