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.

Beauty and the Chinese Beast

A beauty queen speaks out about China, and causes tensions at Miss World
By Maura Judkis

Anastasia Lin in a photo taken last year when she was first crowned Miss World Canada — but was unable to compete at the international pageant in China because the government denied her a visa.

Everything seemed to be going well for Miss Canada, Anastasia Lin, during an interview Wednesday promoting the Miss World pageant — until she was asked whether she would be attending a screening of her new movie, which has reportedly enraged officials in her native China.
Lin shot a glance at the four pageant officials assigned to listen in.
“You can ask them,” she told a Washington Post reporter.
One of the officials maintained that Lin could go “if she has spare time” but that she hadn’t yet asked to go.
That’s when things got testy, Lin noting sharply that the screening’s hosts had repeatedly sent requests on her behalf, her handlers insisting she just needed to abide by "certain" protocols.
It was a tempered explosion of the tensions surrounding Lin’s presence at the beauty contest, taking place Sunday at the new MGM National Harbor casino complex in Maryland.
Miss Canada has found herself at odds with Miss World organizers, in a conflict stretching back more than a year regarding her advocacy work against human rights abuses in China — historically, a major sponsor and booster of the pageant.
Lin, 26, a resident of Canada since she was 13, was supposed to represent the country in the 2015 pageant in Sanya, China.
But Chinese authorities denied her a visa because of her political activity and support of Falun Gong, the Buddhist-inflected spiritual movement that has been banned by the government since 1999.
Lin at a press conference in Hong Kong last year. Miss World invited her to compete this year, with the pageant being held in the U.S.

With the pageant moving this year to the United States, organizers offered her another shot at the crown.
Lin signed on, saying she carried no grudge about last year.
“In all fairness, they were in China with 130 girls,” she told The Post on Wednesday.
“For anyone to take a principled stand, it’s not easy.”
But tensions have remained.
The New York Times reported Tuesday night that pageant officials had barred Lin from speaking to the media. 
A Boston Globe reporter attempted to talk to Lin this month, and was sent away.
Meanwhile, Lin recently had a starring role — as a Falun Gong practitioner who is jailed and tortured — in “The Bleeding Edge,” a movie that portrays Chinese political prisoners forced to undergo organ harvesting. 
The D.C.-based Victims of Communism Memorial was scheduled to host a screening Wednesday night, but attempts to invite Lin had been thwarted by the pageant, the Times reported.
And yet Wednesday, after the Times story appeared, Miss World officials made Lin available for a previously requested interview with The Washington Post.
She spoke candidly in front of her handlers about consequences of her advocacy.
Lin’s father still lives in China, and, as she wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post last year, he has faced intense pressure from state-owned media and banks, and his business and morale have suffered.
“To the point of self-harm,” she said.
Lin said she recently received a series of alarming text messages but would not elaborate.
“I believe he is in stable condition right now,” she said.
“I can understand why he feels like he can’t take it anymore.”
The pageant allowed Lin to meet at the State Department with David Saperstein, the ambassador-at-large for religious freedom, to talk about her father.
“Because it’s still a very fluid situation in China, they don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said.
Four representatives of the pageant — publicist Veronica Jeon and three others who did not give names — sat in on Lin’s interview, which included another contestant and the reigning Miss World, Mireia Lalaguna.
In front of them, Lin said that she was not being silenced.
“The first two weeks, I don’t know what happened, but I’m talking to you now, so that’s all that’s important,” she said.
Still, the tension was clear.
One of the pageant officials maintained that all contestants simply needed to “run it by us” if they wanted to see visitors or speak to the media, “so it doesn’t interrupt any rehearsal time [or] doing a specific event.”
“Uh, well, I wish I had known that two weeks ago when the Boston Globe journalist got kicked out,” Lin said, obviously vexed but maintaining a beauty-queen composure.
The official said that the reporter “didn’t ask for the necessary steps to go and meet her.”
“Uh, he did,” Lin said, “sending two requests before we even came here.”
The pageant has forged close ties to China, which has hosted Miss World seven times since 2000. Chinese companies have sponsored the pageant lavishly, and the city of Sanya built a special theater for it.
This year’s pageant, though, is “self-financed,” Jeon said.
Julia Morley, the pageant’s longtime chief executive, was not available for comment.
Lin said that even if she doesn’t win, the most important thing is her presence on that stage.
“This show is going to be broadcast to China,” said Lin.
“For them to be able to see me on a screen and see that I haven’t given up, I haven’t forgotten, and then their voice can be heard is — it’s very important for me and for a lot of people who I have spoken to.”

Ilham Tohti, Uighur imprisoned for life by China, wins the “human rights Nobel”

The man known as ‘China’s Mandela’ announced as the winner of the annual Martin Ennals award for human rights defenders.
By Tom Phillips In Beijing

Ilham Tohti was convicted of separatism and condemned to a life behind bars by a court in Xinjiang in 2014. 

