China's Gruesome Organ Harvest.
GUTMANN, ETHAN
China’s Gruesome Organ Harvest The whole world isn’t watching. Why not? BY ETHAN GUTMANN The jeepney driver sizes us up the minute we climb in. My research assistant is a healthy, young...
...In the course of my interviews I’ve heard a few distortions...
...It’s also relevant that Chen is not just stubborn, impossible, and a little mad, but young, attractive, and charismatic...
...Harry Wu, a Chinese dissident who established the Laogai Foundation, had already produced reams of evidence that the state, after executing criminals formally sentenced to death, was selling their kidneys, livers, corneas, and other body parts to Chinese and foreigners, anyone who could pay the price...
...In 1999 came mass arrests, seizure of assets, and torture...
...Perhaps an organ that was being tissue-matched with a high-ranking cadre or a rich foreign customer...
...Transplant doctors who claimed to have Falun Gong organ donors in the basement...
...Thus, when Falun Gong unveiled a doctor’s wife who claimed that her husband, a surgeon, had removed thousands of corneas from practitioners in a Northeastern Chinese hospital named Sujiatun, the charge met with guarded skepticism from the dissident community and almost complete silence from the Western press (with the exception of this magazine and National Review...
...Take us to the . . . “Ladyboy...
...Yet as the guards motioned for them to begin walking, Wang felt the group fall into step like a gentle migrating herd...
...That doesn’t mean they never do...
...He just checked her corneas, skipping any test involving brain function...
...For eight days efforts were made to persuade Chen to renounce Falun Gong or gain her submission by torture...
...In the majority of the interviews presented here, my subjects, though aware of the organ harvesting issue, had no clear idea of my line of questioning or the “right” answers...
...Jing watched the procedure carefully and saw nothing unusual...
...Criminal prisoners would taunt the practitioners: “If you don’t do what we say we’ll torture you to death and sell your organs...
...He gave me a tour of the exact spot on Google Earth...
...None of them made it out of China alive...
...Compassion fatigue seeping in...
...Falun Gong became wildly popular in China during the late 1990s...
...Or the health of a particular organ...
...No...
...Either way, the prisoner has been executed, and harvesting is just fun along the way...
...We are still waiting for even one doctor who has harvested organs from living prisoners of conscience to emerge from the mainland...
...My line of inquiry began in a Montreal community center over a year ago, listening to a heavy-set middleaged Chinese man named Wang Xiaohua, a soft-spoken ordinary guy except for the purple discoloration that extends down his forehead...
...I’m too important to be wiped out” is the survivor’s mantra...
...The practice started in the mid-1980s...
...If the practitioner can alter the policeman’s behavior, by moral example or supernatural means, there’s some natural pride, even if the practitioner still gets tortured...
...With the back-alley Chinese woman, I intend to direct my questions away from what she’ll want to talk about—persecution and spirituality—to something she will barely remember, a seemingly innocuous part of her experience: a needle jab, some poking around the abdomen, an X-ray, a urine sample—medical tests consistent with assessment of prisoners for organ harvesting...
...Mobile organ-harvesting vans run by the armed services were routinely parked just outside the killing grounds to ensure that the military hospitals got fi rst pick...
...He looked down at the red earth, streaked with straw and human waste, to the barren mountains on the horizon...
...Even Amnesty acknowledges their numbers might represent a gross understatement...
...Chen was getting medication three times a day (possibly sedatives), so drug-testing can’t be ruled out...
...For example, Lin Jie, a woman in her early 60s living in Sydney, reported that in May 2001, while she was incarcerated in the Chongqing Yong Chaun Women’s Jail, over 100 Falun Gong women were examined “all over the body, very detailed...
...Chen stayed silent...
...That means doctors can shoot a prisoner in the head, as it were, surgically, then remove the organs before the heart stops beating...
...The organ supply tightened...
...Here in Yunnan Forced Labor Camp No...
...Then, starting in 2000, as the movement responded by becoming more openly activist, demonstrating at Tiananmen and hijacking television signals on the mainland, the death toll started to climb, reaching approximately 3,000 confi rmed deaths by torture, execution, and neglect by 2005...
