Forced Organ Harvesting and Torture in China

Photograph of Abduweli Ayup by unknown author CC-BY-SA-4.0

By Andrew Quist

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been torturing, executing, and forcibly harvesting the organs of prisoners of conscience for the past 20 years, and continues to do so to this day. That is the finding of the Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China (the China Tribunal), led by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC. The China Tribunal is a People’s Tribunal commissioned by a collation of lawyers, academics, ethicists, and medical professionals with the aim to hear evidence and raise awareness of human rights violations in China. Public evidence hearings were conducted in 2018 and 2019 in London and the Tribunal issued their judgment in March 2020, finding the CCP guilty of crimes against humanity and torture.

The evidence consisted of witness testimony from former prisoners of conscience from the Falun Gong and Uyghur communities, two groups persecuted by the CCP in China. The witnesses described being tortured and selectively medically tested to assess the function of their internal organs. The Tribunal also heard testimony from researchers like David Kilgour, Ethan Gutmann and David Matas, who have been studying forced organ harvesting in China since 2001. The researchers published their latest findings in the 2016 book Bloody Harvest/the Slaughter: An Update. Kilgour, Gutmann, and Matas described how medical staff at hospitals in China offer organs for sale on short notice and the incomprehensible gap between the large number of transplant operations in China and the very small number of registered donors. The Tribunal found beyond a reasonable doubt that the CCP is torturing, executing, and harvesting the organs of prisoners of conscience.

The CCP’s ghoulish and dystopian practice of killing people for their organs should be commanding the attention of the international community. But with the coronavirus pandemic raging and the world economy in trouble, the wellbeing of foreigners is not at the top of the minds of government leaders or ordinary people, and China’s human rights violations are not getting the attention they deserve. Psychic numbing makes it hard for us to care about people who we learn about only through statistics, and research has shown that our empathy is activated when we are told about the suffering of one identified person with a name and face.

To help bring awareness to this topic, I have been granted permission to share the personal stories of four prisoners of conscience who were tortured by the CCP for doing nothing other than nonviolently practicing their beliefs, or in the case of the Uyghur man pictured above, teaching kindergarteners in their mother tongue. I was provided written testimonies by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China. These testimonies were entered into evidence in the China Tribunal proceedings. I have summarized the testimonies here.

Jintao Liu

Jintao Liu is a practitioner of Falun Gong, a religious movement centered on truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. Falun Gong incorporates movement and breathing exercises and is based on Buddhist philosophy. Members of the religion are persecuted by the CCP. Jintao was arrested in 2006 for practicing Falun Gong. His arrest was extrajudicial; there was no court process whatsoever. He was sent to labor and reeducation camps for more than two years, where he was tortured and forced to do slave labor and watch brainwashing videos.

Jintao’s torturers starved him, forced fed him with urine soaked feeding tubes, shoved feces in his mouth, pushed him against an extremely hot heating unit, stripped him naked, pulled his pubic hair, shoved a toilet brush handle into his anus, poured cold water on him, pierced his skin with needles, punctured his nails with the point of guard’s badge, denied him restroom use, and subjected him to sleep deprivation. Jintao was tortured specifically to get him to give up his beliefs in Falun Gong.

Jintao was forced to have blood taken and get X-rays done every year, but he was never notified of the result of these tests, and he suspects they were connected to the practice of forced organ harvesting. Once while he was being beaten by an inmate with the guards’ permission, another inmate shouted, “don’t injure his organs.”

Liu Huiqiong

Liu Huiqiong was arrested for practicing Falun Gong and sent to forced labor camps twice, first in 2001 and again in 2005. She spent four years in detention. When she was arrested, Liu was beaten by the police and told that the police didn’t have to obey the law when dealing with Falun Gong practitioners. The police threatened to rape and murder her.

Liu was subjected to blood tests and physical exams eight times during her detention. She was denied access to these medical records, which she was told were “state secrets.” The guards threatened to kill her if she did not allow the tests to be taken. Among the labor camp inmates, only Falun Gong practitioners were given these medical tests.

Liu witnessed the division chief of the camp say that Falun Gong practitioners were kept as spare goods. She also heard another guard say that Falun Gong are merchandise, and that tomorrow there would be another shipment. Liu witnessed guards beat an elderly woman for shouting, “Falun Gong is good.” Liu was told that she would be let go if she stopped practicing Falun Gong, but she would die if she continued to believe in it.

