Western Civilization vs. Chinese Barbarity

China watchdog reveals monstrous allegations of mass forced organ-harvesting

By Martin M. Barillas

GENEVA — A human rights group reported to the U.N. that China harvests human organs from imprisoned dissidents, especially members of the proscribed Falun Gong religious group and Uighur Muslims.
Lawyer Hamid Sabi of the London-based China Tribunal told the U.N. Human Rights Council on Tuesday that China takes skin, kidneys, lungs, and hearts from members of the persecuted groups. 

He described the atrocity of “cutting out the hearts and other organs from living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people.” 

Sabi told the assembled U.N. delegates that his group has proof of the atrocities and claimed that it has evidence of China’s crimes against humanity.

“Forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, including the religious minorities of Falun Gong and Uighurs, has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale,” Sabi said in a video published on the China Tribunal website.
Sabi told the U.N. council that China’s organ-harvesting has led to “hundreds of thousands of victims” in “one of the worst mass atrocities of this century.” 

China Tribunal did not specify how many organs have been harvested by China, nor how many victims came from each of the targeted groups. 

In June, China Tribunal published a report that found that a “very substantial number” of prisoners were “killed to order” by the Chinese government. 

The report claimed that prisoners were “cut open while still alive for their kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, cornea and skin to be removed and turned into commodities for sale.”
“Victim for victim and death for death, cutting out the hearts and other organs from living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people constitutes one of the worst mass atrocities of this century,” Sabi said. 

He added, “Organ transplantation to save life is a scientific and social triumph, but killing the donor is criminal.”
Speaking at the council’s headquarters in Switzerland, Sabi said the U.N. and other organizations should examine China Tribunal’s findings “not only in regard to the charge of genocide, but also in regard to crimes against humanity.” 

According to Sabi, member-states of the U.N. have a “legal obligation” to act in view of the release of the tribunal’s June report that uncovered “the commission of crimes against humanity against the Falun Gong and Uighur [minorities] had been proved beyond reasonable doubt.”
Sabi said in a speech that the targeting of minority groups, such as Uighur Muslims and members of the Falun Gong religion, makes possible a charge of genocide. 

Comparing it to other instances of extermination, he said, “Victim for victim and death for death, the gassing of the Jews by the Nazis, the massacre by the Khmer Rouge or the butchery to death of the Rwanda Tutsis may not be worse” than what China is doing. 

Saib told the U.N. Human Rights Council, “It is the legal obligation of UN Member States to address this criminal conduct.”
For its part, China denies that it is harvesting organs en masse. 

However, China has admitted to harvesting organs from executed criminals but claimed that it ceased the practice in 2015, according to Reuters. 

However, China Tribunal’s report said the organs are used for medical purposes. 

It cited short wait times for organ transplants in Chinese hospitals as evidence that China engages in harvesting. 

Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, an attorney who led prosecutors in the trial of former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milošević, chaired the tribunal, which heard testimony from witnesses, medical experts, and human rights investigators. 

According to its findings, China has been extracting organs from victims for at least 20 years and continues to this day.
The report asserted that there is evidence of organ extraction among Tibetans and some Christian communities. 

More than a million mostly Muslim Uighurs are currently subjected to “re-education” in prison camps managed by the Chinese government in northwestern East Turkestan colony. 

The tribunal reported that they are “being used as a bank of organs” and subjected to regular medical testing.
Speaking at a separate event on Tuesday, Sir Geoffrey Nice said the governments of the world “can no longer avoid what it is inconvenient for them to admit.” 

Israel, Italy, Spain, and Taiwan, as well as other countries, have placed restrictions on persons wishing to travel to China for organ transplant surgery. 

The International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC) charity, which founded the China Tribunal, expects that legislation will emerge in the British parliament next month to halt unethical organ tourism.

The profit motive
Concerns over organ-harvesting date back more than a decade. 

In 2006, when hundreds of thousands of members of the outlawed Falun Gong group were imprisoned, the matter was raised by foreign ministers at a China–European Union summit meeting held that year. 

This came after Canadian human rights lawyers David Matas and David Kilgour investigated the deaths of Falun Gong members who were killed despite not having been sentenced to death by any court. 