...But Jing sensed something else in the air that fall, something more substantial: Prisoners were arriving in the middle of the night and disappearing before dawn...
...My research assistant is a healthy, young Israeli dude, so I must be the one with the money...
...Not because people have been “prepped,” but because they’ve suffered trauma...
...For these, the nameless ones, whose families had no way of tracing them or agitating on their behalf, there may be no records at all...
...an explosion in organ transplant activity coinciding with a rise in the Falun Gong incarceration rate, with international customers waiting as little as a week for a tissue match (in most countries, patients waited over a year...
...All witnesses from China have mixed motives, always...
...They’d been prepped by activists...
...Jia Xiarong, a middle-aged female prisoner who came from a family of well-connected offi cials, told Jing outright: “They are doing this because some aging offi cial needs an organ...
...Yu is in his 30s, the picture of robust health...
...Not only did she refuse to renounce Falun Gong, but she shouted down anyone who did...
...Her experience takes us into what I call the “Late Harvest Era” of 2005, when many practitioners seem to have been whisked off to wham-bam organ exams and then promptly disappeared...
...For that matter, we can console ourselves that there are no bones, for now...
...And the truly shameful part is that after 50 or so interviews with refugees from Chinese labor camps, I won’t even be listening that closely...
...Qu escaped to Sydney last year...
...But make no mistake: There are terrible lizards...
...The labor camp police were “very frightened” at this point, according to Chen...
...I wasn’t sure what it was about...
...Kickboxer...
...If they needed someone they could just tie them up and send them over...
...Qu was 35 years old when the police escorted her and two other practitioners into a hospital...
...It was not a good time to be an angry young practitioner, according to a refugee in her 30s recently arrived in Hong Kong...
...But we do have tracks...
...Until recently, high volume Chinese transplant centers openly advertised the use of live donors on their websites...
...They never did learn the results of any of those medical tests, Wang says, a little smile suddenly breaking through...
...The best way to guard against false testimony is to rely on extended sitdown interviews...
...Or they can administer anesthesia, remove the organs, and when the operation is nearing completion introduce a heartstopping drug—the latest method...
...Then, in September, the authorities started expensive blood tests (these would cost about $300 per subject in the West...
...Were there military personnel present at the physicals...
...With its roots in a spiritual tradition from the Chinese heartland, Falun Gong would never have built a version of the Statue of Liberty and paraded it around for CNN...
...I spoke with a former Chinese police offi cer, a simple man from the countryside, who said that, as a favor to a condemned man’s friend, he had popped open the back of such a van and unzipped the body bag...
...No...
...The guard responded evenly: “You know, we care so much about you...
...Wang broke the silence, asking one of the police guards if that was the camp hospital ahead...
...Those without passports make their way through Burma on motorcycles and back roads...
...She didn’t trust the policewoman— why should she...
...She has family in China, so let’s call her Jiansheng Chen...
...Finally, why had no real witness, a doctor or nurse who had actually operated on Falun Gong practitioners, come forward...
...He can’t help it...
...They needed healthy people, young people...
...We could boycott Chinese medical conferences...
...Two prominent Canadian human rights attorneys, David Kilgour and David Matas, outlined his case and many others in their “Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China,” published and posted on the web in 2006...
...They didn’t need them...
...Whatever lay ahead, Wang knew they were not afraid...
...Chen mocked them: “I’m not dead...
...Fang Siyi is a 40-year-old female refugee in Bangkok...
...Twenty-two years would pass before an English paleontologist so much as coined the term “dinosaur”—“terrible lizard”—and the modern study of these extinct creatures got seriously under way...
...Incarcerated from 2002 to 2005, Fang was examined repeatedly and then, in 2003, picked out for special testing in the Jilin detention center in Northeast China...
...And refuse to hold any diplomatic summits until the Chinese put in place an explicit, comprehensive database of every organ donor in China...
...Wang had never seen most of the prisoners’ faces before...
