How China’s Operating Rooms Became Execution Chambers

A doctor realizes Falun Gong practitioners are murdered for their organs

Dr. Torsten Trey, co-founder and executive director, Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting. (Jack Wang/The Epoch Times)

“Living people are killed for their organs,” Dr. Torsten Trey says. “This is arguably the biggest violation of medical ethics in history.”

Sixteen years ago, the first whistleblowers emerged from China with a story that few could believe: The Chinese communist regime was killing Falun Gong practitioners for their organs. What have we learned about this horrible practice since that time? And is it continuing today?

In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek spoke with Trey about these issues. Trey is co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, which has just released a special report, “Forced Organ Harvesting From Living People in China.”

Jan Jekielek: In 2006, a small nonprofit began called Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, and you were one of the co-founders. Before we go any further, please lay it out for our viewers: What is forced organ harvesting?

Dr. Torsten Trey: Forced organ harvesting is the forceful extraction of organs used for transplantation. This bypasses the typical way of giving consent before you donate an organ. Living people are killed for their organs, and it’s happening on a large scale in China. This is arguably the biggest violation of medical ethics in history.

Mr. Jekielek: Where did the idea to start this nonprofit come from?

Dr. Trey: In 2006, I learned from The Epoch Times that witnesses from China were coming forward. In a hospital in Sujiatun, organs or tissues were being harvested from Falun Gong practitioners.

Two months later, I saw that the vice president of the European Parliament, Edward McMillan-Scott, had followed that case, too. He went to China and met with two Falun Gong practitioners who told him they’d seen a friend who died in detention with holes in his body. That was another piece of evidence.

Then, David Kilgour and David Matas conducted phone interviews with Chinese doctors saying they‘d taken organs from Falun Gong practitioners. So in July 2006, I attended the World Transplant Congress in Boston, thinking maybe I’d find some more hints. There, I talked to two doctors from China.

One of them was from the Tianjin hospital. He said in 2005, they'd performed 2,000 liver transplantations, which was an astronomical number. And this was in just one hospital in Tianjin.

Next, I talked to a doctor who was invited to China to open a transplant department. I asked, “Where do all those organs come from?” And he said, “They’re coming from Falun Gong practitioners.”

At that point, I decided there must be more investigation and awareness. That’s how the founding of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting came about.

Mr. Jekielek: Give us a broad picture of the evidence that now exists.

Dr. Trey: There’s evidence related to the transplant numbers, where the organs come from, how they’re donated, and witnesses coming forth. Over time, we followed the number of transplants, and those numbers in China are just out of proportion.

In 2020, for instance, Dr. Chen Jingyu wanted to perform a double lung transplant on a COVID patient, and within one day, they got the match and performed the transplant. This is unthinkable in the Western transplant environment. It seems like organs are coming on demand to facilitate transplants on demand. The wait time in China is usually between two days and 14 days, which is incredibly short.

A team from South Korea with a hidden camera filmed a nurse who was accommodating patients from Korea. The nurse was saying, “Yes, it usually takes two weeks to get a kidney, but if you pay $10,000 extra, you can get it within two days.” This is unheard of, that because of an extra fee, you can accelerate the wait time to two days.

Then, there are the donor numbers. For 18 months, we monitored a website where the numbers of organ donations were displayed. There was a gradual increase of registered organ donors, and then all of a sudden, at the end of 2015, within one day it increased by 25,000—exactly 25,000. It’s unheard of that all of a sudden there are exactly thousands of that many new registered donors.

We saw this again the following year when 88,000 people were added to the so-called registered organ donor pool. You don’t find this in other countries.

If you take all of this together, then you have an overwhelming set of circumstantial evidence. Each piece itself might not be strong, but if you put everything together, there’s enough evidence to conclude something is wrong.

Mr. Jekielek: The China Tribunal comes to mind, which offered one of the most comprehensive bodies of evidence. I believe you testified there. What were the conclusions?

Dr. Trey: The China Tribunal took about a year to review the different reports. They listened to 50 experts in two hearings. It was an objective, independent, and thorough review of the evidence. They concluded that forced organ harvesting takes place in China and that the main victim group is Falun Gong practitioners.

With this information, you can’t just go back to business as usual and continue scientific exchanges with personnel and doctors in China. There should be a pause to review the evidence.

Mr. Jekielek: I remember when Dr. Jacob Lavee was the head of the Israeli Transplant Association. He had a patient who told him, “I’m going to China to get an organ.” He went and got it quickly, and Lavee recognized there was no way this could be ethical.

He advocated for laws to be passed in Israel where the state health system wouldn’t pay for such transplants, basically discouraging people from doing it. Maybe you can tell me, has there been a significant response from any country other than Israel?

Dr. Trey: There has been some response. The U.S. Congress has passed several resolutions acknowledging the forced organ harvesting, and the European Parliament did as well. But those are non-binding steps without really taking responsibility to stop this transplant abuse. They aren’t strong enough to send a signal to China that says to stop it. We observed over time that this is not only happening in governments, but also in organizations where the information we provide is blocked at a certain level of leadership.

And I assume this block at the leadership level is a reflection of pressure and influence from the Chinese government, where the government says, “Do you want to come to our country for certain conferences? Then don’t bring it up. Do you want to be ostracized from our conferences? Then don’t bring it up.”

Mr. Jekielek: Tell me where you see the hope here.

Dr. Trey: Probably the most discouraging times for me are when doctors in the free world take the side of the Chinese government and trivialize forced organ harvesting. The most encouraging are when I talk to other doctors and they understand it, and they support me. Those moments energize me and give me the motivation to continue.

Mr. Jekielek: You’ve written quite a number of papers and a couple of books on this. What would you say is your most important contribution?

Dr. Trey: Probably an article titled “Cold Genocide: Falun Gong in China.” It was the first time I understood that forced organ harvesting isn’t an isolated violation of medical ethics, but that it had a purpose, and the purpose was to destroy Falun Gong practitioners. I compared the student massacre in 1989, which was really obvious to the world, to the unperceived persecution of Falun Gong, and I thought, “What is the difference here?”

The Chinese government learned from the student massacre that they needed to proceed with less intensity and more slowly. So you have a cold genocide. It can happen over years without being noticed because it’s too slow to trigger an international reaction.

If you think of this slow-moving destruction and then expand it to other areas, you see that China is slowly infiltrating and influencing our society. Universities, for example, can’t have forums critical of China because they don’t want to lose thousands of Chinese students. This infiltration is everywhere.

Mr. Jekielek: Our new film, “The Final War,” talks about a lot of these things and how there’s been this hundred-year plan to subvert America. In the face of all this, what can the typical person do?

Dr. Trey: If we want to defeat forced organ harvesting, we have to break the silence. If the people would learn more about the persecution of Falun Gong and bring it to social media, the silence would be broken.

And if medicine isn’t able to stop forced organ harvesting, then what will happen to the medical profession? The goal of medicine is to help a patient, to save a life. But if someone is killed to provide a cure for others, then medicine is at a crossroads. I believe that every doctor needs to look into this.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.