Barbaric Sick Men of Asia

China Butchers Political Prisoners for Their Organs

By WESLEY J. SMITH

The Butcher-in-chief

China has long been accused of allowing a black market in organ sales, the kidneys, livers, etc. coming from murdered political prisoners such as the Falon Gong.
Several years ago, China promised it would eliminate this dark harvest, but according to the China Tribunal — an independent investigative tribunal into forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience — the tyranny continues to permit the murder and strip mining of political prisoners to continue without interruption. 

From the NBC story:
The organs of members of marginalized groups detained in Chinese prison camps are being forcefully harvested — sometimes when patients are still alive, an international tribunal sitting in London has concluded.
Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale,” the tribunal concluded in its final judgment Monday. 

The practice is “of unmatched wickedness — on a death for death basis — with the killings by mass crimes committed in the last century,” it added.
There is great concern that the Uyghurs are also potential victims. 

From the China Tribunal’s Final Report:
Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale and that Falun Gong practitioners have been one – and probably the main – source of organ supply.
The concerted persecution and medical testing of the Uyghurs is more recent and it may be that evidence of forced organ harvesting of this group may emerge in due course.
This is unspeakably evil. 

But the vaunted international community doesn’t have the fortitude to pressure China into actually stopping this horror, nor do countries and large companies want to lose the money that would result from taking such action. 

These faults and weaknesses being a given, we certainly shouldn’t expect China to do the moral thing any time soon.
Still, there has been too much reporting for too long about this profound human-rights abuse to ethically continue to look the other way. 

The question thus becomes: Will the U.S. specifically outlaw traveling to China for the purpose of buying an organ — just as we do participating in pedophilia tourism overseas? (Spain, Israel, Italy, and Taiwan have passed such laws already.) 

I can’t think of one argument against pursuing such a course.
If we don’t at least do what we can, it seems to me that we make ourselves complicit in allowing the demand for black-market organs forcibly harvested from murdered prisoners to continue unimpeded — and the blood of the slaughtered victims will also be on us.

China Still Killing and Harvesting Falun Gong
China is a brutal tyranny in which all manner of oppressions are imposed by the government – such as its authoritarian one-child policy – recently praised by Joe Biden with faint damnation, while being outright praised by others.

More, some of the willingly complicit in the tyranny, such as killing political prisoners and selling their organs. 

One such participant is kidney buyer Daniel Asa Rose, author of Larry’s Kidney, who audaciously wrote a gleeful books about his experience in the organ market. (I hope he enjoyed the blood royalties.)
Killing and harvesting prisoners is a particularly heinous practice against which the splendid former Canadian MP David Kilgour has fought for many years. 

China had promised reform, but–surprise, surprise–Falun Gong (and Christians) are still arrested, typed, slaughtered, and harvested.
First, Kilgour references his earlier work. 

From his report presented to a European Parliament workshop on the issue:
Permit me to mention only a small fraction of the evidence that led us to our conclusion:

• Investigators made many calls to hospitals, detention centres and other facilities across China claiming to be relatives of patients needing transplants and asking if they had organs of Falun Gong for sale. We obtained on tape and then transcribed and translated admissions that a number of facilities trafficking in the Falun Gong organs provided.

• Falun Gong prisoners, who later got out of China, testified that they were systematically blood-tested and organ-examined while in forced-labour camps across the country. This could not have been for their health since they were regularly tortured, but it is necessary for organ transplants and for building a bank of live “donors”.

• In a few cases, family members of Falun Gong practitioners were able to see mutilated corpses of their loved ones between death and cremation. Organs had been removed.

• We interviewed the ex-wife of a surgeon from Sujiatun in Shenyang City, Liaoning. The surgeon told her that he had removed corneas from 2,000 Falun Gong prisoners between 2001 and 2003. He made it clear to her that none of these sources survived because different surgeons removed other organs and their bodies were then burned.

