WASHINGTON, DC, May 19 — Citizens of the socialist “paradise” of mainland China are being robbed of their vital organs to give the People’s Republic of China an edge in the global transplant market. According to multiple reports, the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] is harvesting the organs from among “unwanted” populations, including the Falun Gong religious group and the Uighur population in China’s Xinjiang region well as Tibetans and Christians.
Veteran China analyst Ethan Gutmann suggests that as many as eight to ten thousand political dissidents a year are murdered to serve the needs of what one observer calls China’s “organ tourism” business. China promised in 2015 that it would stop using the organs of executed prisoners for transplants. Still, new evidence shows that the practice of rounding up so-called “enemies of the state” for organ harvesting has not only continued but has grown at a rapid pace in the meantime.
Gutmann estimates that organs harvested from one prisoner can be worth as much as three-quarters of a million U.S. dollars. All the more reason for ginning up transplant candidates from around the world by signaling that instead of waiting months and years to find a donor, patients are welcomed in China, where they can have transplants done in a matter of weeks. As Gutmann put it in an interview with The Epoch Times: The message is obvious, “We have the organs. It’s safe. Come on over. China is open for business.”
What makes the CCP’s transplant business different is that instead of a patient having to wait for a live voluntary donor with matching DNA and blood type, the Chinese have “herds” of donors in captivity who have already been typed standing by and ready for the slaughter to supply matching organs on demand. In a recent article in the Taipei Times by human rights activist David Kilgour, he reported: “that a hospital for infectious diseases in Aksu City was transformed into an internment camp with a large crematorium nearby and a ‘green corridor’ for expedited organs at nearby Aksu Airport.”
Last year the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC) convened a Tribunal to investigate China’s forced harvesting of organs for its transplant business. It concluded that the CCP’s harvesting initiative borders on “genocide.” Investigators and witnesses who testified before the Tribunal reported instances in which operations on victims to retrieve their organs were, in many cases, crude undertakings, often performed while the victims were still alive.
The forced harvesting of organs was first discovered in 2001. All of a sudden, there was an unexplained acceleration of transplant activity in China. Unlike the long waiting times to get a transplant in other parts of the world, in China, one could have a transplant in a short period of time.
The Tribunal heard expert witnesses and investigators tell of how captive donors were ordered to be killed for their organs to be extracted and how forced organ harvesting was also being performed while victims were still alive, killing the person in the process. One witness, Dr. Enver Tohti, a surgeon who performed organ harvesting surgery for the Chinese, recalled how he proceeded in one instance: “I tried to cut into his skin, there was blood to be seen. That indicates that the heart was still beating … At the same time, he was trying to resist my insertion, but he was too weak.”
China’s transplant trade and its inhuman method of sourcing body parts may finally be getting the attention it deserves. Governments around the world are condemning the practice, and the issue has become a topic of the day for lawmakers at every level of government. State houses have passed resolutions decrying the practice of forced harvesting of organs.
Republican Texas State Senator Angela Paxton, for one, introduced one such resolution last month condemning China’s “vile practice of forcibly removing human organs for transplant,” and it was passed unanimously. In addition, Senator Paxton urged the United States to take an “aggressive stance” with China on the issue.