They estimate that of 60,000 transplant operations in China between 2000 and 2005, only 18,000 organ donations in that period came from official sources, which is to say from posthumous donations or from formally executed death row prisoners. 

This leaves a shortfall of some 40,000 organ donations, which Matas and Kilgour supposed may come from forced organ extraction.
The profit motive is evident in the trafficking of human body parts. 

In 2006, the China International Transplantation Network Assistance Center in Shenyang carried a list of prices for body parts wherein a kidney was listed at $62,000, a liver or heart at $130,000, and a lung at $150,000. 

Currently, according to China Tribunal, the trade surpasses $1 billion each year.

China's crimes against humanity

The Truth about China’s Persecution of Falun Gong
By ETHAN GUTMANN
People practice Falun Dafa, or Falun Gong, meditation and exercises before a protest march against the Chinese government, outside City Hall in Los Angeles, Calif., October 15, 2015. 

There is a certain transgressive thrill in pulling the tail of a sacred cow. 

In that sense, Ms. Tolentino’s piece “Stepping Into the Uncanny, Unsettling World of Shen Yun” (March 19, 2019) is a compliment, a flare in the New York sky that Falun Gong, as a victim group, has finally achieved sacred-cow status. 

But even tail-pulling has an unwritten etiquette: If I wanted to write a critique of, say, traditional Jewish Passover food, I would stick to things such as the texture of gefilte fish rather than condemning the Seder or questioning the existence of the Holocaust. 

And I suspect Ms. Tolentino would agree with me.
Ms. Tolentino was essentially writing a critical dance review of Shen Yun Performing Arts while sprinkling a little snark on — in her view — the cornball conventions of Chinese theater and Falun Gong’s suspicious refusal to adopt Western, politically correct norms. 

Yet her argument suddenly took a weird detour, delivering a skeptical judgement on the charges of Chinese State organ harvesting of Falun Gong (“many experts dispute this”).
Why did she do this? 

Two reasons: A moment of transgressive pleasure is followed by guilt, and guilt must be answered by justification — perhaps the victim group is not really a sacred cow after all? 

Or they have brought their suffering upon themselves? (You know, through hypocrisy or not answering her emails or something). 

The second reason is that even a cursory glance at the credible claims surrounding Chinese organ harvesting will establish that this is not the Holocaust.
Indeed, it’s closer to the Spanish Inquisition — a convert-to-the-Communist-Party-or-die scheme that has spanned two decades and picked up four victim groups on the way: the Uyghurs in 1997, Falun Gong in 2001, Tibetans and House Christians in 2003. 

Overall casualty rate? 

Probably just under that of the Syrian Civil War. 

Tolentino is right; that’s only a fraction of what the Nazi death camps produced in a just a few years.
Yet Ms. Tolentino had many choices in her brief Google search. 

On one side, she found me, and David Kilgour, and David Matas — two Jews and a Presbyterian who have investigated this subject for 13 years and have published books on the subject. 

On the other, she found a Washington Post journalist who, during his brief posting in Beijing, wrote a single story on this issue, with a single quote from a Chinese lawyer (“he had never heard of organs being harvested from live prisoners, as Falun Gong claims.”)
That Chinese lawyer represents Falun Gong detainees in China. 

And that means he is a very brave man — particularly at a time when Chinese lawyers are routinely being thrown into prison, “Black Jails,” and even labor camps. 

Yet even very brave men don’t stand up all that well to electric cattle prods, so it is not surprising that the lawyer didn’t remember hearing anything from his clients about the most politically sensitive issue in China, the state-sponsored organ harvesting of political and religious dissidents.
Ms. Tolentino had choices. 

I’m not surprised that she did not read our published works. 

That can take a month. 

But she could have quoted the New York Times; their previous star China reporter, Didi Kirsten Tatlow, seamlessly fluent in Chinese, wrote six stories on this issue. 

Ms. Tolentino could have easily found that our own House of Representatives passed a resolution in 2016 condemning China for harvesting dissidents, citing our “credible and persistent reports” — as did the European Parliament. 