Abduweli Ayup

Abduweli Ayup is a Uyghur, an ethnic minority that practices Islam and lives in Northwest China. Abduweli is pictured above. Like practitioners of Falun Gong, the Uyghurs are currently being persecuted by the CCP. The Chinese government is putting them in concentration camps, torturing them, and subjecting them to forced sterilization.

Abduweli was arrested in 2013 for raising money for a Uyghur language kindergarten and spent 15 months in detention. After his arrest, Abduweli was chained to a “tiger chair,” a torture device, while the police beat his hands and shoulders. He was then stripped naked and thrown into a hall with 20 violent criminals who attacked him. Abduweli was also placed into a cubical cell that was so small he could not stand up and could only move in a crouch position. After again being beaten in a tiger chair, Abduweli had a hood placed over his head and he was taken to a hospital. There he was subjected to an x-ray exam, had his blood, saliva, and urine taken, and had a cold jell applied to his skin while his organs were examined. After the medical exams, Abduweli was taken to a detention center, where he was beaten, placed in small glass cell, and beaten again.

One of his cellmates at the detention center was a Uyghur man who was executed. Abduweli learned that the man’s family were refused permission to see and wash his body, and were only allowed to see his face. Abduweli learned of two other Uyghur men who had the same thing happened to them: they were executed and the family was not allowed to view the body. Abduweli suspects these men were executed to have their organs removed.

Abduweli was arrested two more times, in December 2014 and July 2015. After the 2014 arrest, he was placed in a prison cell and forced to clean the stools away in the toilet to humiliate him. The arrest in 2015 was conducted by a police SWAT team. They slapped and kicked him for half an hour before taking him into custody. In both cases, Abduweli was released after several hours. The purpose of the arrests was to torment and intimidate him.

In August 2015, the police warned Abduweli not to rent an apartment in his home city of Kashgar, and he decided to leave the country.

Dai Ying

Dai Ying was arrested with her husband in 1999 for practicing Falun Gong. The prosecutor told her husband that they were not guilty of breaking any laws, but he had to sentence them because it was “dictated by higher authorities.” Dai and her husband hired two lawyers to defend them, but the municipal government did not allow the lawyers to represent them and instead appointed a lawyer for the couple, who pleaded guilty. Dai was sentenced to detention for three years.

At the detention camp, Dai went on a hunger strike, and was force-fed. During the force-feeding, the guards used a screwdriver to pry open her mouth and broke two teeth and knocked two other teeth loose permanently. Dai was forced to do hard labor making leather shoes from 7:30 am to midnight each day. The shoes were exported to the US and Europe. Dai was housed in a detention cell with 30 other inmates. They had to sleep head to foot and were given moldy rice to eat.

Dai was forced to watch brainwashing videos defaming Falun Gong. When she refused to give up her beliefs, she was tortured. The guards forced her to stand up against a wall until she collapsed of exhaustion. She was only allowed to sleep for two hours at a time, and when she slept the guards made inmates with contagious diseases like Tuberculosis sleep next to her so she would catch their diseases.

At a large meeting, a guard announced to hundreds of inmates that Dai practiced Falun Gong and no one was allowed to talk to her or give her personal items. Four inmates followed Dai everywhere even when she would shower or go to the bathroom.

For refusing to denounce Falun Gong, Dai was also tortured by electrocution. Guards held an electric baton at her sensitive areas such as the cervical vertebra and shocked her many times. Due to the damage from electrocution, Dai went completely blind in one eye and her other eye was permanently damaged. Guards repeatedly threatened to send Dai to a concentration camp in Northwest China if she refused to give up her belief in Falun Gong.

Dai was released in 2002, but because she continued to practice Falun Gong, two months after her release, she was arrested again and was sent to a labor camp for two years. At the labor camp she was forced to sort garbage. The guards again tried to brainwash her, forcing her to write material against Falun Gong. Dai was deprived of sleep and not allowed to use the bathroom.

In 2004, inmates at the labor camp who were members of Falun Gong were taken for medical testing. Dai had her blood taken, received x-rays, and had her heart and kidneys inspected. Only Falun Gong practitioners were given the medical tests; none of the other inmates at the camp joined them. After the exams, some of the Falun Gong practitioners went missing. Dai believes they were killed to have their organs harvested.

When Dai’s blood pressure rose to 250 and she was on the verge of a mental breakdown, she was released from camp. However, a year later, the police in her city began another round of persecution against Falun Gong. Dai and her husband were warned the police were coming to their home, and they escaped to Thailand, where they arranged to move to Norway as refugees.