...Those of us researching the harvesting of organs from involuntary donors in China are like the early dinosaur hunters...
...The Chinese police wanted to avoid deaths in custody—less paperwork, fewer questions...
...The charges set off a quiet storm in the human rights community...
...Some were the subjects of drug tests...
...But practitioners vary...
...Some have been questioned by U.N...
...lately he only noticed the warm, rancid stench of his rotting scalp when he woke up...
...We may have to live with the Chinese Communist party, for now...
...And, again, no numbers from China, even the one in the last paragraph, can be considered defi nitive...
...But she remembers her exams pretty well...
...Until there is countervailing evidence, however, I’ll bet on bargainbasement prices for organs in China...
...They kept repeating: “If you still won’t transform, what waits for you is a path to death...
...So the real question was, at $62,000 for a fresh kidney, why would Chinese hospitals waste any body they could get their hands on...
...Then a urine sample, electrocardiogram, abdominal X-ray, and eye exam...
...I can’t bear to see this—a living person in front of my eyes about to be wiped out...
...When Falun Gong’s claims about organ harvesting surfaced in March 2006, Yu still languished in prison, incommunicado...
...She had drunk her own urine...
...They can afford to...
...This wasn’t top secret...
...The usual our-partyespeciallycares-for-you speech was followed by X-rays, the drawing of massive blood samples, cardiograms, urine tests, and then probes: “They had us lie on [our] stomachs and examined our kidneys...
...They aren’t the leader of the free world...
...We do not really know the scale of what is happening yet...
...Dai Ying is a 50-year-old female refugee living in Sweden...
...It included transcripts of recorded phone calls in which Chinese doctors confi rmed that their organ donors were young, healthy, and practiced Falun Gong...
...I was not expecting to see Wang’s pattern repeated as my interviews progressed, nor did I expect to fi nd that organ harvesting had spread beyond Falun Gong...
...We don’t work in close consultation with each other...
...In 1939, a British Foreign Offi ce offi cial, politely speaking for the majority, described the Jews as not, perhaps, entirely reliable witnesses...
...Practitioners of Falun Gong are many things—intense, moralistic, singleminded— but they are strictly nonviolent...
...No taped conversation with a mainland doctor is unimpeachable...
...And that was it—organs only, hold the corneas—a fact that Dai, almost blind from torture at the time, remembers vividly...
...Fang had never seen the doctors before: “Upon arriving here, they changed into labor camp uniforms...
...At any given time, 100,000 Falun Gong practitioners were said to be somewhere in the Chinese penal system...
...and any transplant dealer will confi rm that buyers will pay more for one...
...They were just saying what potential organ recipients wanted to hear...
...Yet Lin found herself wondering why “one police per practitioner” escorted the women through the physical, as if they were dangerous criminals...
...As an act of passive resistance, or simply to avoid trouble for their families, many Falun Gong began withholding their names from the police, identifying themselves simply as “practitioner” or “Dafa disciple...
...The path you have chosen is the path of death...
...She is also the earliest refugee to describe an “organs only” medical examination...
...Was this testing for diabetes or drugs...
...Sober Western journalists ignored these accounts as subjective and biased...
...Written testimony from practitioners...
...Embargo surgical equipment...
...Practitioners like to talk about altering the behavior of police and security personnel through the power of their own belief...
...Yet what initially drew most fi re from skeptics was the claim that organs were being harvested from people before they died...
...The policewoman had met a fellow warrior—her tears are plausible...
...The rise in organ transplant activity...
...She was useless, the closest approximation we have to a nameless practitioner, one of the ones who never gave their names or provinces to the authorities and so lost their meager social protections...
...Qu’s health was fairly good, though she had lost some weight from hunger strikes...
...So the story continues to founder under the lead weight of American political and journalistic apathy...
...bonds...
...The director brought in a group of military police doctors wearing white uniforms, male and female...
...Inside the facility, the practitioners lined up and, one by one, had a large blood sample drawn...
...Three things happened...
...It left a discrepancy of 41,500 unexplained cases over a fi ve-year span...
