Chinese billionaire in exile Guo Wengui broke a long period of silence this year by giving video interviews, in which he described the complex web of business and politics connecting China’s elite.
One of the most surprising revelations from Guo’s interviews, given to overseas Chinese media, is what he had to say on the subject of forced organ harvesting from Chinese prisoners of conscience—in particular from practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice that is heavily persecuted by the Chinese regime.
After describing how his now-imprisoned business rival, Li You, was able to obtain a liver for transplant without any difficulty, Guo said he made inquiries through his network in China about the source of the liver and found that it was to come from a murdered practitioner of Falun Gong (at the time of the interview, Li had not yet undergone the liver transplant).
In a tweet, Guo apologized to adherents of Falun Gong (also called Falun Dafa), saying that he previously thought the allegations of organ harvesting were a hoax. “But judging from Li You getting a new liver, I saw that this kind of thing is really happening! I didn’t make this clear [in the interview], so here I express my apologies to Falun Gong believers,” Guo said.
Guo later voiced support for the group, which has been suppressed by communist authorities since 1999, on the orders of then-Chinese leader Jiang Zemin. The Communist Party labelled Falun Gong an “evil religion” as an excuse for its persecution.
Citing Falun Gong’s main philosophical tenets, Guo said Falun Gong practitioners were people who had “indeed put ’truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance' into practice,” and were “very friendly and dedicated.”
“I really have no idea why [Falun Gong] was labeled an ‘evil religion’,” Guo said in a March 12 telephone interview with a reporter from New Tang Dynasty Television, a Chinese-language broadcaster and sister media of The Epoch Times based in New York.
