Part One: Forced Organ Harvesting Continues After the Covid Pandemic

A. Between 2019 and 2023, the number of medical institutions certified to conduct organ transplants increased by 8.7% from 173 to 188 (see Table 1).

Table 1: Number of organ transplant medical institutions increased by 8.7% between 2019 and 2023.

Year Certified Organ Transplant Medical Institutions Certified Transplant Physician Training Bases Source Comments
2019 173

 

(Oct 29, 2019)

 31

 

(March 25, 2019)

 首批人体器官移植医师培训基地备案名单公布(ulabmed.com)
2020 Data Unavailable

 

(Covid-19 pandemic)

 33

 

(May 11, 2020)

 List of Training Bases for Human Organ Transplant Physicians – People’s Republic of China National Health Commission (nhc.gov.cn)
2021 180

 

June 11, 2021

 33 政策文件：器官移植医院名单（具有人体器官移植执业资格的医疗机构名单） (neusoft.uk)
2022 183

 

(July 29, 2022)

 33 全国移植器官医院名单汇总 具备器官移植资质的医院 中国器官移植医院一览→买购网(maigoo.com); 政策文件：器官移植医院名单（具有人体器官移植执业资格的医疗机构名单）(neusoft.uk)
2023 188

 

Nov 15, 2023

 33 具有人体器官移植执业资格的医疗机构名单 – 中华人民共和国国家卫生健康委员会(nhc.gov.cn)

B. Forced organ harvesting continues after the Covid pandemic

Between July 1, 2020, and April 30, 2022, Traceback International conducted a telephone survey of hospitals and medical staff suspected of harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners. The results showed that during the three-year pandemic, the CCP’s “zero-COVID” policy hit China’s economy hard, but organ transplantation was not affected. From the investigation, some physicians said that they had a variety of liver donors on hand.

In addition, the number of “green channels” has increased, covering almost all of mainland China. “Green channels” refer to special corridors for the high-speed transportation of living organs. In 2016, the National Health and Family Planning Commission, the Ministry of Public Security and, other six departments jointly issued a “Notice on the Establishment of a Green Channel for the Transfer of Human Donated Organs.” Since then, these channels have been set up at airports, high-speed railways and other places across the country.

List of newly certified organ transplant medical institutions published in 2022:

References:

Part Two: New testimony presented in public

Case 1: First Known Survivor of Forced Organ Harvesting

Mr. Cheng Peiming, a Falun Gong practitioner from Heilongjiang Province, revealed at a press conference in Washington, D.C. on July 3, 2024, that part of his liver and lungs were removed in 2004. He was fortunate to escape from the hospital in 2006, when the authorities tried to forcibly harvest his organs for the second time.

A medical examination showed that the left side of Cheng’s liver and a portion of his left lung were partially removed. Several organ transplant experts issued statements that supported this conclusion.

Cheng began practicing Falun Gong in 1998. In January 2002, he was illegally sentenced to eight years in prison and later incarcerated in Daqing Prison in Heilongjiang Province. On November 16, 2004, he was taken from Daqing Prison to Daqing No. 4 Hospital, where six police officers held him down. He was forcibly anesthetized and operated on without his knowledge.

Cheng said, “On November 19, when I woke up, I was paralyzed, unable to move at all.” When he was escorted back to Daqing Prison, the stitching on his surgical wound had not been removed. “I felt a lot of pain and gritted my teeth. This pain was worse than death, I was gritting teeth, made sound of ‘crunching’ (ringing). Because I was in terrible pain, they [police officers] pried my mouth open and made me bite on a stick…”

The surgery left a clear 35-centimeter scar on the left side of his body. Cheng also said that he had trouble breathing after the surgery.

When the prison guard who was monitoring Cheng during his operation returned to the prison, he told an inmate that he had heard from the head nurse that this was the first transplant operation she had encountered in her 30 years of nursing. At one point, Cheng overhead inmates saying that he had had a transplant surgery.

According to Cheng, there was a clear difference in the way he was treated in Daqing Prison after the surgery. Before the operation, he was severely tortured many times, but the prison stopped torturing him afterwards.

In 2006, Cheng was taken to the hospital again, and he felt that this time it was going to cost him his life. At 2 o’clock in the morning on March 3, 2006, Cheng took the opportunity of going to the bathroom and escaped the hospital through a fire exit.