...Let’s assume it’s prisoners— that’s what Taiwanese doctors think—and theorize that the new law was a signal: Get your consent forms and stop harvesting from Falun Gong...
...Like most numbers coming out of China, these were crude estimates, further rendered unreliable by the chatter of claim and counterclaim...
...In good health, a comprehensive exam...
...She is going to tell me intimate stories of humiliation, torture, and abuse...
...That’s an evil crime...
...Jing observed that they were drawing enough blood to fi ll up eight test tubes per practitioner, enough for advanced diagnostics or tissue matching...
...And that was it: no hammer on the knee, no feeling for lymph nodes, no examination of ears or mouth or genitals—the doctor checked her retail organs and nothing else...
...This report has never been refuted point by point, yet the vast majority of human rights activists have kept their distance...
...No girls...
...I confess, I feel a touch of burnout myself at this thought...
...Masanjia is very close to Sujiatun [hospital]—a pretty quick drive...
...I’m not kidding you...
...Or take Jing Tian, a female refugee in her 40s, now in Bangkok...
...She gave her account of the policewoman without braggadocio, only abject, shrieking shame at having fi nally signed a transformation statement...
...But neither can kidney-function assessment...
...Yet as her resistance dragged on, the police said: “If you don’t transform, we’ll send you away...
...During the Great Leap Forward, emaciated refugees from the mainland poured into Hong Kong, yammering about deserted villages and cannibalism...
...She was told to drink fl uids and refrain from urinating until she got to the hospital...
...Even I was terrifi ed...
...The real problem was that the charges came from Falun Gong—always the unplanned child of the dissident community...
...The discrepancy between executions and transplants...
...Since Falun Gong’s claims were suspect, their allies’ assertions were suspect...
...Prices doubled...
...Wang’s story is not new...
...They tapped on them and ask[ed] us if that hurt...
...Qu Yangyao, an articulate Chinese professional, holds three master’s degrees...
...After he’d worked for months in the burning sun, Wang’s shaved head had become deeply infected...
...only when the heart stops beating is the patient actually considered dead...
...Eastern Lightning are Christians—fringy, out-there Chinese Christians to us, incurable, nontransformable deviants to the party...
...It will be argued—quietly, of course—that America has no point of easy leverage, no ability to undo what has been done, no silver bullet that can change the Chinese regime...
...We are all allowed a touch of compassion fatigue—it’s understandable...
...Liu Guifu is a 48-year-old woman recently arrived in Bangkok...
...Yu knew which month the buses would arrive and where they would park in the courtyard...
...Many prisoners preserve a kind of “it can’t happen here” sensibility...
...Unlike the Tiananmen student leaders and other Chinese prisoners of conscience who had settled into Western exile, Falun Gong marched to a distinctly Chinese drum...
...I may have felt a silent chill run up my spine at points in our interview, but Qu, like many educated subjects, seemed initially unaware of the potential implications of what she was telling me...
...She doesn’t remember giving a urine sample at that time, but the doctor did shine a light in her eyes, examining her corneas...
...I was wrong...
...Clearly someone in the Chinese security system was nervous...
...If that number seems low, consider the diffi culty of survival and escape...
...To meet the demand, a new source of supply was needed...
...Chen was a “nontransformable”—with an edge...
...Did the doctor then ask her to trace the movement of his light with her eyes, or check her peripheral vision...
...But what struck me is that they seemed to be military doctors...
...After they signed, they wouldn’t get a physical again...
...The yammering of a spiritual revivalist apparently counts for even less than the testimony of a peasant or a Jew...
...For Falun Gong, they called them, Little Faluns...
...While a prisoner in China in June 2000, she refused to “transform”— to sign a statement rejecting Falun Gong—and was eventually transferred to a labor camp...
...By interviewing Wang, I was tipping my hat to the extensive research already done by others...
...Yet the charge was not far-fetched...
...Upon arriving in Bangkok, they fl ed to the YMCA and applied for U.N...
...It almost felt like a holiday...
...Chen allowed that she would think about transforming...