She could have quoted from the ongoing London China Tribunal, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice, probably the most respected human rights prosecutor in the world. 

Again, Ms. Tolentino is right: There is a rival herd of experts who dispute our findings out there. 

But with over a million Uyghurs incarcerated over the last year, blood-and-DNA-tested, ready for organ-tissue matching, those experts are very quiet these days.
Gefilte fish has many memories for me. 

I could write an essay about Jewish food and it might be just as evocative — and critical of how corny the whole Seder thing can be, and emotionally mixed — as Ms. Tolentino’s feelings about the Shen Yun dance performance. 

But the force of my writing still wouldn’t give me the standing to publish in The New Yorker on the Holocaust. 

Only intensive study and the relentless, challenging, scarring, tedious, and exhaustive interviews of witnesses can do that.
I suspect that the author had a nice, mildly transgressive piece in hand. 

Pull the tail a little, maybe even tip the whole cow. 

Then she “stepped into” something, “uncanny and unsettling.” 

It wasn’t Shen Yun, or Falun Gong — or a cowpie for that matter. 

No, it was something evil, with a whiff of the gas chamber about it, something she did not understand. 

And she panicked, but she went ahead and did it anyway. 

I have no clue as to why her editors went along on that midnight ride, but they did. 

And in doing so, they failed their readers — and millions of prisoners of conscience as well.

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.”

Butcher's Pope

Debate Flares Over China’s Forced Organ Harvesting
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

BEIJING — A politely worded but testy debate has flared over a Vatican conference on human organ trafficking, with a group of ethicists warning that China will use the participation of its most senior transplant official to convince the world that it has overhauled its organ procurement system.

In a letter to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome, where the two-day Summit on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism began on Tuesday, 11 ethicists wrote: “Our concern is with the harvesting and trafficking of organs from executed prisoners in China.”
China has admitted that it extracted organs from death row prisoners for decades, in what critics have called a serious violation of the rights of inmates who cannot give genuine consent. 

Since Jan. 1, 2015, Chinese officials have said they no longer use prisoners’ organs, though doubts persist.
“We urge the summit to consider the plight of incarcerated prisoners in China who are treated as expendable human organ banks,” wrote the 11 signatories, who included Wendy Rogers of Macquarie University in Australia; Arthur Caplan of the New York University Langone Medical Center; David Matas and David Kilgour, both Canadian human rights lawyers; and Enver Tohti, a former surgeon from the western Chinese region of Xinjiang.

The Chinese official attending the meeting, Huang Jiefu, a liver transplant specialist, is co-chairman of the National Organ Donation and Transplantation Committee of China, which is charged with remaking the country’s organ donation system to ensure transparency in sourcing and distributing organs in line with international standards.
Reached in Rome, Huang did not comment immediately, writing in a WeChat message that he was at the meeting and would reply soon.
An article co-written by another member of the national committee, Zheng Shusen, also a liver transplant specialist, was recently withdrawn after publication by the journal Liver International over concerns it relied on data from executed prisoners, Science magazine reported on Monday.
In their letter, the ethicists also argued that there was no evidence that China had ended the practice of taking organs from executed prisoners, which they said included prisoners of conscience.
“On the contrary, there is evidence that it continues,” they wrote. 

“Officials from China should not be given the prestigious platform of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to spread misinformation about reform in China.”
In a response to the letter, addressed to Dr. Rogers, who is also chairwoman of the advisory committee of the International Coalition to End Organ Pillaging in China, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Science, warned against promoting political agendas.
“The organizer intends for the summit to be an academic exercise and not a reprise of contentious political assertions,” Bishop Sorondo wrote.
In an interview, Dr. Rogers said she disagreed with the bishop’s response. 

“I thought that was outrageous, really, to try and hedge off any discussion by saying it’s political,” she said. 

“The weight of evidence is such that it’s up to the Chinese to prove that they’re not doing this, and not the other way round.”
Last year, 4,080 Chinese donated a total of 11,296 organs, according to an article published on Monday in the Chinese journal Health News and republished in People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s main newspaper. 

That number is a small fraction of the total needed. 

