Experts said those organs were most probably from living people and most probably from practitioners of Falun Gong. That judgment was based on the location of the activities, the number of executions, the research Wang was involved in, the availability of organs, and Wang’s known role in the anti-Falun Gong campaign.
And Bo Xilai certainly knew about his subordinate Wang’s activities.
Researchers pretending to be communist officials confirmed that high-level Party officials knew about the organ harvesting. Li Changchun, for instance, was asked about using “Bo Xilai’s involvement in murdering and removing organs from Falun Gong practitioners to convict Bo, right at this time.”
Li said: “Zhou Yongkang is in charge of this specifically. He knows it.”
Of course, Zhou’s being in charge of investigating his ally’s fate is what Bo would want.
This year, after Wang Lijun’s Feb. 6 defection attempt, a few funny things happened.
In March, Huang Jiefu, the vice minister of Health, announced that China would stop using organs from inmates within five years. Similar pronouncements had been made before, but the timing in this case raised eyebrows.
According to Ethan Gutmann, a researcher who has followed the story closely, it was an attempt to effectively slink away from the Falun Gong mass murder by slowly adopting Western ethical standards of organ sourcing.
Around the same time, Internet searches for highly sensitive terms related to this scandal were allowed. For example, it was possible to search on Baidu for “live harvest,” “bloody harvest” and “Wang Lijun live harvest.” Prominent results popped up and those pages were not blocked by the Great Firewall.
The Chinese regime is infamous for its hermetic censorship, and the above terms are among the most sensitive in the political lexicon. To many observers, the idea that they were unblocked—at the height of a factional struggle in the Party about how to deal with Bo Xilai and Wang Lijun—by anything other than design is inconceivable.
Revelation
At this point, we must assess what we have and what conclusions can be drawn.
Most obviously, we have a large pile of bodies. At least 60,000 Falun Gong practitioners were killed for their organs between 2000 and 2008, researchers estimate. The real figure is not known.
The Falun Dafa Information Center has confirmed that over 3,500 practitioners were killed by torture and abuse although the real number is probably far higher—the Information Center suggests it is in the tens of thousands. Millions have been sent to labor camps and prisons. A generation of orphans has been created, along with broken families.
We have proof that the persecution of Falun Gong and Falun Gong’s response is significant to the CCP. Witness the arc of Bo Xilai’s political career, which was essentially wed to his involvement in the campaign; the lengths the CCP has gone to persecute Falun Gong; and the fact that the organ harvesting crimes became a club used by one faction to strike another earlier this year. Members of a hard-line faction that includes Jiang Zemin, Zhou Yongkang, and Bo Xilai are all deeply involved.
Eventually the truth of the whole affair will come out. The question that faces observers is, what will happen then? How will this affect China and the future course of the Party?
There is a possible historical precedent, first drawn by Gutmann.
In 1940, Soviet secret police murdered over 20,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest in Russia. Stalin blamed it on the Nazis, and the Soviet regime maintained that lie for the next 50 years.
In 1989, the truth emerged, and in 1990, Gorbachev admitted what happened. The massacre was used in the power struggle between Yeltsin and Gorbachev. The disclosure strengthened the Polish resistance and crushed the moral authority of the remaining Soviet hardliners.
The impact of these revelations on the CCP may be similar.
Gutmann writes: “This is China’s Katyn Forest moment—the moment when Wen, like Gorbachev, blurts out the first words of confession to a historical crime so great, a lie so immense, that the Party will have no retreat from the juggernaut that must certainly follow.”
The great denouement of the CCP will play out soon, and the revelation of these atrocities will help shove the regime over the precipice. Its legitimacy will be shattered, not to be restored.
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