Tens of Thousands of Xinjiang Detainees Killed by Organ Harvesting, Expert Says By Jimmy Quinn
A researcher who last month published a paper detailing the Chinese Communist Party’s forced organ-harvesting techniques told a congressional panel yesterday that his research proves that Chinese organ-harvesting doctors killed their patients. Another expert presented analysis indicating that 25,000 to 50,000 Xinjiang prison-camp detainees are subjected to organ harvesting, then cremated, each year.
“In plain language, the papers appear to show that the donors, who were prisoners, were alive at the time of surgery, and were killed by the transplant surgeons in the process of heart extraction,” said Matthew Robertson, the co-author of a groundbreaking article in the American Journal of Transplantation.
His paper, published in April, looked at a number of cases up through 2015, in which surgeons effectively admitted to execution by organ harvesting. The analysis looked at 124,000 Chinese-language medical papers, finding at least 71 papers outright describing that practice.
“These findings show a uniquely close and long-running collaboration between the PRC’s medical establishment and its public security system,” he said. “This would make PRC surgeons, many of whom were trained in the West, involved in medicalized extrajudicial killing.”
He made the remarks during a hearing held by the Tom Lantos Commission, a congressional human-rights panel, which is chaired by Representative Christopher Smith. Other witnesses who testified included a surgeon who in the 1990s carried out the first documented incident of live organ harvesting and legal and human-rights experts.
For decades, Falun Gong practitioners have alleged that the Chinese authorities executed members of their spiritual movement — which the party views as anathema to its rule — via forced organ harvesting, claims that human-rights experts have backed up. The Robertson paper is a major step toward more widespread recognition of these practices.
Earlier this month, the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning organ harvesting in China and calling on the EU to act on the findings reported by Robertson. Smith’s hearing was convened to galvanize similar U.S. action.
The witnesses placed a particular emphasis on organ harvesting in Xinjiang prison camps.
Enver Tohti, the surgeon, testified that he was ordered to harvest the liver and kidneys from a prisoner who had just been shot by a firing squad but whose heart was still beating. He said a group of surgeons arrived at the scene following the execution of 10 or 20 prisoners in Xinjiang in 1995.
“The whole operation took around 30-40 minutes, chief surgeons happily put those organs into a weird looking box, and said that: ok, now you take your team back to hospital; remember nothing happened today,” Tohti said.
Tohti and Ethan Gutmann, a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, also presented evidence that the party has continued similar organ-harvesting practices in Xinjiang, throughout the atrocities against Uyghurs and other minorities that intensified over six years ago.
Gutmann presented evidence that two groups of Xinjiang camp detainees leave the camps early: 18-year-olds and 28- to 29-year-olds, which he said is “the exact stage of physical development that the Chinese medical establishment prefers for organ harvesting.” Their selection follows an extensive medical exam process, including blood tests. Those given colored bracelets or vests, he said, are taken away in the night.
He made a jarring estimate, based on his interviews with camp survivors across the world and other research: That 25,000 to 50,000 detainees are being subjected to forced harvesting every year.
Gutmann described what this looks like in practice, citing the proximity of a crematorium and a hospital to a detention camp in Aksu prefecture in Xinjiang:
A Uyghur male who was in and out of the Aksu prison system explained to me that the Aksu Infection Hospital was originally used for SARS patients. By 2013, it evolved into a treatment center for “extreme Muslim” dissidents – a “re-education” hospital. The associated crematorium has a prominent sign, and “the air smells like burnt bones.”
Another Uyghur male from the Aksu area drove by the crematorium every day. He adds that the smell was a common complaint among local workers.
It’s a twenty-minute drive from the Aksu Infection Hospital to the Aksu Airport and a “Human Organ Transport Channel” — an export-only fast lane to move human organs east. I’ve identified one probable end user near Shanghai: “First Hospital Zhejiang Province”; as a “big brother” to Aksu Infection Hospital, First Hospital liver transplants increased by 90% in 2017. Kidney transplants increased by 200%.
Smith called the party’s organ-harvesting practices “a tool of genocide meant to cull minority populations deemed ‘undesirable’ by the state.”
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