I have written about Kilgour’s work before. 

But I wasn’t aware of this later work referenced in his report:
The seminal 2014 book, The Slaughter (Prometheus), by Ethan Gutmann places the persecution of the Falun Gong, Tibetan, Uyghur, and House Christian communities in context. 

It focuses mostly on Falun Gong, the group most viciously and continuously targeted since 1999.
Gutmann explains how he arrives at his “best estimate” that organs of 65,000 Falun Gong and “two to four thousand” Uyghurs, Tibetans and House Christians were “harvested” in the 2000-2008 period alone. 

No “donors” survive pillaging because all vital organs are removed to be trafficked for high prices to wealthy Chinese nationals and “organ tourists”.
This is shocking and intolerable. 

So is the dearth of effective international response.

State Terrorism: Inside the People’s Republic of Death

The range of victims—from hardened spies to infants barely out of the womb—is stunning and should be taken into account by Washington whenever it deals with Beijing.
By Gordon G. Chang

A Chinese informant for the Central Intelligence Agency was shot in front of colleagues in the courtyard of a government building, reports The New York Times. 

China’s government, according to former American officials, executed at least a dozen supposed CIA sources from the end of 2010 through 2012.
Beijing’s Global Times, a semi-official tabloid, calls the reporting of the courtyard killing “a purely fabricated story, most likely a piece of American-style imagination based on ideology,” but the publication, controlled by the authoritative People’s Daily, did not deny the New York paper’s report of the other executions.
The People’s Republic of China has very little compunction about killing its citizens. 

There is no question about that. 

The range of victims—from supposedly hardened spies to infants barely out of the womb—is stunning and should be taken into account by Washington whenever it deals with Beijing.
We start with babies born without permits issued by population control officials.
Mao Hengfeng heard the “piercing cries of her baby” after a forced abortion. 

“Yet instead of being able to hold her newborn child,” veteran journalist Verna Yu reports, “she watched helplessly while her baby was drowned in a bucket.”
“The baby was alive, I could hear the baby cry,” Mao said. 

“They killed my baby.” 

Mao was also forced by family planning officials to undergo a hysterectomy. 

She had been seven-and-a-half months pregnant at the time.
Her baby was killed a quarter century ago, but the practice continues today. 

“In today’s China, under the Communist rule,” says blind activist Chen Guangcheng, “the government can put their hand into your body, grab your baby out of your womb, and kill your baby in your face.” 

Chen talks of a “war zone” created by family planning officials.
Forced abortions occur as late as the ninth month, according to Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, in 2009 testimony before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the U.S. Congress (PDF). 

Chinese “methods of infanticide” include “puncturing the skulls and injecting alcohol into the brains of full-term fetuses to kill them during labor,” she testified.
Littlejohn appended a translation of a Chinese document labeled “Best Practices, Infanticide,” issued to handle the question, “What if the infant is still alive after induced labor?”
“This is the hallmark of communistic governments: the peacetime mass killings of their own citizens,” Littlejohn told The Daily Beast.
China, since the beginning of 2016, has generally permitted couples to have two children, a relaxation of the notorious One-Child Policy, in place since 1979. 

Yet the requirement that couples obtain birth permits and the other coercive rules remain in place.
And that, unfortunately, means “gendercide.” 

As Susan Yoshihara, senior vice president for research at the Center for Family and Human Rights, pointed out in comments to me, “brutal Chinese family planning policy has led to the direct and indirect killing of tens of millions of innocent Chinese baby girls just because they are girls.”
Almost as grisly is organ harvesting. Dr. Jacob Lavee, president of the Israel Society of Transplantation, told PBS NewsHour that in 2005 one of his patients was promised a heart transplant in China “two weeks ahead of time.”
“If a patient was promised to undergo a heart transplant on a specific date,” Lavee said, “this could only mean that the—those who promised that they knew ahead of time when his potential donor would be dead.”
China said in 2014 that, beginning the following year, it would no longer take organs from executed prisoners. 

