How organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience can happen on a large scale in the 21st century

Legalizing the seizure of organs from “serious offenders” and treating them as raw materials for production

On March 31, 2006, a senior military doctor who belonged to the General Logistics Department of the Shenyang Military Command, wrote several times to the Epoch Times, choosing to remain anonymous for his safety:¹

The Chinese Communist Party Central Military Commission had documentation since 1962, and has followed through to today, that all death row and serious offenders can be treated according to the needs of national and socialist development and can be dealt with according to the “revolutionary protocol.”

The seizure of organs from serious offenders was legalized by a supplementary regulation enacted in 1984. Many local public security departments deal with this either by directly transplanting from these people and cremating them afterwards, or by wounding them, forming death rituals, directly transplanting, and then cremating. After 1992, with the rising costs of industrial raw materials as a result of the development of many industries, human bodies became a valuable raw material. Both living bodies and corpses became raw materials.

At present, the Chinese Communist Party Central defines Falun Gong members as a class enemy. This means that there is no need to report if they are treated in line with the needs of economic development. In other words, like serious offenders, Falun Gong people are no longer seen as human beings, but raw materials for products, and they became a commodity.

Sujiatun is one of 36 similar secret detention facilities. From the information I can access, Jilin has the largest camp that detains Falun Gong practitioners, with the code of 672-S. There are more than 120,000 people detained there, including Falun Gong people from throughout the country, serious offenders, and political prisoners. Just the Jilin Jiutai region, which has the fifth-largest secret detention facilities holding Falun Gong practitioners, detained more than 14,000 of them.

How can medical professionals–people trained to heal–be made to participate willingly in acts of killing?

Enver Tohti, a former Uighur surgeon educated and raised in China, currently lives in London. He was told to extract the organs from a living prisoner in 1995. Years after he left China, he told his experience to the world: “These things [are] haunting me … I had to tell the world to release the things inside my heart, to get a little relief.”

He shared his experience during an interview,

The interests of the Communist Party are above everything. We had a class called ‘politics.’ They made you disabled to think yourself. If you don’t believe what the CCP is believing, that is wrong. That is what they believe. That is what they teach. My whole body became a robot and performed to do what I had been programmed to do …

All the people [who] graduated from their system–they too have same mindset, they are the product produced by the CCP. Our ideology at the time was that being able to participate in doing away with the country’s enemies was a glorious thing, even genuinely believing what we are doing is for a good cause …

Prisoners of conscience … I think this term only exists in the West. In China, they don’t say it that way. Or they say political prisoner. That is the general terminology.

The Communist Party treats everyone else as an enemy of the state, apart from their own. So, [if] anybody labels themselves other than communism, the Communist Party or member, then they will be treated as an enemy of the state. They are traitors. Therefore, they are not even qualified as human beings. Therefore, they are assets of the state to be used at the CCP’s will. Therefore, they are subject to whatever punishment is available.

Eliminating the “number one enemy”

China started performing transplants with organs harvested from executed prisoners on a small scale in the 70s. In the years that followed, it also used organs from prisoners of conscience, Uyghurs, Tibetans and House Christians in captivity.

The tremendous development in China’s human organ transplant industry after 1999 coincided with the start of the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign to wipe out Falun Gong.

David Matas, co-author of Bloody Harvest / The Slaughter: An Update, explains, “The official line, in terms of the repression of Falun Gong, of the Party, is ‘Bankrupt them financially, ruin their reputations, destroy them physically.’ So, the vilification is destroying their reputations; the organ transplant is destroying them physically.”

Incentives to growth in transplant volume are supported by the Party’s national strategic planning. Since 2001, the Party has incorporated organ transplantation into its ‘Five-Year Plans’. Since the Party runs the country, when the Party indicates a target in a plan, the country is expected to conform to the plan.

Live organ [transplantation] not only serves the Party’s policy to destroy physically its “number one enemy” but also gives a benefit to hospitals and individuals who participate in the persecution campaign through numerous government-funded projects.

Enver Tohti further explains,

… Uighur people get drunk, they smoke, but Falun Gong practitioners don’t, so their organs are rather healthy. There suddenly [emerged a] huge number of potential organ supply. And they are being labelled as an enemy of the state. They are subjected to whatever punishment. That’s how they have become the victims of it.

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