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.

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

Study retraction reignites concern over China’s use of prisoner organs
By Dalmeet Singh Chawla

A protest in Hong Kong of forced organ harvesting in mainland China.

A journal has decided to retract a 2016 study because of concerns that its data on the safety of liver transplantation involved organs sourced from executed prisoners in China. 

The action, taken despite a denial by the study’s authors that such organs were used, comes after clinical ethicist Wendy Rogers of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and colleagues authored a letter to the editor of Liver International on 30 January, calling for the paper’s retraction in the “absence of credible evidence of ethical sourcing of organs.”
For years, Chinese officials have come under fire for allowing the use of organs from executed prisoner for transplants, including for foreigners coming to the country for so-called medical tourism. 

In January 2015, it set up a volunteer donation system, but doubts persist that much has changed.
The disputed study—published online in October 2016—analyzed 563 consecutive liver transplantations performed before the ban (from April 2010 to October 2014) at a medical center in China. 

Suspicious, Rogers organized the protest letter to the journal. 

“Publication of data from prisoners is ethically inappropriate given that it is not possible to ensure that the prisoners freely agreed either to donate their organs, or to be included a research program,” she tells ScienceInsider.
Mario Mondelli of the University of Pavia in Italy, Liver International’s editor-in-chief, notes that two of the study’s authors tried to reassure him in an email, which he provided to ScienceInsider. 

Shusen Zheng and Sheng Yan of the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, wrote that “all organs were recovered from donors after "cardiac" death and no grafts obtained from executed prisoners were used.” (Zheng and Yan have not responded to a request for comment from ScienceInsider.)
After getting no reply to subsequent request for further evidence on the origin of the organs, Mondelli says, the journal asked the authors’ institution for an official document, by 3 February, confirming that organs were not sourced from executed prisoners. 

Again, he says, there was no response.
Mondelli says the original study and its related correspondence will be published together in an upcoming print issue. 

The study will, however, be accompanied with a retraction statement, and the authors, adds Mondelli, will face a “life-long embargo” from submitting their work to Liver International.
Last year, Rogers and colleagues called for the retraction of another paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics that, according to Rogers, presented a “very positive” and “sanitized” account of organ procurement in China. 

In that case, instead of retracting the article, the journal published a lengthy correction.
The new dispute has flared just before a summit on organ trafficking and transplant tourism, to be held in Vatican City, Italy on February 7 and 8, by The Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

The Butcher's Pope

• Vatican defends inviting Chinese ex-minister to organ trafficking talks
• Huang Jiefu’s inclusion at summit confers legitimacy on Beijing’s forced organ harvesting

By Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome

Vatican officials have defended their decision to invite a Chinese former deputy health minister to a conference on organ trafficking despite concerns that China still relies on the organs of executed prisoners in its transplant programme.
Medical ethics experts and human rights activists have decried the move by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to invite Huang Jiefu to a two-day conference starting on Tuesday that aims to expose organ trafficking and seeks to find “moral and appropriate solutions” to the issue.
Wendy Rogers, a medical ethics expert at Macquarie University in Australia, said Huang’s inclusion in the conference, where there could be a meeting with Francis, risked giving a propaganda boost to China and an “air of legitimacy” to its transplantation programme.
“The Pontifical Academy of Sciences should be aware of how the endorsements – even indirect – of prestigious foreign bodies are used by China’s propaganda apparatus to burnish the reputation of its unethical transplant system,” Rogers wrote in a protest letter to a Vatican official.
“We urge the summit to consider the plight of incarcerated prisoners in China who are treated as expendable human organ banks. There is no evidence that this practice has ceased in China,” she wrote.
At the heart of the controversy lies a daunting question for the Vatican at a time when it is desperately seeking to re-establish ties to China: whether dialogue with Communist party officials could help spur reform on issues such as human rights and religious freedom, or whether such interactions offer legitimacy to practices that are deeply at odds with Catholic teaching, including the church’s objection to capital punishment.
In an address last year, Francis said he considered illicit organ trafficking to be a “new form of slavery”.
In his response to Rogers’ letter, which was obtained by the Guardian, Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, an Argentine bishop and chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said the conference was meant to be an “academic exercise and not a reprise of contentious political assertions”.
Huang, who has led an effort to overhaul China’s transplantation processes, has been under fire before. 

China’s use of prisoners’ organs was debated at an international conference last year after two doctors said it was premature to declare China an “ethical partner” in the international transplant community.
In 2015, Huang claimed China would no longer use organs from executed prisoners to meet the country’s high demand.
Nicholas Bequelin, regional director for East Asia for Amnesty International, said it was known at the time that the vast majority of organ transplants in China came from executed prisoners. 

The number of prisoners China executes every year is a state secret, but Bequelin said estimates ranged from 3,000 to 7,000 people annually.
Bequelin said experts had cast doubt on Huang’s claims that China had outlawed the practice, in large part because the country is yet to develop an effective national donor programme of willing participants.
“They haven’t stopped the practice and won’t stop. They have a need for organ transplants that far outpace the availability of organs,” Bequelin said.
Details of the process are grim. 

Bequelin said China did not adhere to World Health Organization recommendations on how doctors determine whether a person is legally dead. 

In China, organs have been removed before the prisoner would be considered medically dead by international standards.
“The timing of the execution is dependent on the need of a particular transplant surgery. You will execute this person at this time on this day, because that is when the patient has to be ready,” Bequelin said. 

“It is very secret and there is not a lot of reliable information.”
In testimony before a US congressional committee examining the issue last year, Francis Delmonico, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School who was appointed to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Francis, acknowledged that he could not assure the committee that the practice had been completely eradicated.

Amnesty’s Bequelin said: “It is a very optimistic view of the lay of the land in China if you think that conversations and dialogue can be on its own a significant factor. China is a system. There is a risk of naiveté about what can be achieved through rapprochement and meetings.”

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.