WASHINGTON—The evidence of forced organ harvesting from large numbers of Falun Gong practitioners in China has continued to mount. Now, a newly released, award-winning documentary conveys a key point: the responsibility of top officials in the Chinese regime for this atrocity.
Last year, two reports were published that broadened our picture of the scale and method of this atrocity. “Bloody Harvest/ The Slaughter—An Update“ by investigators David Matas, David Kilgour, and Ethan Gutmann was released on June 22 in Washington, D.C. This report shows detailed evidence of the massive number of organ transplants taking place in Chinese hospitals. It analyzed hospital revenue, bed counts and utilization rates, surgical personnel, and other data and reached the conclusion that China is performing 60,000 to 100,000 transplants per year, far exceeding the Chinese government’s claim of 10,000 per year.
The other report, “Summary Report of the Crime of Live Organ Harvesting in China,” by the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG), was published in August. It provides extensive evidence that the organ harvesting is orchestrated from the top levels of the Chinese government and is not a crime of just some rogue hospitals and unethical surgeons. The WOIPFG report claims that organ harvesting is a state-sanctioned crime on a massive scale that is going on at this moment, with the aim to kill practitioners of the traditional Chinese spiritual discipline Falun Gong who will not renounce their faith.
Now comes WOIPFG’s second major documentary film, “Harvested Alive – Ten Years of Investigation,” which samples the key findings of their report from last year.
Hearing actual audio of high-level Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials, surgeons, and hospital personnel speak nonchalantly of their role in the forced organ harvesting of innocent prisoners of conscience provides an emotional impact that the printed page of the WOIPFG report cannot come close to matching.
The film won the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards best director and best foreign documentary feature for January 2017.
WOIPFG was founded on Jan. 20, 2003. Its stated mission is to investigate and expose the criminal conduct of individuals and organizations involved in the persecution of Falun Gong. Seeking hard data to make its case regarding forced, live organ harvesting in China, WOIPFG investigated more than 865 hospitals and over 9500 surgeons in China.
The English-language premiere of the film was held on Capitol Hill at the House of Representatives’ Rayburn Office Building on June 23. Producer and director Li Jun, co-producer Dr. Peng Tao, and Dr. Wang Zhiyuan, who narrates the film, were present at the showing and answered questions from the audience. WOIPFG officials and Ethan Gutmann, one of the principle investigators of live organ harvesting in China, also spoke before the screening.
Shortly before the U.S. premiere, the film became available for viewing online. This film and the original Chinese-language version were produced by Deerpark Productions, with the latter released in Nov. 2016.
Hospital Boiler Room ‘Cremations’
The host of the film is Dr. Wang Zhiyuan, whose words are translated. Wang spent 30 years as an aviation military doctor in China and then came to the United States in 1995 to conduct research in cardiovascular disease at the Harvard School of Public Health. He was the founder of WOIPFG, and is its president. In the movie, he says that after practicing medicine and saving lives for 30 years, he never imagined he would devote the next 10 years investigating doctors taking the lives of innocent people.
In the film, Wang said his life changed forever on March 9, 2006, when he heard allegations of large-scale organ harvesting of Falun Gong prisoners, while they were alive, in the Sujiatun Thrombosis Hospital in Shenyang. A woman using the alias “Annie” claimed her ex-husband, an eye surgeon driven by guilt, confessed to her that he had extracted corneas from more than 2,000 Falun Gong practitioners.
Wang, who was skeptical, said that he and his WOIPFG colleagues decided they must investigate further. They were looking for evidence, but the doctors and nurses at the Sujiatun hospital were no help. Then Wang called the hospital boiler room and learned that corpses were being burned there. From his own experience, he thought that was most unusual as deceased patients are normally moved to the hospital morgue and sent to a funeral home for cremation.
Wang found this matter disturbing and so, based on it and the other allegations at Sujiatun, he and his WOIPFG colleagues began a preliminary investigation. WOIPFG investigators in 2006-2007 called 23 hospitals in China asking if there were livers available from Falun Gong practitioners. In the movie, we hear a recording on March 6, 2006 of a doctor from Shanghai Fudan University, Zhongshan Hospital Transplant Center, reply, “All we have is of this type.”
High Level CCP Officials Know
WOIPFG investigators, posing as working out of other CCP offices, elicited several statements via telephone from high level officials, who, not knowing whom they were really talking to, acknowledged and confirmed their involvement in organ harvesting. Here are some examples from the documentary.
Tang Junie, Vice Chairman, Liaoning Province Political & Legal Affairs Commission, was asked about orders to take organs from Falun Gong practitioners for transplant surgeries. He said, “I was in charge of this. The [CCP] Central Committee was actually managing this issue, and it had widespread impact.” Tang also said the matter was discussed at Central Committee meetings.
Li Changchun, Politburo Standing Member, was asked about Bo Xilai, who, a week before, had come under investigation by the CCP Discipline Committee. When the caller (WOIPFG investigator) asked on April 17, 2012 about Bo’s involvement in the crime of harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners, Li answered immediately, “Zhou Yongkang is in charge of this; he knows; go ask him.”
Zhou Yongkang was at the time a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the most important decision making body in the Chinese regime. As domestic security czar, Zhou wielded enormous power in general, and specifically over the Falun Gong detainees in concentration camps. He was later sentenced in June 2015 to life imprisonment on corruption-related changes.
