Recent months have seen a surge of efforts worldwide to prevent western countries from colluding in the horrors perpetrated by China’s transplant industry and to take a clear stand against what has been called the worst crime against humanity of the 21st century.
Canada’s Macdonald-Laurier Institute
At the end of 2021, Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) published a paper on the West’s complacency regarding China’s human rights violations. “Keeping Our Eyes Open to China’s Machinery of Repression,” written by Canadian human rights lawyer and co-author of “Bloody Harvest/the Slaughter” David Matas and human rights expert Caylan Ford, addresses the dangerous misconception that downplaying Beijing’s human rights abuses would lead to reforms in China. This belief, the authors suggest, has not only emboldened the Chinese Communist Party’s vicious suppression of Falun Gong, including the use of forced organ harvesting to murder adherents, but has also given the Government permission to repeat its crimes against such groups as the Uyghurs and Christians.
“Successive Canadian governments, and others around the world, have convinced themselves that soft-pedaling on atrocities would somehow encourage reforms in China. Instead, the machinery of oppression that was built to crush the Falun Gong has metastasized, becoming a permanent feature of [the] Communist Party’s governance apparatus,” Matas and Ford noted.
“For diplomats seeking to advance complex and multi-faceted agendas with China, the persecution of Falun Gong is understood to be a third rail,” the authors noted. “Talk about some other forms of repression, and the Chinese Communists will offer denials and justifications. Talk about [the] persecution of Falun Gong, and the Communists get angry and walk out of the room. Given the risks, it [consequently] seems much simpler and more productive to simply focus on other things.”
Matas and Ford write that the Chinese Government’s ability to “completely eliminate” Falun Gong is, in large part, made possible by the silence seen in Western media on this issue and the failure of so many government officials around the world to call China to task. “Most Canadians know little to nothing about the repression of Falun Gong in China,” Matas and Ford said, adding that “political leaders in Canada seldom acknowledge it.” Furthermore, “some Canadian and U.S. media outlets, likely in response to pressure from the Chinese Government, have apparently ‘spiked or censored stories’ about the persecution campaign against Falun Gong.”
#NotFromChina Pledge
A group of NGOs began a campaign on December 8, 2021 to “help put an end to China’s billion-dollar murder-for-organs industry.” #NotFromChina Pledge, co-sponsored by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC), and China Aid, asks supporters for a personal commitment to refuse an organ from China if they would ever needed one in order to decrease the demand for unethically and illegally obtained organs from prisoners of conscience.
“It is an abomination that today in the 21st century, innocent individuals, including prisoners of conscience, are killed to harvest their organs for profit,” stated Andrew Bremberg, president of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), a Washington-based advocacy group.
The pledge can be made on the ETAC website and a personalized “I took the pledge” card can be shared on social media.
According to a report in The Epoch Times, the pledge campaign “drew inspiration from the Taiwan International Religious Freedom Forum in 2019, when China Aid organized more than 70 politicians, activists, and religious leaders to sign a pledge not to receive organ transplants from China.” Bob Fu, president of China Aid, stated that “It was magical in Taiwan when we all took the pledge.” He added, “I am thrilled that this initiative is now going global as it will strengthen our movement and send a clear message to China that they cannot hide this crime any longer.”
U.S. Congressman Chris Smith
On February 24, 2022,Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ) was interviewed about China’s human rights issues by Jan Jekielek of Epoch TV’s American Thought Leaders. Smith argued that certain U.S. policies, specifically those which have favored trade over human rights, have helped to embolden the Chinese government and have subsequently contributed to crimes such as forced organ harvesting and genocide of the Uyghurs. Smith noted a tendency for the U.S. to minimize China’s malevolent behavior. “There was always an understanding of the human rights abuses being committed, for example, by the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact. But when it came to China, there was always a double standard. There was this inability to understand. I think it was by design, not by mistake, that the Chinese Communist Party is vicious. It is cruel. It uses torture as an element of ensuring people’s compliance, but [also to] just punish, kill people by torture.”
Smith also noted that U.S. companies have furthered China’s power to mistreat its own citizens and foment its formidable role as a global hegemony, “…it’s the ultimate police state, and yet they still export so much to this country which enables their military…I’ve chaired 75 congressional hearings on human rights abuses in China. One of them was with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Cisco…what they were doing on surveilling as well as censoring people on the internet, people who go onto Google, Google Search, they said they were just following orders…the reminiscence that this brings to mind…”
Virginia House Resolution
On February 11, 2022, Virginia’s House of Delegates unanimously passed a resolution on forced organ harvesting. A bipartisan resolution with unanimous (82–0) support was passed after three days of testimony addressing the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) persecution of Falun Gong, including the mass murder of Falun Gong practitioners for their organs.
The resolution entitled Condemning the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese Communist Party was introduced by Republican John Avoli and Democrat Kaye Kory and highlights the 22-year persecution of the spiritual practice, including slave labor, torture, and forced organ harvesting. The resolution also details how CCP-controlled media “dehumanize Falun Gong practitioners to justify these brutal forms of persecution.”
Hudson Institute Center for Religious Freedom
On February 4, 2022, the National Review published a commentary by Nina Shea, Director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom. In “The CCP Wages a Second Genocide — against Falun Gong,” she lays out the evidence for the CCP’s clear intention to eliminate Falun Gong. Shea noted that several extensive reports have not only acknowledged the Government’s stated intention to annihilate Falun Gong, but have also demonstrated that large numbers of detained practitioners have been forcibly subject to medical procedures that “inevitably kill them.” Experts now believe that these procedures are also being used on other groups targeted for extinction.
In her paper, Shea includes a recent finding from 12 U.N. experts which offers credence to the determination of genocide. “Falun Gong had 70 million practitioners, by Beijing estimates, when, in 1999, PRC president and CCP general secretary Jiang Zemin directed that they be ‘eliminated.’ The CCP immediately launched a fierce campaign against the group, maintaining, the State Department confirms, ‘an extralegal, party-run security apparatus to eliminate the Falun Gong movement.’ The State Department reports that, in China, Falun Gong practitioners now number between 7 million and 20 million.”
Shea notes that the compliance, and even support, of international organizations and individuals allows China’s forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong to continue unabated. “CCP manipulation of the World Health Organization, observed during the pandemic, has helped cover up this horror as well. In 2020, scholar Matthew Robertson found that WHO’s advisory anti-organ-trafficking task force, headed by Harvard University transplant surgeon Francis Delmonico, was initiated by CCP Central Committee member Huang Jiefu to be influenced by him as one of the prominent members on the “independent” task force. A government release confirms that it was Huang ‘[o]n behalf of China [who] proposed to establish a WHO task force.’ Unsurprisingly, the task force ‘dismissed out of hand’ the charges of organ harvesting, reported Robertson.”
Tea with Erping
Last month, Erping Zhang, a Harvard-trained China scholar, offered a detailed history of the evidence of forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghurs on an episode of his podcast series, Tea with Erping. In this episode, China’s Darkest Atrocity: Harvesting Organs from Prisoners of Conscience, Zhang takes his viewers back to 2006, when the first evidence of forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners came to light. Zhang highlights the shockingly brazen actions often taken by the government in promoting its illegal transplantation system. He cites the signage at the Kashagar Airport in the Xinjiang region, an area that had not previously been known for organ transplantation, which includes a special “priority lane” for organ transplant, referred to as “Special Passengers, Human Organ Exportation Lane.”
