Wang Lijun Suspected in Falun Gong Organ Harvest, Group Says

Wang Lijun, the former police chief and deputy mayor of Chongqing, may have participated in or directed the harvesting of organs from Chinese prisoners of conscience.
Wang Lijun Suspected in Falun Gong Organ Harvest, Group Says
A re-enactment of the communist regime in China harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners at a public rally in Tokyo on Sept. 13, 2006. (clearwisdom.net)
Matthew Robertson
2/28/2012
Updated:
9/22/2015
<a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/07/TsuweiHuang-mod.jpg"><img class="size-large wp-image-197330" title="Dr. Tsuwei Huang of the Falun Dafa Association in Washington, D.C." src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/07/TsuweiHuang-mod-676x450.jpg" alt="Dr. Tsuwei Huang of the Falun Dafa Association in Washington, D.C." width="289" height="193"/></a>
Dr. Tsuwei Huang of the Falun Dafa Association in Washington, D.C.

<a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/07/2006-9-18-japan-zhb01.jpg"><img class="size-large wp-image-197296" src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/07/2006-9-18-japan-zhb01-600x450.jpg" alt=" A re-enactment of the communist regime in China harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners" width="231" height="173"/></a>
 A re-enactment of the communist regime in China harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners

Wang Lijun’s research may have played a role in precipitating this change. According to a vitae online, he was the project leader for the “Key Research Project of Trauma-Free Anatomy in the Asia-Pacific Region.” This project included researchers from the Institute of Forensic Medicine at University of Bern, Switzerland, Medical University of Graz, Austria, China Medical University, Jinzhou Medical University and the 205 Hospital of the People’s Liberation Army, according to WOIPFG.

Wang became head of the Chongqing Public Security Bureau after his political patron, Bo Xilai, was shunted there in 2008. According to an article in Global Times, an outlet affiliated with Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, in December 2008 Chongqing began gradually eliminating execution by firing squad, and phasing in execution by injection.

“The whole point of drugging in this context is to keep the organ alive while it’s removed, so the organ would be healthier. If they weren’t going to do that they might as well shoot the person,” said David Matas in a previous telephone interview.

“The disadvantage medically is that the drug taints the organ to an extent, but the organ is kept alive. In China there has been a movement to kill by drugs because you get more organs out of that because there’s a longer time in which to harvest,” Matas said. “That’s what they’re talking about.”

Continued on the next page: Doing the Math ...

Doing the Math

WOIPFG believes that these technical advances in organ harvesting were concurrently applied to the population of Falun Gong practitioners in Chinese labor camps and prisons.

WOIPFG points to the math: the large number of transplantation operations compared to the much smaller number of death penalty cases and the very few instances of organ donation.

David Kilgour a former crown attorney and Canadian Secretary of State (Asia/Pacific),and the international human rights lawyer David Matas, in their seminal study in 2006 and their 2009 book, “Bloody Harvest“ cite Chinese official statements in concluding there were 60,000 transplants carried out between 2000 and 2005. They take the number of transplants done in the five-year period prior to the persecution of Falun Gong—18,500—as a baseline, assuming the organs in these operations came from executed criminals.

The difference in the number of transplantation operations done in the five years before and after the persecution—a total of roughly 41,500 transplants—most likely came from the Falun Gong population, according to Kilgour and Matas.

Wang referred to “thousands” of on-site transplants conducted at his “research center” in the city of Jinzhou when he received the Guanghua award, during what is thought to have been the height of organ harvesting activity.

Other circumstantial evidence that WOIPFG presents implicating Wang Lijun in the harvesting of organs from Falun Gong practitioners includes transcripts of phone calls made in 2006 to detention centers and courts in Jinzhou.

In the phone calls researchers posing as potential organ recipients or brokers ask leading questions about the availability of organs from Falun Gong practitioners. An operator at a People’s Court says “Now we have divided the tasks among us. Death cases... Falun Gong, our court also assigned their cases to the First Division of Criminal Law.”

WOIPFG also provides a transcript of an interview with a policeman who was a subordinate to Wang Lijun at Jinzhou. He said his job was to stand guard in military hospitals and other buildings where Falun Gong practitioners were tortured or had their organs removed; in his transcript he recounts witnessing the organ harvesting from a Falun Gong practitioner.

At one point, the transcript says, “Question: Did you torture them once in the interrogation process to extract information, or many times? Witness: Many times. At that time, Wang Lijun, nowadays the chief of the Chongqing Public Security Bureau, ordered that we ’must eradicate them all.'”

Correction: The World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong is an independent organization that brings together people of conscience opposed to the ongoing persecution of Falun Gong in China, and has no formal affiliations with the practice.

Matthew Robertson is the former China news editor for The Epoch Times. He was previously a reporter for the newspaper in Washington, D.C. In 2013 he was awarded the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi award for coverage of the Chinese regime's forced organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience.
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