A moderate Uighur intellectual, who was jailed for life after opposing China’s draconian policies in its violence-stricken west, has been named the winner of a prestigious award known as the “human rights Nobel” in a move likely to infuriate Beijing.
Ilham Tohti, who has been called China’s Mandela, was announced as the winner of the annual Martin Ennals award for human rights defenders on Tuesday.
The honour comes two years after the 46-year-old scholar was convicted of separatism and condemned to a life behind bars by a court in Xinjiang, a vast region of western China where there have been repeated outbreaks of ethnic unrest and violence.
In a statement, the Martin Ennals foundation said Ilham Tohti had spent two decades trying “to foster dialogue and understanding” between China’s Han majority and members of Xinjiang’s largely Muslim Uighur ethnic minority, of which he is a member.
“He has rejected separatism and violence, and sought reconciliation based on a respect for Uighur culture, which has been subject to religious, cultural and political repression,” it added.
Beijing has painted Ilham Tohti – whom western governments and rights groups universally view as a voice of moderation – as a dangerous separatist and “scholar-turned-criminal” who preached “hatred and killing”.
But Dick Oosting, the chair of the Martin Ennals foundation, rejected that depiction and accused Beijing of silencing a peaceful advocate of Uighur rights.
“The real shame of this situation is that by eliminating the moderate voice of Ilham Tohti the Chinese government is in fact laying the groundwork for the very extremism it says it wants to prevent.”
Teng Biao, an exiled human rights lawyer and friend of the jailed scholar, welcomed the award.
“It is definitely good news,” he said. 

“It won’t necessarily lead to an early release or have direct consequences but at least this kind of prize will make the international community more aware of Ilham Tohti. Every award is helpful to Chinese political prisoners and human rights defenders.”
Nicholas Bequelin, Amnesty International’s east Asia director, said: “The prize is a much needed recognition of the admirable work that Ilham Tohti has made to the cause of addressing ethnic tensions in Xinjiang, a topic that he knew well would one day lead the government to jail him.”
Also shortlisted for the high-profile award – which is named after the British activist who was one of Amnesty International’s first secretary generals – were Razan Zaitouneh, a Syrian campaigner who went missing in Damascus in 2013, and a group of Ethiopian activists known as the Zone 9 bloggers.
Ilham Tohti was born in Artush, a city in Xinjiang near China’s borders with Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Pakistan, in October 1969.
Aged 16 he made the 2,700-mile journey to Beijing to continue his studies, eventually becoming an economics professor at the Minzu University of China, a institution geared towards the country’s ethnic minorities.
As an academic he began writing about the political and ethnic tensions that continued to blight Xinjiang in the mid-1990s and in 2006 launched a bilingual website called uyghurbiz.net to debate such issues.
Scrutiny of his work intensified following deadly 2009 ethnic riots in Xinjiang’s capital and again after Beijing declared a “people’s war on terror” in 2014 after a spate of attacks linked to the region.
Teng said his friend had attempted to address the causes of the bloodshed by serving as a “bridge to connect Uighurs and Han Chinese”.
“He was never a radical. He never resorted to violence or extreme ideas.”
Even so, the lawyer said his friend’s criticisms of Beijing’s ethnic policies saw him “severely monitored by the secret police”. 

In early 2014 the scholar was detained at his home in Beijing and taken to Xinjiang, where western diplomats were barred from attending his two-day trial, in September that year.
Teng said Ilham Tohti’s “very inhumane” life sentence – harsh, even by Chinese standards – showed how fearful the Communist party had become of his influence. 

“That’s the reason the Chinese government ... hated him so much.”
Teng said the wife and children of the academic – whose financial assets were also confiscated following his trial – were now “facing difficult times”. 

Relatives were only permitted to see the jailed scholar for 20 minutes every three months, with discussion of political issues and prison conditions forbidden.
Bequelin said: “By sentencing to life-imprisonment such a moderate and constructive critic who had never advocated either violence or separatism, Beijing betrayed its fear that discussions of any kind about the situation of Uighurs in China would inevitably bring attention to the extraordinarily repressive policies under which Uighurs live.
“These policies have produced disastrous results including increasing ethnic polarisation and a spike in violence in recent years – the very peril that Ilham Tohti was trying to address. It is time for Beijing to recognise that Ilham Tohti should never have been jailed in the first place and release him immediately.”
The decision to honour Ilham Tohti is likely to spark an angry response from Beijing. 

The Swiss government and donors of the Martin Ennals foundation reportedly faced pressure from Chinese officials after the activist Cao Shunli was shortlisted for the same award just days before she died in custody in 2014.
Teng, who fled China two years ago fearing he too would be imprisoned, said he hoped such awards meant the international community would not “gradually forget” human rights defenders such as Ilham Tohti.
But the severity of the crackdown that has rolled out under Xi Jinping meant keeping track of all its victims was increasingly difficult.
“The Chinese government has arrested a lot of human rights activists and scholars and lawyers,” Teng said. 

“It is very hard to remember all these people.”