Health officials estimate that each year about 300,000 people in China need a transplant.
To help change the system, officials have issued public appeals and deployed organ donation coordinators at hospitals. 

But many Chinese are unwilling, fearing that it is unfilial to one’s ancestors be buried with organs missing.
The meeting in Rome comes amid warming ties between China and the Vatican. 

Francis is eager to visit China, home to millions of Catholics who are members of either the state-sponsored church or the underground church that is loyal to Rome. 

Some consider themselves members of both.
The Chinese state does not recognize the jurisdiction of Rome over Chinese Catholics, though Catholicism is one of China’s five official religions along with Buddhism, Islam, Protestantism and Taoism. 

Organizers of the Vatican meeting said they hoped it would help generate remedies to the problem of organ trafficking and transplant tourism, which they called a “form of human slavery” afflicting many parts of the world.
“We hope this summit will create a top-down and bottom-up movement in society, to raise awareness of the extension and seriousness of this modern challenge and lay the groundwork for moral and appropriate solutions based on human dignity, freedom, justice and peace,” the academy’s website said.
In a Twitter post last year, Francis made clear his objections to organ trafficking:
The Vatican knows about the problem surrounding organ sourcing in China and wants to help change it, said Francesco Sisci, a specialist in Catholic affairs at Renmin University of China who interviewed the pope last year.
“They are well aware of the situation,” Mr. Sisci said in an email. 

“But the Vatican can only do this: encourage better behavior. It can’t start a trade war or send in the Swiss Guards as paratroopers,” he added, referring to the small force responsible for the pope’s safety.
Condemning the perpetrators “may be good revenge, but that’s the job of the Nuremberg trials, or of God,” Mr. Sisci said. 

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."

China's crimes against humanity

China Harvests Thousands of Organs from Prisoners of Conscience

By Suzette Gutierrez-Cachila

Members of a surgical team implant a donated harvested kidney to transplant into patient Adam Abernathy as part of a five-way organ transplant swap in New York.

A disturbing report claims that China continues to harvest organs from prisoners of conscience on a wide scale.
Most of the victims are Falun Gong practitioners, but others, including Christians, who contradict the ideologies of the Chinese Communist Party can also suffer the same fate.
Sometimes the prisoners are killed so their organs can be harvested. 

At other times, their organs are extracted while they are still alive, according to News Corp Australia.
Another report released in June says that 60,000 to 100,000 organ transplants are being done in Chinese hospitals each year, a figure that appears to be questionable with the authorities claiming only 10,000 organs transplants are done annually.
“The total number of transplants which officials ascribe to the country as a whole, ten thousand a year, is easily surpassed by just a few hospitals. Whatever the total number is, it must be substantially more, by a multiple, than the official figure," the report said.

The report also claims organ transplantation in China has become a lucrative business. 

It cites the development of new hospitals or new transplant wings, suggesting there is an assurance of a good organ supply.
There are also many medical staff qualified to perform organ transplants, indicating a demand for the skill. 

In addition, these professionals are constantly being trained.
“Transplantation in China means money, lots of it,” the report said.
The Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting conducts research into such forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience. 

The organization says China is “the only place where systematic forced organ harvesting continues to occur on a mass, state-sanctioned level.”
One of the reasons for this is that there is no legislation that prohibits the practice. 

On the contrary, an old law opens the way to harvest organs from executed prisoners.
“In fact, a ‘1984 Provision’ still remains in place, which allows for executed prisoners to be used as donors — in direct violation of all international guidelines,” DAFOH spokeswoman Sophia Bryskine said, according to NewsCorp Australia.
She said China’s legal system is “corrupt.”
“China hasn’t even confirmed prisoners of conscience have been killed for their organs. They only said they stopped the practice for executed prisoners who had death sentences,” Bryskine said, adding that international pressure is necessary to put a stop to the state-sanctioned organ harvesting.
Former Canadian lawmaker David Kilgour and human rights lawyer David Matas, co-authors of the report, went to the Australian Parliament House Monday to call on lawmakers to intervene in the Chinese practice.
Kilgour and Matas told the parliament they hold evidence proving there are 60,000 to 100,000 organ transplants being performed in China each year. 

