The investigators observed tremendous development in China’s human organ transplant industry after 1999. This growth coincided with the start of the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign to wipe out Falun Gong.1

Falun Gong is a meditation practice based on ancient Chinese traditions of health and self-improvement, and the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. By the end of the 1990s, the government estimated that over 70 million people were practicing Falun Gong, a figure quoted by several Western news media.

Falun Gong practitioners meditate in Muxidi, Beijing before the persecution began in 1999.

The former Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin saw the group’s popularity and revival of traditional values as a threat to his rule, and launched a violent campaign to “bankrupt them financially, ruin their reputations, destroy them physically.”

Millions of Falun Gong practitioners from around China traveled to Beijing to appeal to the central government, only to be arrested and tortured. When many were unwilling to disclose their identities to protect their families and friends, they became part of a large anonymous population held captive by the state. More practitioners were rounded up all across China. Those who refused to renounce their faith began to disappear without a trace.

Falun Gong practitioners unfurl banners on Tiananmen Square to protest the persecution. The banners read “Truthfulness, Compassion, Tolerance.”

“In the U.S., in Europe, you have to be dead first in order to be an organ donor. In China, they make you dead.

—Arthur Caplan, Leading U.S. Medical Ethicist

References

1
"Bloody Harvest/The Slaughter: An Update page 408~410 Authors: David Kilgour, Ethan Gutmann, and David Matas, June 22, 2016"
Original: http://endorganpillaging.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Bloody_Harvest-The_Slaughter-June-23-V2.pdf