But forced donations are continuing according to Ethan Gutmann, author of The Slaughter.
Gutmann, along with David Kilgour and David Matas, is co-author of an exhaustive June 2016 report. 

They maintain there are somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 organ transplants a year, a number far in excess of donations available from voluntary sources.
Prisoners corroborate conclusions of the report. 

Wang Chunying and Yin Liping, Falun Gong practitioners, told PBS they were forced to take tests needed for matching organs with recipients. 

Gutmann says he has heard similar accounts from other prisoners.
“China is not the only country with organ-transplant abuse,” David Matas, a Canadian human rights lawyer, told the Toronto-based Globe and Mail. 

“What’s different about China is it’s institutionalized, it’s state-run, it’s party-directed. It’s not a few criminals in back alleys trying to make a fast buck.” 

Kilgour, a former Canadian MP and now a human rights activist, implored the Chinese government to stop what he labeled “an industrial-scale crime against humanity.”
In China, you can get livers, kidneys, hearts, spleens, hands, breasts, arms, corneas, intestines, pancreases, thyroids, stem cells, hair, and bone marrow, and it looks like they come from more than just common criminals. 

China has used Falun Gong practitioners, Uighurs, Tibetans, and Christians as forced donors, the three authors charge.
Beijing called the charges “groundless accusations” after the U.S. House of Representatives last year passed a resolution on the practice.
Despite noticeable improvement in Chinese donor practices, the Chinese state looks like it is searching for a new source of organs. 

“Forced organ harvesting of political dissidents began in the ’90s, in Xinjiang,” Gutmann told The Daily Beast. 

“With the recent revelation from Human Rights Watch—that the Chinese authorities are comprehensively mapping Uighur DNA—it is difficult to suppress the thought that Beijing has entered a new stage: not simply the murder of individual political dissidents but a slow-motion version of racial genocide.”
But, in fact, China is still murdering political dissidents, even if the killings often are out of sight. 

In 2009, police said a 24-year-old prisoner, Li Qiaoming, died while “playing hide-and-seek.” 

Li, however, had been beaten to death, and this term suddenly became a common euphemism for official brutality.
Last year, Lei Yang, 29 years old and an environmental activist, died an hour after being taken into custody in the Chinese capital. 

Police blamed a heart attack. 

An autopsy revealed Lei choked on his own vomit.
These days, activists also “disappear.” 

Take 2015’s “709” crackdown, so named because it began on July 9. 

Some 300 rights lawyers, legal assistants, and dissidents were swept up. 

A few of them—Zhao Wei and Wang Quanzhang—are still missing. 

The 709 campaign, primarily directed at the legal profession, has been called the “war on law” and “is widely seen as a sign of a growing intolerance of dissent under Xi Jinping.
“In China, there are countless allegations of police torture, abuse, and suspicious deaths,” widely followed freelance journalist Paul Mooney tells The Daily Beast. 

The police are killing citizens “with impunity.” 

And as he points out, “police power is growing and we can expect the situation to get worse and worse.”
Many people call the country “China.” 

But we would understand it better if we thought of it as the People’s Republic of Death.

Investigator of China Organ Harvesting Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

By Jack Phillips

Ethan Gutmann speaking about China's organ harvesting in Washington. 

Investigative journalist and author Ethan Gutmann has been nominated for the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for his work exposing the mass harvesting of organs in China’s state-run hospitals from practitioners of the traditional spiritual practice Falun Gong.
Gutmann, along with human rights lawyer David Matas and former Canadian member of Parliament David Kilgour, released last summer the report “Bloody Harvest/The Slaughter: an Update,” which expanded on research published in Matas and Kilgour’s 2006 report “Bloody Harvest” and Gutmann’s 2014 book “The Slaughter.”
The new report shows that between 60,000 and 100,000 transplants have been carried out annually in China over the past 15 years, and that the number of organ transplants is six to 10 times higher than the official estimates put forth by the Chinese Communist Party.
The Chinese regime has all along denied allegations that it murders prisoners of conscience to provide organs for its transplantation industry. 