They said most of the victims, aside from Falun Gong practitioners, are Christians, Tibetan Buddhists and Muslim Uighurs, whose murder allows the demand for transplants to be met.

China's crimes against humanity

Two Canadian lawyers take Chinese organ-harvesting claims to Australia 

By Rod Mcguirk

David Kilgour, former prosecutor and Canadian secretary of state for the Asia-Pacific, and David Matas, human rights lawyer

Two Canadian lawyers came to Australia’s Parliament House on Monday to persuade lawmakers to pass a motion urging China to immediately end the practice of organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience.
David Kilgour, a former prosecutor and Canadian secretary of state for the Asia-Pacific, and David Matas, a human rights lawyer, have published evidence they say shows that China performs an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 transplants a year, with organs primarily taken from Falun Gong practitioners, Muslim Uighurs, Tibetan Buddhists and Christians.
China says it performed 10,057 organ transplants last year and has not harvested organs of executed prisoners since January 2015.
The U.S. House of Representative passed a resolution in June calling on the State Department to report annually to Congress on the implementation of an existing law barring visas to Chinese and other nationals engaged in coercive organ transplantation. 

The resolution also condemns persecution of Falun Gong, a spiritual group China calls a cult and has outlawed.

The European Parliament passed a similar declaration in July calling for an independent investigation of “persistent, credible reports on systematic, state-sanctioned organ harvesting from non-consenting prisoners of conscience” in China.
Kilgour said the Australian government was reluctant to accept evidence of large-scale, forced organ harvesting in China. 

Kilgour blamed Australia’s close economic ties with China, its largest trading partner.
“The greatest amount of skepticism seems to be in Australia,” Kilgour said.
Kilgour and Matas first published a report on organ harvesting in China in 2006, which became the basis of their 2009 book “Bloody Harvest. The Killing of Falun Gong for their Organs.”
Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade First Assistant Secretary Graham Fletcher told a Senate committee last month that he had doubts about the credibility of Falun Gong reports of forced organ harvesting.
Amnesty International’s Australian spokeswoman Caroline Shepherd said the London-based organization had not done its own research into organ harvesting in China and supported United Nations’ calls for an independent investigation of such allegations.
The Australian Health Department said at least 53 Australians travelled to China for organ transplants between 2001 and 2014.
Matas said it was not possible for such a large organ-transplant industry to thrive without the support of the Communist Party.
“This is an institutionalized, party-driven scheme, with an institutionalized cover up,” Matas said.
Around 200 Falun Gong practitioners demonstrated outside Parliament House against forced organ harvesting on Monday as Matas and Kilgour addressed a meeting of lawmakers from several political parties.

China tortured detained Canadian into giving bribery confession

By CRAIG OFFMAN

A Canadian citizen held in Chinese custody says authorities tortured her into confessing that she bribed a former leading official who became an outspoken critic of the regime.
You Ziqi of Richmond, B.C., was detained on fraud charges by customs officials at the Beijing airport in 2014 while travelling with her son to visit family in Hubei province.
In a complaint written to the Chinese authorities and obtained by The Globe and Mail, Ms. You said Chinese officials forced her to give testimony that she had bribed Xie Weidong, who was a businessman and former Supreme Court judge before he immigrated to Canada two years ago. 

In the meantime, the Chinese government seized almost all of Ms. You’s family assets, worth around $10-million.
Evidence provided by Ms. You became the basis for a Red Notice, an international arrest warrant-like demand issued by Interpol, against Mr. Xie, who lives in Toronto and has applied for permanent residence here.
Both expatriates say the case against them is based on false testimony, instigated by Communist Party officials trying to cover up the theft of Ms. You’s family assets. 

“I have come from inside the system. I know very well the extent of corruption and darkness there,” Mr. Xie told The Globe.
Their plights represent the murk of the country’s judiciary system, which remains firmly controlled by the party. 

What may be look like an earnest effort to root out corruption could equally be part of a broader effort to purge an official who has fallen out of favour. 

