In a press conference yesterday in Beijing, Zhang Yuqin, the deputy director of the Liaoning Thrombosis Treatment Center, claimed that his hospital is considering suing The Epoch Times. Tipped off by three brave individuals who risked their lives in order to tell the truth, we have reported the harvesting of the organs from thousands of living Falun Gong practitioners at his hospital and associated hospitals in the Sujiatun district of Shenyang City, Liaoning Province.
Subsequent investigations have corroborated the statements of these witnesses.
We first reported this horror on March 9. More than a month later the Chinese Communist regime chose to respond. Why the wait? We have reports from Sujiatun that the time was spent executing or shipping out the Falun Gong practitioners still held there and creating a cover-up.
If the media travel to Sujiatun, they will find a Potemkin Village, ready for inspection.
The Chinese Health Ministry lied about SARS. The Chinese Communist regime still claims no one was killed in the Tiananmen Square massacre. Now the Chinese regime has decided to lie about the organ harvesting factories it has set up around China.
We stand by our original stories and are eager to see a full, independent investigation into the organ harvesting from live Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners that is continuing to take place in labor camps and prisons throughout China.
Such an investigation could begin by looking at the role played by the China International Transplantation Network Assistance Center (CITNAC) based in Shenyang City.
This Center's website, which mysteriously stopped working right after the Sujiatun story first broke, advertised in five languages that a liver transplant might be available within one month, and a kidney transplant might be available within one week. The maximum times for such transplants were said to be, respectively, two months and one month. Outside China, individuals often have to wait years for a matching kidney or liver to come available.
This website also claimed that it does not use organs from those who are brain dead "because the state of the organ may not be good."
Where could such organs come from whose quality is better than those removed from the brain dead?
The organs don't come from destitute individuals trying to sell an organ. An article in the China Business Daily quotes Dr. Wu Gang, an associate professor in the Organ Transplant Department of a Shenyang City hospital as saying, "The kidney supply in Shenyang is sufficient. Those kidney ads [from individuals trying to sell their own kidney] almost have no market."
Perhaps Mr. Zhang can also explain the statistics regarding liver transplants published by the "Health Newspaper," a periodical affiliated with the Ministry of Health.
From 1991-1998, 78 liver transplants were performed in all of China. In 1999 the persecution of Falun Gong began, and in that same year the number of liver transplants skyrocketed, to 116 in that year alone—more than the total for the previous seven years combined. Each succeeding year the numbers continued to climb, to 254 in 2000, and 486 in 2001. By 2003 the number in one year totaled 3,000.
Where did this flood of healthy organs come from? China has almost no voluntary donations of organs.
We are confident—although deeply saddened—as to the answer to this question: this extraordinary increase in healthy livers came from Falun Gong practitioners who were killed in the act of harvesting their organs.
The lies told in Beijing yesterday were occasioned by the visit to Washington, D.C. next week by Hu Jintao, China's paramount leader. We trust the free press of this country will demand of Mr. Hu a full account of the organ harvesting being done in China.
The Epoch Times calls on our colleagues in the media to join us in investigating these atrocities. Such an investigation is demanded by the facts, demanded by our duty as journalists, and demanded by our humanity.
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