Gutmann believes the 2016 report made a difference.
“In 2016, the dam broke, the story changed, and suddenly, when we woke up in 2017, Beijing had lost the argument.”
Gutmann, an award-winning author, launched in 2008 an independent investigation into China’s state-run organ harvesting operations, interviewing more than 100 doctors, refugees, and members of law enforcement. 

The project grew out of Gutmann’s previous interest in the persecution of Falun Gong, which he began writing about in 2002, about three years after the Communist Party’s campaign against the practice began.
“The Slaughter,” published in 2014, included accounts from doctors who knew about or participated in the grisly practice of removing organs from living Falun Gong practitioners.
“I owe the fact that there was a story worth telling to the world because of the witnesses—the refugees from labor camps, the defectors, and doctors like Enver Tohti and Ko Wen-je,” he said. 

Ko helped build Taiwan’s voluntary organ transplantation system.
In “The Slaughter,” Gutman details how Ko went to mainland China and accidentally discovered that organs sourced from Falun Gong prisoners of conscience were being used in transplants.
“All I had to do was get their story out. Persevere. Write. Get it published,” Gutmann said. 

“I had an unspoken contract with the witnesses. I fulfilled it. That is why I will sleep well, not because I was nominated for a prize.”

China's crimes against humanity

Researcher Hopes President Trump Will Hold China Accountable on Organ Harvesting
By Sarah Le

Former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific David Kilgour presents a revised report about continued murder of Falun Gong practitioners in China for their organs, as report co-author lawyer David Matas listens in the background, on Jan. 31, 2007.

LOS ANGELES—As former Canadian member of Parliament and Secretary of State (Asia-Pacific) David Kilgour travels around the world speaking on the issue of forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China, there are some people who tell him the practice ended in 2015.
Jan. 1, 2015 is the date that former Chinese Vice Minister of Health, Huang Jiefu, openly promised that China would end using organs from executed prisoners for transplantation.
“People don’t want to believe this is still going on. They want to believe that it’s stopped,” he said during an interview on Friday, Feb. 3, prior to a screening of the award-winning documentary “Human Harvest” at the UCLA Ackerman Grand Ballroom.
For years, Kilgour has researched allegations of organ harvesting in China. 

In June of last year, he published an updated version of his 2006 report titled “Bloody Harvest,” co-authored by international human rights lawyer David Matas, and in cooperation with researcher and author of “The Slaughter” Ethan Gutmann.
The researchers say China is conducting 60,000 to 100,000 organ transplants per year, and most of the organs come from prisoners of conscience who are killed in the process.
Meanwhile, Chinese officials claim only 10,000 transplants are conducted each year.
Yet Kilgour said most of the data used in his updated report came directly from Chinese government websites during the last two years. 

And the number of transplants was much higher than 10,000.
All the evidence points to a giant bank of living organ “donors,” who tissues are matched to wealthy Chinese and medical tourists and killed on demand, said Kilgour. 

The film “Human Harvest” by Vancouver filmmaker Leon Lee tells the chilling story in detail.
“People will fly to China and get a kidney or a liver and come back home with it, and they don’t want to think about where the liver’s coming from,” he said. 

“That is simply inhuman, and it’s got to stop.”
Kilgour says he has found hope in an unlikely source—the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Late last year, Trump picked Peter Navarro to head a new National Trade Council. 