Such a dilemma underscores the difficulty of co-operating with a country whose evidence is often unreliable and whose allegations of criminality often masks ulterior motives.
Winnipeg lawyer David Matas, who has a long career in the field of human rights in China, said these kinds of situations are common. 

“The target of a corruption charge is being asked to implicate somebody relatively high up,” he noted. “They operate by attacking friends, relatives, neighbours and business associates as a way of getting the target. They drain the pool to catch the fish.”
At the same time, China is pushing for countries such as Canada and the United States to participate in Operation Foxhunt, its controversial effort to scour the globe for people it calls corrupt. 

Beijing has pushed Ottawa for a formal extradition treaty, and the government has agreed to discussions.
This week, Interpol announced that a leading Chinese security official, Meng Hongwei, will head the global police organization, stoking worry that the appointment may be instrumental in tracking down dissidents as well as alleged fugitives who have fled abroad.
The allegations against Ms. You date back to 1999, when she represented her brother in a debt dispute that landed before Mr. Xie while he was a judge on the Chinese Supreme Court.
Mr. Xie ruled in Ms. You’s favour, and told The Globe that he reached out to her after delivering his verdict. 

At the time, he was planning to step down from the court to launch a website devoted to legal matters.
“She was a businesswoman, and I was just starting my own business. We had a lot in common,” Mr. Xie said.
He left the court in 1999. 

The two became romantically involved, he added, but the relationship did not last.
In 2002, Ms. You left for Canada, where she obtained citizenship. 

While she was gone, authorities targeted her family back home, seizing more than $10-million in assets from her brother, including a set of precious books and a limousine.
When authorities arrested Ms. You upon her return to China in 2014, they showed a remittance slip that, they said, proved her brother’s company had invested in Mr. Xie’s website in 2004 – which they called evidence of a bribe for the favourable Supreme Court ruling years earlier.
As interrogators pushed her to confess, they threatened to go public with a tale of her seducing an important judge, and amassed bank transfer statements, audit reports and testimony that, they said, proved she had on several occasions moved public company funds into accounts she personally controlled.
“The suspect You Ziqi defrauded the wealth of listed companies in large numbers,” legal papers filed against her allege.
Authorities changed her name while in detention and told her they could send her to remote Inner Mongolia, where “even if she died, no one would know,” her lawyer, Xuan Dong, said in an interview. 

He was not allowed to see her until she had been in detention for more than a year. 

By that time, she had signed a confession, but authorities refused to provide Mr. Xuan the videotape of her confession.
Later, Ms. You recanted her testimony, insisting that it was forced in a detailed six-page letter – copied to Xi Jinping – and in court, where in a pretrial meeting she threatened to commit suicide inside the courtroom if found guilty.
According to documents provided by Ms. You’s son, Li Ang, consular officials have visited Ms. You at least three times. 

“Canada takes allegations of mistreatment or torture of Canadian citizens abroad extremely seriously,” Global Affairs spokeswoman Jocelyn Sweet wrote in an e-mail, adding that the department has put in place a mechanism designed to identify situations in which mistreatment of a Canadian may have occurred and to take steps to protect the interests and well-being of Canadians.
Mr. Li, who was with his mother at the Beijing airport when she was detained, said that as she was taken into custody, his mother told him to take of himself, but she didn’t seem troubled. 

“She was confident she was innocent,” he said.
Based on the evidence it extracted from Ms. You, Beijing issued an Interpol Red Notice seeking the arrest of Mr. Xie, who moved to Canada in 2014. 

In a June, 2016, notice provided by Mr. Xie, the Department of Canadian Citizenship and Immigration listed a set of accusations against him based on the Red Notice.
The Immigration Department said it could not comment on a specific case without consent. 

The Chinese embassy in Ottawa did not respond to questions.
Mr. Xie said one his sisters has now been hauled away in China and accused of taking bribes, as a way to force him back. 

Another sister, who also lives in Canada, has been barred from leaving China.
For China, bringing back Mr. Xie could have another benefit, silencing a rare figure who both occupied the highest levels of the judiciary and emerged as a public critic.
“If the Canadian government establishes an extradition treaty with the Chinese government, the Canadian government will be helping the evil and dark forces of the Chinese government,” he said.