WOIPFG investigators played a careful ruse on serving Politburo Standing Committee member Zhang Gaoli to get him to unwittingly acknowledge former CCP boss Jiang Zemin’s principal role in the organ harvesting of millions of live Falun Gong practitioners. Jiang launched the persecution of Falun Gong on July 20, 1999, and coerced the other members of the Politburo to go along with his wishes.
WOIPFG knew when Zhang would be out of the country in Kazakhstan. After Zhang arrived and checked into the hotel, a WOIPFG investigator called him, posing as “Secretary Liu” who works at Jiang Zemin’s office. The investigator told Zhang that tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners had lodged criminal complaints against Jiang at the Supreme People’s Procuratorate for harvesting the organs of millions of Falun Gong practitioners, and that the subject will be brought up at the next Politburo meeting. In the recording, he asked Zhang if he could stop discussion and investigation of the matter. We hear Zhang’s voice reply, “Yes! Yes!”
The WOIPFG investigator repeats four times that Jiang had ordered the organ harvesting of millions of live Falun Gong practitioners and that the responsibility was very serious. Without any reservation or disagreement, Zhang promised he would prevent the investigation and told the caller to tell Jiang not to worry. He ended the call wishing Jiang a long life and good health.
All phone recordings are tagged with receipts from the telephone companies with the time, duration and phone numbers called. The voices of the high-level officials in the recordings can be compared to their voices available online and elsewhere and verified by acoustic labs, states WOIPFG.
Altogether, WOIPFG holds the recordings as evidence that organ pillaging in China is a crime that is directed by the CCP and carried out by the military, state institutions, hospitals, and transplantation professionals.
The above is only a sampling of the recordings pertaining to high-level officials’ knowledge and influence in a massive state-sanctioned crime in the murder of large numbers of practitioners since 2000. There is more evidence in the documentary on other aspects of the crime.
Police Guard Comes Forward
One recorded interview is especially chilling and shocking. It was from the only actual witness in the film of the gruesome surgery. At a military hospital in Shenyang, an armed security guard from Liaoning Province claims to have witnessed the killing of practitioners for their organs in 2002.
What the security guard described was “too vividly horrible,” said WOIPFG president Wang Zhiyuan. The guard had been suffering from insomnia and depression.
In 2009, the security guard’s conscience bothered him and so he contacted WOIPFG, with which he had been in touch for over a month. The security guard recalled witnessing two military doctors extracting the heart, liver, corneas, and brain (“sucked the brain pulp out”) from a still-living female Falun Gong practitioner without the use of anesthetic.
“When the knife touched her chest, she shouted, ‘Falun Dafa hao,’” which means Falun Dafa (also known as Falun Gong) is good. The heart was carved out first. She had been tortured with electric batons for a week, he said. Wang concluded that this was not normal surgery but instead was “a continuation of torturing of Falun Gong practitioners.”
Why Premiere at the U.S. Capital
Li Jun, the director and producer of “Harvested Alive,” said after the screening that they consciously chose the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Congress to hold the English premiere. Speaking through a translator he said, “It is very apparent that this crime [of pillaging organs from Falun Gong practitioners on a massive scale] is state-sanctioned by the CCP. We want the U.S. government as the world leader to do something about it.”
Dr. Peng Tao, the co-producer of “Harvested Alive,” hopes the film will enable everyone to “understand the crimes the CCP has committed, and we have to stop it.”
Wang expressed frustration that the world does not pay much attention to what is going on in China. “It’s a shame to the human race. That’s why I wanted to tell the U.S. government and the entire world, we should really work to stop this.”
Representative Chris Smith (R-N.J.), co-chair of the Congressional Executive Commission of China (CECC), wrote a letter to be read at the premiere screening of “Harvested Alive.”
“If even half of the claims made by your documentary are true,” Smith wrote, “we must call organ trafficking in China truly barbaric and a crime against humanity.”
Smith continued, “We need a concerted effort to stop this barbaric practice—in China and globally.”
Wang said that in this month of June, a hospital in Jilin Province is giving away free liver transplants to 10 children. (He noted that on April 28, 2006, a hospital in Hunan Province, where the persecution of Falun Gong had been particularly severe, ran a promotion announcing 20 free liver or kidney transplants.) Wang said the hospital’s “give away” could only mean an abundance of organs and a very large pool of practitioners available to be harvested and killed.
In the United States, which has a much more mature system of organ donation, the typical wait time for a liver is two to three years. In China, however, the wait time is one to two weeks.
When asked by The Epoch Times what is behind the free organs, Wang said, “I think [the CCP] very likely wants to eliminate all the Falun Gong practitioners who still remain in the concentration camps as soon as possible.”
Data Tipping Point
Ethan Gutmann said that over the past year, 2016-2017, the two reports alluded to at the beginning of this article were significant for the power of their raw data and have brought on a “global tipping point,” leading to greater willingness to believe that live organ harvesting is taking place.
Referring to the emergency liver transplants discussed in the film, he said, “There is a stable of people ready to be killed.” There is no question live organ harvesting is going on, he said.
Gutmann, the author of the 2014 book “The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem,” noted that both reports had received rigorous scrutiny by researchers at the CECC. After devoting two months checking over the sources, the CECC researchers authenticated the documents, which Gutmann said was a testament to their validity.
Gutmann noted that in the past year the human rights organizations Freedom House and Amnesty International have begun reporting on forced organ harvesting, and even the New York Times, which had ignored the issue for over a decade, is now reporting on it.
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