...Perhaps it was getting a little better...
...He recalled a scene: About 20 male Falun Gong practitioners were standing before the empty winter fi elds, fl anked by two armed escorts...
...So, the latest nice-nice trick was unconvincing...
...No ladyboy, no kickboxer, thanks...
...It can’t be ruled out...
...She was also diagnosed as schizophrenic and possibly given drugs...
...I may be a paunchy, sweaty, middle-aged white guy, but I’m here to— well, actually, I am on my way to meet a Chinese woman in a back alley...
...Until that happens, it is true, we don’t even have dinosaur bones...
...How did she know...
...As Falun Gong committees kicked into full investigative mode, the Canadian lawyers Kilgour and Matas compiled the accumulating evidence in their report...
...She had been burned with electric batons...
...Jing, too, remembers Eastern Lightning being given blood tests in 2002, but Fang remembers the Jilin exam as far more focused: “The additional examinations would just be blood tests, electro cardiograms, and X-rays, nothing else...
...We’ve been here together all this time, we’ve made at least some sort of connection by now...
...Maybe just better reporting...
...Falun Gong practitioners are forbidden to lie...
...As 2003 began, 180 Falun Gong were tested in Sanshui labor camp...
...For all the Falun Gong theatrics, this claim was not so outlandish either...
...If you were an auntie in your 60s or 70s they wouldn’t pay attention to you...
...The summer of 2001 had been brutal in South China...
...Any medical expert knows that a recipient is far less likely to reject a live organ...
...Just as a prisoner of war is duty bound to attempt escape, a Falun Gong practitioner is required by his moral code to try to save sentient beings...
...Both the Taiwan ese doctors who investigate organ harvesting and those who arrange transplants for their Taiwanese patients agree on one point: The closing ceremony of the Olympics made it once again open season for harvesting...
...She screamed it out cathartically, in a single note of abrasive, consuming fury...
...For various reasons, some valid, some shameful, the credibility of persecuted refugees has often been doubted in the West...
...They just touch you in different places . . . abdomen, liver...
...In 1998, the party quietly canceled the business licenses of people who practiced Falun Gong...
...She was given three urine tests in a single month...
...Taiwanese doctors who arranged for patients to receive transplants on the mainland claim that there was no oversight of the system, no central Chinese database of organs and medical histories of donors, no red tape to diminish medical profi ts...
...refugee status...
...He survived...
...At least, so Qu assumed...
...And three major blood samples were drawn in the same month, at a cost of about $1,000...
...The corpse’s chest had been picked clean...
...Qu distinctly remembers the drawing of a large volume of blood, then a chest X-ray, and probing...
...As a respected human rights scholar asked me, why did Kilgour and Matas use Amnesty International’s estimate of the number of executions in China to suggest the execution rate had stayed constant for 10 years...
...Think of 1820, when a handful of doctors, scientists, and amateur fossil hunters were trying to make sense of scattered suggestive evidence and a disjointed pile of bones...
...After 20 minutes, he saw a large gleaming structure in the distance—maybe it was a hospital, Wang thought...
...The timing is consistent: With all the bad publicity, mainland doctors were hinting at a close-of-business sale on organs at exactly this time...
...Suddenly the guards ordered her to write a suicide note...
...Yu makes a good show of indulging my questions, but to him it was never a big mystery: “There was common knowledge of organ harvesting in the prison...
...Here are some that I’ve found...
...Chen did not tell her story with composure...
...There will be none until the party falls and the Chinese people begin to sift through the graves and ashes...
...And the critics had one thing exactly right: Precision is an illusion...
...In spite of all the torture they had endured and the brutal conditions, even the government would be forced to see that practitioners of Falun Gong were healthy...
...In this spiritual calculus, the policeman who uses torture destroys himself, not the practitioner...
...Fang estimates that eight were Falun Gong...
...In March 2002, the Shenyang Detention Center gave a comprehensive physical to all the practitioners...
...Fine...
...It helps that brain death is not legally recognized in China...
