Twenty of the world’s heads of state are descending on Hangzhou, China, on Sept. 4–5 for the G-20. When they want to take a break from talking about the state of the world’s economy, they should ask their hosts for a tour of the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University, the largest organ transplantation center in eastern China.
A trip to the hospital from the G-20 site, the Hangzhou Olympic and International Expo Center, would normally take about 25 minutes by car. But the Public Security in China is expert at moving people out of the way, and, with its help, the 6-mile trip can easily be done in 10 minutes.
Once there, the world leaders could be given a tour of the facility by Dr. Zheng Shusen. Zheng is the president of the hospital and the former director of the China Organ Transplantation Society.
China aims to be the world’s leader in organ transplantation, and Zheng’s career provides perhaps the best example of what this means.
He claims to have led teams in performing 1,400 liver transplants and to have personally transplanted hundreds of livers. More remarkably, in 2005 Zheng co-authored a paper about 46 emergency transplants—the rapid acquisition and transplantation of a liver into someone suffering acute liver failure.
For a donor to become available at the time that a patient suffers liver failure requires, in regular countries, an unusual coincidence. But in China, where there has been no organ matching system linking hospitals and regions, transplanting livers on demand in this way 46 times at a single institution becomes no longer a matter of coincidence. Experts agree that the livers must have come from blood and tissue typed donors, held in captivity. When the right patient shows up, the donor is killed and the liver transplanted.
This is the kind of activity on which Zheng’s medical career has been built.
Genocide
We know about First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University and the activities of Zheng because of the report “Bloody Harvest/The Slaughter: An Update.” Issued in June, the report mines public sources in China to give a detailed portrait of the 700 some hospitals that do organ transplants in China.
How many beds each hospital has, and the rate at which they are utilized. How long patients wait to receive organs, and what the hospital’s advertised rates of transplantation are. The report delivers this information and much more.
Analyzing the raw data, the authors—former Canadian Secretary of State (Asia-Pacific) David Kilgour, Canadian international human rights lawyer David Matas, and journalist Ethan Gutmann—are able to give a far better picture of the secretive regime of forced organ harvesting in China than had been available before.
They estimate that in the years 2000–2015, on average between 60,000 and 100,000 organ transplants were done each year in China.
These transplantations come at a terrible cost.
The Chinese organ transplant system is wasteful and inefficient. For instance, according to the deputy director of one Chinese transplant center, only two hospitals in China are capable of simultaneously doing transplants with multiple organs from a single donor. The result? In the great majority of cases, one organ transplanted means one donor killed.
The report’s authors did not give an estimate of the number murdered to feed China’s transplantation industry, but if one does the math, the death toll is likely to go well over one million.
The authors also found that beginning in 2000, this giant system for organ transplantation was built from a standing start. All across China over the next 15 years, transplantation departments were created, surgeons trained, and hospitals built or special wings added in a flurry of activity.
The year 2000 is significant, because the Chinese regime began persecuting the spiritual practice of Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa) in July 1999. Falun Gong involves living according to the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance and practicing slow-moving, meditative exercises.
The then-head of the Chinese Communist Party, Jiang Zemin, feared the popularity of Falun Gong and worried that the Chinese people were finding Falun Gong’s traditional moral teachings more attractive than Communist Party doctrine. An official survey showed there were over 70 million Chinese who had taken up the practice. Falun Gong sources say that in 1999 there were over 100 million. Jiang ordered the practice eradicated.
According to the testimony of China’s own transplant surgeons and hospitals, the organs are obtained with the cooperation of the Public Security and legal systems. As one hospital gushed on its website, such a relationship “is one-of-a-kind in the world.”
The report’s authors conclude that the transplantation industry took off in China when a seemingly inexhaustible supply of organs became available—the tens of millions of Falun Gong practitioners. The authors believe that most of the organs have come from practitioners who have been detained by the state and held as a living organ bank.
And the authors say this is a genocide. In a previous interview, Gutmann said, “It’s a slow-motion genocide; a drip, drip, drip, genocide.” In China, mass murder has been accomplished one kidney, one liver, and one heart at a time.
Hatred
Genocide is made possible by a climate of opinion that considers a group of people no longer human.
In a previous interview, Matas said, “If you look at all the propaganda against Falun Gong, it’s incitement to hatred of the vilest sort … within a Chinese context, where there are no contrary statements … it’s incitement to hatred, incitement to genocide.”
In Hangzhou, the man responsible for inciting hatred against Falun Gong is the indefatigable transplant surgeon Dr. Zheng.
Zheng is the head of the Zhejiang Provincial Anti-Cult Association. When the citizens of Hangzhou are bombarded with messages that describe Falun Gong practitioners as dirty vermin and urge their extermination, those messages have been published at the direction of Zheng.
When the regime’s thugs seek to force practitioners to give up their beliefs, they are following a script laid out by Zheng’s Anti-Cult Association.
That script involves torture, and Zheng is often seen in Chinese media at events with the head of the local 610 Office—the Party organization tasked with imprisoning and torturing Falun Gong practitioners.
An economist might say that Zheng works both the supply and the demand sides of the genocide business. He helps gin up the hatred that makes genocide possible, and then, in his sanitary operating room, he does the detailed work that makes big profits for him and his hospital.
The G-20
If one accepts that the effort to round up a specific group of people and build an industry around their execution is a genocide, one might also think it would make for some awkwardness in Hangzhou.
Seventeen members of the G-20 have acceded to or ratified the treaty that is meant to put the likes of Zheng out of business—the Genocide Convention. Japan, Indonesia, and the European Union are the exceptions.
The signatories of the convention agree to “prevent and to punish” genocide. There has been no formal finding by the U.N. that genocide has taken place, and, absent that, perhaps the obligations under the convention do not hold.
However, the 2007 decision by the International Court of Justice in the case of the former Yugoslavia found that “a State’s obligation to prevent [genocide], and the corresponding duty to act, arise at the instant that the State learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed.”
After “Bloody Harvest/The Slaughter: An Update” was published in June, the signatories of the Genocide Convention were put on notice that there was a “serious risk” that genocide was taking place in China.
Genocide is considered in international law the “crime of crimes.” The preface to the Genocide Convention says it is “condemned by the civilized world.”
This must be so. Civilization cherishes and develops our humanity. By treating an entire group as livestock to be harvested, the genocide in Hangzhou and throughout China calls into question the very basis of civilization. All nations have an interest in stopping genocide, because all nations have an interest in preserving the idea of our common humanity.
When the world leaders gather in Hangzhou, they should take a trip to the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University, and afterward they should sit down with the leaders of the Chinese regime and ask a simple question: When is this going to stop?
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