Navarro has written hard-hitting books and created a film about the risks the United States and the rest of the world face from China regarding issues such as trade imbalance and the military.
Kilgour thinks highly of Navarro and even wrote an endorsement for Navarro’s book “Crouching Tiger: What China’s Militarism Means for the World,” calling it “brilliant and clear-headed analysis.”
“I think big changes are coming for the way China deals with America, and I think with the world, for the better,” said Kilgour.
Although Kilgour is not a supporter of Trump, he thinks it’s likely the new U.S. president will be tougher on China than the previous administration and may put pressure on the Chinese regime to take responsibility for the crime of organ harvesting.
“In the history of the world, no other government on the face of the earth [has done] this except China,” he said. 

“Until it stops, China should not be part of the world trading community, and it should not be part of the civilized community.”
Kilgour said during his travels, he’s noticed more and more people around the world are becoming aware of the organ harvesting issue. 

His recent visits to Ukraine, Latvia, and Poland were covered extensively by local media.
He said he’s also optimistic that the horrific practice of organ harvesting in China will soon end, despite the fact that it could be generating as much as $9 billion a year.
“Once more and more people in China know about it, I’m sure they’ll rise for the party state to stop doing it,” he said.
Until that happens, he hopes the United States, Canada, and other countries can join Israel, Spain, and Taiwan in passing legislation banning citizens from participating in transplant tourism to countries that sell organs that were taken by force.
“The question now is doing something about it,” said Kilgour.

Beauty and the Chinese Beast

Barred from China and silenced in the US, this beauty queen isn't backing down
By James Griffiths

Anastasia Lin is barred from entering China and has been blocked from speaking out in the US.
Hong Kong -- Anastasia Lin just wanted her father to see her face.
Prevented from taking part in Miss World 2015 when China refused to allow her to enter the country, where the final was being held, she tried again this past December.
The Canadian was under no illusions about coming home with the 2016 crown. 

Getting on stage would be enough: the Miss World final is broadcast around the globe, including in her native China, where her father has been harassed and prevented from leaving.
In the end she appeared on screen for all of six seconds, during her introduction. 

For the rest of the show she was tucked away at the back of the crowd of contestants, or at the corners of the stage.
"It was really too naive to think that my father could see me," Lin said.
If she is slightly bitter, it's with good reason. 

Her sliver of screen time was bought with months of practice and rehearsal, and, most painfully for an outspoken human rights activist, her silence.
During the competition, Lin was placed under a communication blackout and forbidden from speaking to journalists, part of what analysts say is a pattern of western companies cooperating with China to silence critics overseas.
Miss World chairwoman Julia Morley said the organization did "our best to assist Miss Lin and have done absolutely nothing to prevent her doing everything she wanted to do."

Good little Communist

Chinese students wearing the uniform of the Young Pioneers.

Lin, 26, was born in China's Hunan province. 

As a child, she wore the iconic red scarf of the Young Pioneers and vowed to "struggle for the cause of Communism."
One of her duties in the state-run youth organization was to corral other children to watch propaganda broadcasts, which at the time were intently focused against Falun Gong.
The spiritual movement, which has roots in the ancient Chinese meditative martial art qigong, exploded in popularity in the 1990s, growing to an estimated 30 million members by the end of the decade, according to the US State Department.
In 1999, after upwards of 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners staged a peaceful demonstration in Beijing -- the largest mass protest the Chinese capital had seen since the Tiananmen Square massacre a decade before -- the movement was banned and a brutal crackdown launched, with tens of thousands of people arrested.
Now a prominent spokeswoman against the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, Lin said she was largely unaware of the crackdown at the time. 

It wasn't until she moved to Canada at age 13 that she "learned that what were told in China was completely different to reality."

Contestants on stage during Miss World 2016 in Washington DC.
Speaking out
"I didn't start as an activist at all," Lin said.
As a teenager, she was focused on acting and modeling, eventually studying theater at the University of Toronto.
It was there that she was approached by a Chinese producer who was looking for someone to play the role of a student killed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. 

Thousands of children died during the disaster, as shoddily built schools collapsed on top of them.
"He said they couldn't find anyone to play this role, because it was too sensitive," Lin said. 

