Investigative journalist Ethan Gutman (centre) talks to a man attending his speech on Parliament Hill (left) and NDP MP Bill Siksay (right) on Nov. 1, 2010. (Matthew Little/The Epoch Times)

Evidence of Canada’s tangled ties with China has been splattered all over Parliament Hill in recent weeks, showing just how complicated relations are with the most powerful dictatorship in the world.

While the government is trying to curry favour with the Chinese regime by sending a deluge of ministers there (four in the past two weeks alone) to wrangle trade deals and agreements on various files, talk of China on Parliament Hill has been grim recently.

Like the tales told to a subcommittee last week about how the Chinese regime has become more repressive in recent years, cracking down on dissent with a fervour borne out of fear.

Fear of the Masses

“The discontent and alienation is so deep and widespread that more than 120,000 large-scale demonstrations occur each year in China that go largely unreported in the west,” Dr. Yang Jianli, president of Initiatives for China, told MPs on the human rights subcommittee last Thursday.

“To keep a lid on this cauldron of discontent, the Chinese government has constructed, in the past 20 years, an unprecedented police state, or as the Chinese government calls it, a stability-preserving system,” he said via videoconference from New York.

Researchers at Tsinghua University, China’s MIT, say the regime spent $77 billion on domestic security in 2009, just below its military budget of $80 billion.

“This security system is out of control and clearly shows the paranoia of this regime and its attitude that its citizens are enemies to be mentally and socially controlled at all costs,” Yang said.

“Many say that the situation in China has worsened, that the government is in full crackdown mode,” said Maran Turner, the executive director of Freedom Now.

Also speaking via videoconference from New York, Turner told the subcommittee that despite continued economic growth, human rights in China have deteriorated.

“The rule of law has been said for a while now to be in full retreat. As I said, individual activists and dissidents are targeted. They’re being arrested. They’re being put on trial. They’re generally being charged, with very few exceptions, under article 105 of the Chinese Criminal Code, which is subversion or splitism, or more often, they’re charged with merely inciting subversion or splitism.”

She said those vague laws have no real definition, a catch-all crime the regime uses to attack its targets, such as prominent human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng and recent Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo.

Just days later, one of the world’s foremost experts on China’s security system also visited Parliament.

Profit From Their Pain

Ethan Gutmann, whose long resume most recently includes being an award-winning investigative journalist, previously used his extensive business connections in China to unravel how Western companies like Cisco and Nortel worked with the regime to create the world’s most advanced surveillance system.

His book, “Losing the New China,” tells how American investors lost their way in China, strengthening the world’s most powerful tyranny rather than freeing China’s oppressed masses through economic liberation.

For the past few years, Gutmann has been working on a book about the suppression of Falun Gong in China. But then something unsettled him.

Talking with survivors of prison camps and re-education centres, he was struck repeatedly by the passing reference many made to medical tests.

“The fact that they were given medical examinations at all struck me as unusual. These are people who were being mistreated. They were working under brutal conditions, they were being shocked by electric batons. They were being fed subsistence food.”

One older Chinese woman told him the young and fit got tests, but if you came in on a stretcher, you were ignored.

Unusual became disconcerting as Gutmann found that only Falun Gong prisoners were tested, and tested by military doctors. But the tests were not aimed at determining their overall health, he said.

“There was no attempt to test brain function. Similarly there was no ears, nose, throat, there was no look at the genitals. There was really nothing except looking at the heart, blood test, urine test, electrocardiogram, and the eyes.”

The tests, Gutmann said, targeted the health of the heart, kidney, liver and corneas. “These are the retail organs. These are the ones that can be sold, and these were all prisoners of conscience.”

Gutmann said he was unnerved by what he found, in part because when The Epoch Times first reported on organ harvesting in 2006, many found the idea impossible to accept and discredited the story.

It was only after the work of two prominent Canadians, Order of Canada member David Matas and former MP and Secretary of State (Asia-Pacific) David Kilgour, that the possibility the Chinese regime was killing prisoners of conscience to sell their organs gained credibility.

Kilgour and Matas found that transplant numbers skyrocketed in China after hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong adherents were imprisoned. Websites for Chinese hospitals offered almost immediate organ matches on websites directed to overseas clients.

The two co-authored a report detailing evidence of the practice that has since caused some countries to change their laws regarding transplant tourism, the practice of visiting another country to purchase a transplant. This past summer, the Canadian Society of Transplantation instituted policies to direct doctors on how to deal with transplant tourists out of concern for illicit transplants.

Gutmann obtained on-camera interviews with sources familiar with organ harvesting from political prisoners in Xinjiang province that predates the 1999 crackdown on Falun Gong. He said he is withholding their names while they go through delicate refugee claims, but one person was witness to executions involving organ harvesting in Xinjiang, the restless Muslim province that has seen suppression very similar to that in Tibet.

The Gruesome Truth

Organ harvesting is now an accepted reality in China though its scale remains uncertain. The Chinese regime has made vocal attempts to clean up the system, but Gutmann discounts its sincerity.

He said there is no doubt the Chinese regime knew of the abuses going on in military hospitals, where most transplants are believed to have occurred, because of the sophistication of its monitoring systems.

“It is the most sophisticated surveillance state the world has ever seen. But like Orwell’s 1984, the surveillance is not really aimed at the [proletariat], it is aimed at the party members, it is aimed at the military, and the military hospitals are no exception to this rule.”

He said with the attention the issue is not getting, China is preparing to sweep the whole thing under the rug of history.

“This is a manoeuvre the West goes along with every time. Why else would it have taken us 40 years, until this year, to establish that the Great Leap Forward led to the death of not only a couple million people but tens of millions of people. The only reason we are allowed some documentation on this now is because this fact no longer threatens the Chinese Communist Party and our ability to do business with it. And obviously it is going to be this way with organ harvesting.”

But besides the fact that two Canadians blew the lid off China’s illicit organ harvesting, Canada has another connection to the story, one Gutmann says those involved should be wary of.

Isotechnika Pharma Inc. has developed an organ transplant anti-rejection drug and inked a deal with a Chinese company to have it commercialized in China. Gutmann says the deal will likely be poisonous for the company, given the ethical implications of marketing an anti-rejection drug in a country trying to conceal an organ harvesting trade supplied by murdered prisoners of conscience.

With the deal, Isotechnika joins Nortel and Bombardier among noteworthy Canadian companies making dubious deals in China.

Bombardier’s high-speed rail line into Tibet has been important to the regime’s iron-fisted rule of the mountainous region.

“This product doubles as a military carrier, specifically designed to enforce order in Tibet and create a strategic attack point on India and to do it very quickly.”

Looking over the deal, and Canada’s general stance toward China, Gutmann noted a relative lack of concern.

“The Canadian consensus … appears to be one of studied neutrality.”

Gutmann describe the ongoing organ harvesting in China as “the first Chinese mini-genocide of our current century.”