China forcibly harvesting organs from its dissidents in a 'kind of genocide': Report
Zheng Qiaozhi still has nightmares from his time interning at China’s Shenyang Army General Hospital, where he was reportedly forced to be a part of an organ-harvesting team.
Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute and the author of 'Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order,' wrote about the horrors of the illicit organ transplant trade in the country in a New York Post editorial.
According to accounts by Qiaozhi, whom Mosher refers to as George, once the prisoner was brought in, tied hand and foot but alive, the army doctor in charge sliced him open from chest to belly button, revealing his two kidneys. He then instructed his intern to "cut the veins and arteries" before blood spurted everywhere.
Once detached, the kidneys were placed in an organ-transplant container.
Qiaozhi was then ordered to remove the man's eyeballs, but the intern froze up and told the doctor, "I can't do it." The doctor then proceeded to quickly scoop out the eyes himself.
Qiaozhi soon quit his job at the hospital and returned home. He was so unnerved by what he had witnessed that he became afraid he might be the next victim of China's forced organ-harvesting business, thereby fleeing to Canada and assuming a new identity.
"First-person accounts like George’s are understandably rare," Mosher wrote. "The “transplant tourists” who come to China are naturally told nothing about the “donors” of their new heart, liver or kidney. And those who are executed for their organs tell no tales."
According to experts, between 60,000 and 100,000 organs are transplanted annually in China. The cost of a liver transplant comes to $170,000 while a kidney transplant would set one down $130,000. When you multiply the numbers, you are easily looking at an estimated $10-20 billion racket.
Little is known about the "source" of the hundreds of thousands of organs that are harvested every year. Qiaozhi had no idea about the background of the man whose kidneys he fatally removed. All he was told was that the victim was "under 18 and in good health."
Ethan Gutmann, author of several books on the subject, believes the vast majority of organs are obtained by ending the lives of convicted prisoners.
In recent years, one rich source of fresh organs has been the Falun Gong - a heretical Buddhist sect - where thousands of the group's followers have been arrested and disappeared into a wide network of secret prison facilities across the country.
"The Muslim minorities of China’s far west are apparently next in line," Mosher says. "Over the past couple of years, between one to three million Uighur and Kazakh men have been arrested and sent to concentration camps — Beijing calls them “vocational training centers” — in the region."
According to the author, these "prisoners of conscience" had their blood drawn upon entry and their organs examined for viability. What's more? There are dedicated organ-transplant lanes recently opened at airports in the region -- with crematoria under construction nearby such facilities.
"All this suggests that assembly-line harvesting of Uighur, Kazakh, and Tibetan organs is already getting underway," Mosher speculated. "China is not just ridding itself of troublesome minorities, it is profiting mightily in the process."
While China has denied the terrifying organ harvesting racket, their business is booming after incorporating western technologies like ECMO — extracorporeal membrane oxygenation — which have come in handy.
About two decades ago, it was possible to successfully harvest only an organ or two from a transplant victim. The other organs had to be discarded due to oxygen deprivation rendering them unviable.
Now, with the latest ECMO technology, every organ can be harvested - even the skin. While the pathbreaking tech has saved innumerable lives in the West, it has accelerated the killing of innocent people in China.
According to Mosher, China has taken drastic steps to cover up these crimes from international scrutiny. The government announced in January 2015 that it would "only use organs from voluntary civilian organ donors and that the use of organs from executed prisoners would be banned."
"As proof, they even published statistics," he wrote. "These showed a straight-line increase in 'voluntary' organ donations so picture-perfect it could only be fabricated. And China’s 'official' number of voluntary donors had only risen to 6,000 by 2018, a number far too small to supply the many tens of thousands of organs actually transplanted that year."
Mosher says China's amazingly short wait times for organs is proof that the slaughter of "donors" still continues. Only in China can organ tourists receive a heart, kidney, or liver transplant within days or weeks of arriving. In some cases, patients reported their surgeries were scheduled before they even arrived in the country.
"The world is beginning to wake up to the fact that virtually every organ transplant in China costs the life of an innocent human being," Mosher continued. "That’s why countries like Israel, Spain, Italy, and Taiwan have already banned transplant tourism."
He added, "China’s organ-transplant assembly line is not only murder for hire but may turn out to be a kind of genocide as well."