"I jumped on the opportunity."
Similar offers quickly followed: "At one point I really had a monopoly on these types of roles."
At the same time, she began competing in beauty pageants to raise her profile and get on-camera experience. 

She placed third in Miss World Canada in 2013, going on to win the competition outright in 2015.
That's when the trouble started.

Miss World contestant denied entry to China 02:13
Blocked
As Canadian champion, Lin was due to take part in Miss World 2015, to be held that year in Sanya, on China's southern island of Hainan. 

But as the event approached, her visa request went ignored and she was left hanging, unsure if she could take part in the competition.
She also began receiving distressing messages from her father, who still lives in China. 

Lin said he was approached by security officers and told that if she didn't "stop her political and human rights activities" her family members would be arrested.
These threats did not stop her speaking out -- "my personality is that I can't really hide things" -- but she and her father no longer talk due to fears for his safety.
Many activists have made similar allegations. 

Ilshat Hassan, president of the Uyghur American Association -- which advocates for members of China's Turkic-speaking Muslim minority -- told CNN last year that his family has faced repeated harassment over his activism. 

"Just months ago my mum says please stop what you're doing, or don't call us," he said.
Determined to at least try and take part in Miss World, Lin flew to Hong Kong -- where Canadians do not require a visa to enter -- and attempted to get a flight to Sanya.
"They declared me persona non grata and prevented me from boarding the plane," she said.
Her denial of entry was quickly reported worldwide, massively raising her profile, and earning her a denouncement in the state-run Global Times, which accused her of lacking "reasonable understanding of the country where she was born" and warned her against "being tangled with hostile forces against China."

Miss Puerto Rico Stephanie Del Valle (center) reacts after winning Miss World 2016.
Silenced
Given a second chance to participate in Miss World 2016, Lin vowed to toe the line, not wanting to be denied a place in the final again. 

"I wanted to do things by the book," she said.
Nevertheless, she chose as her "Beauty with a Purpose" project to shine the light on organ harvesting in China, a topic with which she had become familiar with after acting in the Canadian film "The Bleeding Edge."
In June, a report by former Canadian lawmaker David Kilgour, human rights lawyer David Matas, and journalist Ethan Gutmann claimed, based on publicly reported figures by hospitals, that China was still engaged in the widespread and systematic harvesting of organs from prisoners, including prisoners of conscience.
Arriving in Washington DC, Lin received multiple media requests. 

Keen to play by the rules, she said she forwarded them all to Miss World officials, only to have them all initially denied, though several were later granted.
Lin was also angrily rebuked after an official spotted her chatting with a reporter in the lobby of her hotel.
"They said I was breaking rules, telling lies," she said. 

"I felt like a criminal."
During this period, at least six other contestants were allowed to give interviews.
After Miss World allowed her to give press interviews, Lin was still carefully monitored when talking to reporters.

Censorship
Western companies and governments are facing increasing pressure from Beijing as it attempts to sideline overseas critics, said Amnesty International researcher Patrick Poon.
CNN has previously reported how Beijing has reached across borders in its hunt for dissidents, working with cooperative governments to deport critics back to China.
Economic pressure has also been brought to bear on companies that depend on revenue from China.
Last week, Apple removed the New York Times from its Chinese app store on the grounds the paper's app "(violated) local regulations," a move anti-censorship activist Charlie Smith characterized as "actively enabling infringements of human rights."
"Foreign governments and foreign organizations should rethink whether what they have been doing in kowtowing to China's influence means that they compromise (dissidents') freedom of expression and freedom of movement," Poon said.
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comment.
Miss World's Morley denied Lin's accusations that her treatment was related to pressure from Beijing, pointing out that this year's competition, unlike Miss World 2015, did not have any Chinese sponsors.
Despite her experiences, Lin said she was grateful to the competition for giving her a platform.
"It's not Miss World's fault they're so nervous, they're a vulnerable pageant organization," Lin said. "The entire world is economically tied to China."