He fled China in 2015 and arrived in Thailand before coming to the United States in 2020. After Cheng escaped, the local police launched a city-wide manhunt. The Ministry of Public Security issued a warrant and offered a reward for his arrest.

Nationwide arrest warrant for Cheng Peiming issued by the Ministry of Public Security, June 1, 2006.
On July 3, 2024, Falun Gong practitioner Cheng Peiming from Heilongjiang Province appeared in Washington, D.C. and publicly recounted his experience of surviving and finally escaping the CCP’s crime of live organ harvesting. The picture shows Cheng Peiming showing a 35-centimeter-long scar left on his body by the first organ harvesting operation. (Madalina Vasiliu/English Epoch Times)

References:

Case 2: First case reported by the victim herself

On July 17, 2023, WOIPFG received a report from a physician in mainland China about the deathbed testimony of Zhang Xiuqin in 2019. On April 28, 2019, in Harbin City, Zhang had her organs harvested at the Department of Infectious Diseases in the 962nd Hospital of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Joint Logistics Support Force (formerly the 211th Hospital of the PLA). When her body was cleaned up at the hospital, Zhang woke up and was found by a physician. When Zhang was dying, she recounted her tragic experience of being tortured and abused and having her organs harvested.

Zhang, 46 at the time of the 2019 operation, from Laizhou, Shandong Province, practiced Falun Gong since 1998. After the CCP began to persecute Falun Gong on July 20, 1999, Zhang was arrested multiple times for talking to people about Falun Gong and was sentenced to two years of re-education in a labor camp and three and a half years in prison. She was fired from her job and became displaced.

At the end of 2018, she was arrested again and repeatedly tortured and raped. In April 2019, she was cut open, and one of her kidneys was removed. Her liver was also cut, but it was not removed. The incisions were not sutured in multiple places. Zhang used the last moments of her life to tell people about the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong, including forced organ harvesting.

Zhang’s account became the first case of forced organ harvesting reported by the victim herself. Her case occurred four years after the CCP announced in 2015 that it would stop using organs from death-row prisoners and that unpaid donations from citizens were the only source of organ transplants.

Before Zhang was killed, she was held in a basement after a medical examination, where more than a dozen other Falun Gong practitioners were held. there in the basement …… Often someone was taken away and never returned, and new practitioners would be brought in a few days later. This is likely a part of the CCP’s living organ donor bank, in which prisoners of conscience are killed on demand as they are matched to recipients.

The physician said, “We don’t know those physicians [who performed the transplant operations]. They don’t belong to our facility [211th Hospital of the PLA], and it’s not the same people who come each time.” This suggests that the donor organs procured at 211 Hospital are used for transplants at other hospitals.

The physician also said that the Infectious Disease department of the Harbin 211 Hospital was chosen for these operations because the bodies of patients who die in surgery are treated according to contamination protocol; that is, they are directly cremated after sealing and disinfection, and the process is convenient for destroying evidence.

Testimony: A Military Physician Witness

In 2023, Zheng Zhi, a military physician who fled China many years ago, revealed what he saw during his internship at the Shenyang Army General Hospital in 1994. He saw a young soldier under the age of 18 having his organs harvested while he was alive: after the young man’s limbs and neck were tied up with thin ropes, a large incision was made from under the subxiphoid to the navel without anesthesia. The abdominal cavity was opened, and the kidneys were directly removed, followed by the eyeballs. The whole process was quickly completed by high-ranking military doctors, and Zheng lived in fear for many years because he had witnessed the abuse and killing of young lives.

To let more people know about these atrocities, Zheng participated in the filming of the documentary State Organs and personally recounted this experience in front of the camera. He once told the director, “In fact, the pain and pressure experienced by doctors who do live organ harvesting are also very, very deep. Because the Communist Party wants to force them to become devils.” Regarding the organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners, Zheng said in an interview that in 2005, he learned of the existence of a human organ bank from a close confidant of a member of the Politburo Standing Committee: “At the Public Security Department in Wuhan, Hubei Province, the underground of the back garden is full of Falun Gong practitioners and underage children.”