...Washington faces its own imperatives: The riptide of Chinese fi nancial power is strong...
...When I asked her if anyone in Masanjia Labor Camp actually received medical treatment, she responded without missing a beat: “If people came in on a stretcher, they were given cursory treatment...
...Some in the human rights community will read that last assertion with skepticism...
...After a protracted argument with the doctors, the police left...
...case workers, but few have been interviewed by the press, even though, emerging from Chinese labor camps, they are eager, even desperate, to tell their stories...
...Normally, this kind of thing never happens in a labor camp...
...So it’s all the more interesting that he vividly remembers a large, panicky deportation of prisoners (perhaps 400 people, including practitioners) in May 2006...
...Ethan Gutmann, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, wishes to thank the Earhart Foundation and the Wallenberg family of Sweden for research support...
...That sounds like a stupid game, but everyone knew there was a real list: Prisoners and practitioners alike would be taken away on an annual schedule...
...In 2007, Yu Xinhui, free after fi ve years in Guangdong prison, signed himself, his wife, and their infant son up for a foreign trip with a Chinese tour group...
...Indeed, the entire investigation must be understood to be still at an early, even primitive, stage...
...Sever medical ties...
...By the mid-1990s, with the use of anti-tissuerejection drugs pioneered by China, the business had progressed...
...There might be no discrepancy at all...
...It was Falun Gong practitioners and Christians...
...There were transports to “hospital civil defense structures” with names like Sujiatun and Yida, and practitioners with no names, only numbers...
...Some received seemingly normal, comprehensive physicals, though even such people sometimes offered valuable clues...
...But that’s speculative...
...By 2007, the consensus was that the Chinese government had shut down Falun Gong harvesting to avoid any embarrassing new disclosures before the Olympics...
...But so had the Chinese government: Fresh off the confession in 2005 that organs were being harvested from ordinary death-row prisoners, and after issuing their predictable denials of harvesting organs from Falun Gong, Beijing suddenly passed a law in July 2006 forbidding the sale of organs without the consent of the donor...
...For various reasons—perhaps because the membership of this movement was larger than that of the Chinese Communist party (and intersected with it), or because the legacy of Tiananmen was unresolved, or because 70 million people suddenly seemed to be looking for a way into heaven (other than money)—the party decided to eliminate it...
...2, Falun Gong detainees were carefully kept to a minority in each cell so that the hardened criminals could work them over...
...Tibetan sources estimate that 5,000 protesters disappeared in this year’s crackdown...
...When the blood tests started, she said, “before signing a statement [renouncing Falun Gong] the prac titioners were all given physicals...
...Some were simply too shaky in their recall of specifi c procedures to be much help to us...
...It’s an occupational hazard...
...Back in 2002, Chen noticed another pattern...
...So my fi nal case must be viewed as borderline, a comprehensive medical exam followed by . . . well, judge for yourself...
...The staff] would say, Here comes another one of those Eastern Lightning...
...I’m in Bangkok because practitioners of Falun Gong, the Buddhist revival movement outlawed by Beijing, tend to head south when they escape from China...
...It’s why I told that one-night-in-Bangkok joke to get you to read beyond the fi rst paragraph...
...It’s a favorite trope...
...In fact, according to doctors I have spoken to recently, all well versed in current mainland practices, live-organ harvesting of death-row prisoners in the course of execution is routine...
...In early 2006, the fi rst charges of large-scale harvesting— surgical removal of organs while the prisoners were still alive, though of course the procedure killed them—of Falun Gong emerged from Northeast China...
...Masanjia Confi dential” has family in China, so prudence dictates mentioning only that she’s about 40 and is in Bangkok...
...Practitioners of Falun Gong were forbidden to communicate openly...
...She got a soup-to-nuts physical—really a series of them—in Beijing Women’s Labor Camp in 2007...
...Then Chen noticed something dripping on her hand—the policewoman’s tears...
...Deliberate distortions, though, are exceedingly rare...
...My research assistant, Leeshai Lemish, interviewed Dai Ying in Norway, bringing our total to 16...
