Calls to disengage from China on ethical grounds are coming from the fields of medicine, education, business and politics.
At the November 2019 Edelstam Foundation seminar in Sweden, Uyghur surgeon Dr. Enver Tohti Bughda told participants how in 1995, he was ordered to remove the liver and kidneys of a man whose heart was still beating. Urging the West to act, Dr. Bughda said, “Stop teaching Chinese students medicine. Stop cooperating with Chinese medical society. Refuse to accept medical articles by Chinese surgeons. By doing this, the world will let the Chinese doctor know that what you are doing is wrong.”
Another speaker was physician Benjamin Kong, a Falun Gong practitioner who, while imprisoned for his belief in a Chinese labor camp, was given a comprehensive, organ-based medical examination. “It included an ECG,” Kong said, “I know because I’m a doctor myself. They were checking all my organs. At the time I was thinking, we’ve been through so much torture because of them. They don’t even treat us as humans. Why, all of a sudden, do they care about our health and give us physical exams? And I didn’t even get the exam results.”
The Edelstam Foundation is named after Swedish diplomat Harald Edelstam (1913-1989) who helped hundreds of Jewish people escape from Nazi Germany during World War II.
In mid-December, Health Europa reported on the recently released Economics Of Organ Harvesting In China, which for the first time, named 20 global companies that apparently profit from China’s transplant industry. Innocent people, incarcerated for religious or political beliefs in China, die in hospitals across the nation as a direct result of the government’s state-sanctioned forced live organ harvesting.
International human rights attorney, David Matas, who testified at last year’s China Tribunal, said, “The report [Economics of Organ Harvesting in China] sets out compelling evidence that several multinational companies are complicit in transplant abuse in China where prisoners of conscience are killed for their organs.”
After marveling at the beauty and artistry amid themes of hope and freedom displayed by Shen Yun Performing Arts in a December performance in Ottawa, Canada, Graeme Barber, MD, retired vascular surgeon and member of the Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China, said, “After several years of research, I concluded that there is little information about this [organ harvesting] crime for two reasons: First, it is so evil it is essentially unbelievable. Second, it would be impossible for any respectable country to engage in any way with such an evil government if the respectable country truly believed what was happening.”
China sends more students to the United States than any other nation in the world. China is a leading destination for American students studying abroad. After the outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China, several U.S. educational institutions imposed travel restrictions for their Chinese students as well as for their academic and research branch campuses in mainland China. Highly respected American icons of higher education have close partnerships with and branch campuses at institutions across China, including Wuhan University.
Some businesses continue to focus only on the profit potential of China’s transplant market rather than investigating its ethics. Available for purchase on the internet is the January 2020 market trend and outlook analysis for the immunosuppressant drugs used in organ transplantation. The analysis claims to focus on “technological platforms, tools and methodologies” to boost industry performance, offering sales strategies to rapidly obtain new clients. The report purports to “present company profile, product specifications, capacity, production value, and 2014-2019 market shares” for “international and Chinese major industry players in detail, including the “Global and Chinese total market of Organ Transplant Immunosuppressant Drugs industry including capacity, production, production value, cost/profit, supply/demand and Chinese import/export.”
GOP Senators have called on American colleges and universities to accurately report donations from foreign entities, especially those from the Chinese government-controlled Confucius Institutes (CI). Presently, there are approximately 500 CI classrooms in the United States. “This is about transparency,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, “If colleges and universities are accepting foreign money and gifts, their students, donors, and taxpayers deserve to know how much and from whom. Moreover, it’s what the law requires. Unfortunately, the more we dig, the more we find that too many are underreporting or not reporting at all.”
On January 23, 2020, Jan Jekielek of The Epoch Times American Thought Leaders interviewed retired Air Force General Robert Spalding who described how American financial institutions “push equities/bonds onto U.S. investors, including retirement fund, academic endowment, and institutional investors, knowing very well that the CCP is the most important constituency for those companies” and that the “CCP has no fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.” He added that U.S. investment banks are “investing in companies that support concentration camps and forced organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience.”
On February 15, 2020, U.S. Secretary for Defense Mark Esper, while speaking at the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, named China’s regime as the “Pentagon’s top concern” due to Beijing’s aggressive commercial and military postures. He warned, “we should take the Chinese government at its word,” citing Beijing’s ambition to have a fully modernized military by 2035 and be the most powerful military in Asia by 2049. Mr. Esper said, the world needs to “wake up to the challenges” posed by the Chinese Communist Party.
