“And in 1995, it comes to my turn to do it; it was a Wednesday, and my two chief surgeons called me into the office and told me to assemble a team with the capability of the largest possible surgery and report to them the next morning. By 9:30 the next day, we met at the hospital gate and headed towards Western mountain execution ground where I was told to wait for them until I heard the gunshots. After gunshot was heard, we rushed in. An armed officer directed us to the far right corner where I can see a civilian clothed man lying on the ground with a single bullet wound to his right chest. My chief surgeons then ordered and guided me to extract the liver and the two kidneys. The man was alive but I didn’t feel guilty. He tried to resist my scalpel cut but too weak to avoid my action. There was bleeding; he was still alive but I didn’t feel guilty. In fact, I didn’t feel anything but like a full-programmed robot doing its task.” I thought I was carrying my duty to eliminate the enemy of the state. After the operation, those chief surgeons took those organs into strange looking boxes and they told me to take my team back to the hospital and remember that nothing happened and I followed the order. We never talked about it.  – Dr. Enver Tohti, former Surgeon from China.

Edited By Osa Mbonu

China’s communist regime leads the world in illegal organ harvesting, and in some cases, extracting organs from living patients.

So, where did you get your kidney? Seems like a strange question, considering we were all born with our kidneys. The only time you would consider asking such a question is after you underwent organ transplant surgery. And in today’s modern societies with all the checks and balances and so many regulations controlling how our businesses and institutions operate, you would hope that a donor providing you with a vital life-saving organ did so voluntarily.  That may not be the case if you choose to travel to China for organ transplant surgery.

Ethan Gutmann, Nobel Peace Prize nominee and author of The Slaughter, sat down with the European Court of Human Rights. Here is what he has to say about his research into Chinese Communist Party’s huge organ transplantation network: “If you are going to China right now to get an organ, chances are a perfectly innocent person is dying for you. Sixty five thousand (65,000) people over eight years, political prisoners. It uses this massive prisoner population, particularly Falun Gong, as a source for organs. This is the only country where this is truly legal. This is it, China. Now this is something we all want to neglect, we all want to turn our eyes away; we are not going to stop trading with China. China is going to be a player in the world. How do we square the China we know, with what I just told you? It is like finding out a relative of yours is a child molester. Now you may have known they have some problems before, but now you know they are child molesters. I have given you that analogy. I don’t tell you what to do with that knowledge. Like, I don’t tell you to do anything in the book. What I am not going to do is tell the reader how to think about that. But if we are to live with ourselves, can we continue to have our organ removed in China?”

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Organ transplantation in China has taken place since the 1960s. According to reports, there were over 13, 000 transplants in 2004. But according to Gutmann and other researchers, that number could be much higher: “We went on to do further research and in 2016, we came up with this massive doorstop of a report, which shows that in fact, they were not doing 10,000 transplants per  year in China. They were doing 60, 000 to 100,000 transplants per year in China. Now, that figure is pretty indisputable because Congress got behind it, actually after looking at it quite skeptically at first, and so did the European Parliament. And where did you think the organs for that come from? Do you concur with what you just saw in that report? We cannot explain this any other way. We even know that the Chinese have made announcements that they are not harvesting regular prisoners, murderers, rapists at the same rate. I don’t think they are. The gap is huge. It’s enormous. It can’t be filled. Even their made-up numbers on voluntary donations cannot fill this gap. And that leaves Uighurs, Falun Gong, as well as House Christians.”

Involuntary organ harvesting is illegal under Chinese law. But, in 1984, a new regulation made it legal to remove organs from executed prisoners. Dr. Enver Tohti, an ethnic and former organ transplant surgeon in China in the mid-90s, is now a whistleblower speaking out about the surgery he participated in. Tohti testified before the joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade in July of 2017.

Throughout the world, the wait time for an organ can be as long as three to four years. But in China, an organ can become available in as little as two weeks. How is that possible? Dr. Tohti may have the answer: “Pre-date for your heart transplantation means that they make someone dead for you. Giving away organs to promote business means to have organs of plenty, unlimited supply of organs only can be achieved if these organs are carried in the living body waiting to be taken on demand.”

If the Chinese regime can provide healthy functional organs on demand, where are they coming from? There are growing concerns that organs are being harvested from living Falun Gong practitioners, Uighurs, and other prisoners of conscience. The Chinese regime illegally banned the practice of Falun Gong in 1999 and imprisoned those caught practising in the parks and even from their homes. Falun Gong is the practice of mind and body and is rooted in traditional Chinese culture. The health benefits for those practising this ancient cultivation method are well known. Could this be the Chinese regime’s source for so many healthy organs for their multi-million dollar organ transplant industry?

Ethan Gutmann’s book, The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting and China’s Secret Solution to its Dissident Problem, goes into details about the Chinese regime’s organ harvesting trade. Gutmann described the significance of his book and why he wrote it: “I did not write this book….It is not called Malpractice. It is not called Prisoners’ Rights Abuse in China. It’s called The Slaughter because these people – Uighurs, Falun Gong, Falun Gong pregnant women – are not even given any form to sign. There is no consent form to write out as a final act I want to donate my organs to the state. They are treated like animals. And they are slaughtered like animals. And that is the essence of this book. That is why I consider this a crime against humanity. It’s not a question of prisoner’s rights or rights abuse. This is a unique crime. It’s one of the biggest crimes we’ve seen this century, maybe in the last century too. It compares with Unit 731 but it represents a level of medical corruption that we have not seen since the Holocaust.”

The Chinese regime claims they are no longer taking organs from executed prisoners, and that all organs come from volunteers. But the number of organ transplants in China is still too high. In China, many hold Confucian belief that the body should remain whole after death. This would conflict with the claim from the Communist Party that there are many willing donors lining up to voluntarily donate their organs. According to Gutmann and many other researchers, the organ transplant industry is state-run, like everything in China. If we hold the regime like this in such high regard, what does it say about us? We condemn North Korea for its human rights abuses. Yet we view China as a trading partner and as a part of the global community, and agree to their censorship rules when doing business inside China. However, the evidence of their human rights abuses is indisputable. When will we stop kowtowing to the Chinese Communist Party?