...Without such proof (although such an individual’s credibility can always be savaged, even with supporting documents), human rights advocates argued there was no reason to take the story seriously...
...There certainly were not suffi cient grounds for President Bush to mention organ harvesting in his human rights speech on the eve of the Beijing Olympics...
...Indeed, to Western observers, Falun Gong public relations carried some of the uncouthness of Communist party culture: a perception that practitioners tended to exaggerate, to create torture tableaux straight out of a Cultural Revolution opera, to spout slogans rather than facts...
...Many have been sent to Qinghai, a potential center of organ harvesting...
...Even so, just over half of the subjects can be ruled out as serious candidates for organ harvesting: too old, too physically damaged from hard labor, or too emaciated from hunger strikes...
...When they were alone, the policewoman began pleading with her: “Chen, your life is going to be taken away...
...None of them likely will...
...Or perhaps he had just become used to it...
...Corneas are relatively small-ticket items, worth perhaps $30,000 each...
...And transplants continued...
...Chen was blindfolded...
...By 2003, Chinese doctors had mastered the liver transplant, worth about $115,000 from a foreign customer...
...The critical fact is that Liu was both a member of a nontransformed Falun Gong brigade with a history of being used for organs and was considered mentally ill...
...Then she heard a familiar policewoman’s voice asking the doctors to leave for a minute...
...Perhaps not, but we could ban Americans from getting organ transplants in China...
...When Wang pointed to his head, the doctor mumbled something about it being normal and motioned for the next patient...
...He addresses his broken English to me: “Girl...
...Was the labor camp concerned about Liu’s health...
...Twelve prisoners had been selected...
...BY ETHAN GUTMANN The jeepney driver sizes us up the minute we climb in...
...Usually they were taken at night...
...And now that the Olympic Games are over, and the cameras have turned away, they roam the earth again...
...Finally, Kilgour and Matas compared the execution rate in China (essentially constant, according to Amnesty International) and the number of transplants...
...So unless there has been a dramatic cultural shift since 2004, when a Chinese report found that only 1.5 percent of transplanted kidneys were donated by relatives, the organs being sold must still come from somewhere...
...I spoke with Wang in 2007, just one out of over 100 interviews for a book on the clash between Falun Gong and the Chinese state...
...And they asked about our medical history...
...Who were the other four...
...Those in government do not want to hear about Falun Gong and genocide at a time of fi nancial crisis, with China holding large numbers of U.S...
...At least the Europeans have given it some air...
...Arrests, sentencing, and whatever took place in the detention centers, psychiatric institutions, and labor camps were not following any established legal procedure or restraint...
...But one point is beyond dispute: The repression of Falun Gong spun out of control...
...The critics had hinted at legitimate points of discussion...
...When asked for their home province, they would say “the universe...
...written testimony from the mainland of practitioners’ experiences in detention...
...Even before you die, your organs are already reserved...
...Walking back to camp, the prisoners felt relieved, even a tad cocky, about the whole thing...
...I’ve heard that number two hundred and something was a talented young female artist with nice skin, but I don’t really know...
...I’ll keep this short...
...While in prison, he was tested repeatedly, fi nally graduating to an “organs-only” exam under military supervision in 2005...
...Given Qu’s status and education, there were reasons to keep her healthy...
...So why should I sign a death certifi cate...
...So we are taking you to get a physical...
...Instead of leading them out to dig up rocks and spread fertilizer, the police had rounded them up for some sort of excursion...
...For now...
...In the last eight days, she had been hung from the ceiling...
...Yet what’s really laughable is the foot-dragging, formalistic, faintly embarrassed response of so many to the murder of prisoners of conscience for the purpose of harvesting their organs...
...That’s all I need,” the policewoman said...
...There were certainly hundreds, perhaps thousands, of practitioners identifi ed by numbers only...
...In all, I interviewed 15 Falun Gong refugees from labor camps or extended detention who had experienced something inexplicable in a medical setting...
...It was terrifying,” Yu says...
...Look how well the party treats you...
Vol. 14 • November 2008 • No. 10