References:

Part Three: “State Grants” Offered to Organ Harvesting Victims

According to Chutian Metropolis Daily on November 30, 2020, between 2017 and 2018, four doctors from the provinces of Jiangsu and Anhui illegally removed organs from 11 supposedly deceased people in Huaiyuan County, Anhui Province. The doctors were sentenced to prison terms ranging from ten months to two years and four months by the Intermediate People’s Court of Bengbu City, Anhui Province for the crime of intentional destruction of corpses.

Shi, the family member of one victim, has a mentally ill brother. In February 2018, Shi’s brother suddenly attacked his mother Li, his wife, children and himself with weapons, causing severe brain injury to his mother. Shi was seriously injured in the head, abdomen and shoulders. Fortunately, his wife and children were not seriously injured.

After the incident, Shi and his mother were taken to the ICU at Huaiyuan County People’s Hospital for treatment. Shi recovered after two months of treatment. During his hospitalization, he learned that his mother had died five days after admission.

After Shi was discharged, he took his wife and children to the county public security bureau for an injury assessment at the request of a forensic doctor at the Huaiyuan County Public Security Bureau. During the assessment, the forensic doctor asked him how much money his family had received for his mother’s organ donation. Shi then learned that his mother’s liver and kidneys had been removed on the day of her death and that a 200,000-yuan “state aid or state grant” had been transferred to the account of one of his cousins. The money was later used to treat Shi and his family.

Shi learned from his father and younger sister that on the evening of February 14, 2018, Yang Suxun, director of the ICU at Huaiyuan County People’s Hospital, asked them to sign a consent form for donating organs after his mother’s death, saying they would receive 200,000 yuan in “state aid” in return. His mother’s liver and kidneys were removed that night.

Shi wanted to see the organ donation consent form, and after much effort he was finally provided a picture of the form from Yang via WeChat. However, Shi found that there was no registration facility or official seal on the form, so Shi became suspicious of the matter. Between April 2018 and March 2019, Shi visited a number of organizations (listed below) to find out what had happened with his mother’s “organ donation.” In May 2020, the Huaiyuan County People’s Procuratorate filed an indictment with the court, accusing the defendants (physicians) Huang Xinli, Wang Hailiang, Yang Suxun, Huang Chaoyang, Ou Yang, and Lu Sen of the crime of desecrating a corpse.

Shi said that as a family member of the victim, he had repeatedly written to the Huaiyuan County People’s Court to request to file a criminal lawsuit and participate in the lawsuit but was rejected by the court. In addition, Shi’s attorney reviewed the police investigation files and inferred from the suspects’ defense in court that Shi’s mother might still have been alive when she was pushed out of the hospital and taken into the ambulance for organ extraction.

“I cannot accept this verdict. I have consulted legal professionals, and they should be prosecuted for organizing the sale of human organs.” Shi said.

List of the organizations Shi visited:

  • Huaiyuan County Red Cross Society
  • Bengbu Red Cross Society
  • China Human Organ Donation Management Center, Beijing
  • China Human Organ Donation Management Center and Organ Procurement Organization (OPO)
  • Huaiyuan County Health and Family Planning Commission
  • Bengbu Municipal Health and Family Planning Commission
  • Anhui Provincial Public Security Department
  • Anhui Provincial Health and Family Planning Commission
  • National Bureau of Letters and Calls
  • Supreme People’s Procuratorate
  • Anhui Provincial Public Security Department (again)
  • Central Inspection Team (Team to Bengbu)
The copy of the organ donation consent form Shi received

The Shi family’s experience is not an isolated case.

On November 30, 2020, another the family member of another victim in Shi’s area, Ms. Hou, told the Chutian Metropolis Dailyreporter that her father, Mr. Hou, had a sudden cerebral hemorrhage in January 2018 and was admitted to Huaiyuan County People’s Hospital. Half a month after being admitted to the hospital, Yang (the same physician mentioned above) told her that her father was dying and suggested that she donate her father’s kidneys and liver for free and said that the Nanjing Red Cross would pay them “state aid” of 200,000 yuan.

After learning that Yang and the other defendants had been sentenced, Ms. Hou said, “I think their actions constitute the crime of organizing the sale of human organs, not the crime of intentional destruction of corpses.”

While more and more teenagers and conscience prisoner disappeared, and more cases of doctors illegally removed organs from innocent victims in the communities revealed, China’s former Vice Minister of Health Huang Jiefu has publicly stated on different occasions that he wants China to perform the most organ transplants of any country by 2023.

References: