WASHINGTON—Resistance in mainland China to the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners is growing by the day, according to human rights activists and China experts speaking at a forum on Capitol Hill. The evidence of crimes against humanity is mounting and carefully collected for future trials, they said, while hundreds of thousands of legal complaints have been filed against the initiator of the persecution, former communist leader Jiang Zemin.
Practitioners of Falun Gong, both in mainland China and overseas, believe the tide is turning. Most of the high level officials responsible for the detention, torture and deaths of practitioners are behind bars, and many expect that the lead perpetrator Jiang will eventually face the same fate. Over the past year, about 207,881 Falun Gong practitioners and family members filed 175,747 criminal complaints against the former Party leader.
Meanwhile, the number of Chinese who have renounced their membership in the Party or its affiliated organizations (the Youth League and Young Pioneers) has reached 239 million. About 115,000 withdraw every day. This avalanche of renunciations, called the Tuidang Movement, began in 2004, after the Epoch Times published the “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party.”
To mark the 17th anniversary of the ban of Falun Gong in China, the Falun Dafa Association of Washington DC held a forum on May 26, titled, “Human Rights Atrocities in China & Bringing Perpetrator Jiang Zemin to Justice.”
‘Learning to Think Critically’
“Chinese people are taught from infancy to take the Communist Party closer to them than their own family members,” said David Tompkins, who represented the Global Service Center for quitting CCP (The Tuidang Center). He said, “Everyone is indoctrinated from childhood to take the CCP as their mother,” and the indoctrination continues lifelong. The Chinese people then cannot think for themselves.
“Killing and brutality is the nature of the CCP,” he said. The CCP holds this fear of violence over every Chinese person. Quitting the CCP means they are letting go of their fear of the CCP and renouncing the control the CCP has over their lives.
Tompkins said that quitting the Communist Party enables people to create a distance between themselves and the Party, so that they “begin to think critically of the CCP.”
“The movement of withdrawing from CCP is actually helping the Chinese people to realize their legal rights to choose,” said Peng Yongfeng a.k.a. Hugo Peng, who was a lawyer in China for four years where he handled more than 20 human rights cases, including Falun Gong practitioners. He has been in the United States since 2011.
Peng explained that when Falun Gong practitioners speak about the persecution in China, they are, like the many human rights lawyers, teaching and awakening Chinese citizens to their legal rights. The movement to sue Jiang is actually establishing “a path to the rule of law.”
“Suing Jiang is a profound and long-term awakening of the Chinese People,” Peng said.
Whether it is massive number of people renouncing the CCP or many people suing Jiang, the result will bring about the eventual demise of the Party.
“This number of complaints filed is just the tip of an iceberg, when the horrible crime of organ harvesting against Falun Gong practitioners is publically known, the real tsunami will arrive,” Peng predicted.
“These people who have quit the Chinese Communist Party are the hope for a new China,” Tompkins said.
Tompkins said that today, roughly 20 million volunteers spread the “Nine Commentaries” and collect statements of withdrawal from people, and register them on an online database in the United States.
Peng said that in addition to Falun Gong practitioners filing legal complaints, many other Chinese are also filing legal complaints against Jiang. There are cases, he said, of over 5,000 people signing the legal complaint.
Peng believes that the reason behind the large scale arrests of lawyers on July 9, 2015 was the deep-seated fear among those communist officials linked to Jiang faction, who became terrified by the huge number of legal complaints against Jiang and how these were actively being taken up by the lawyers.
Collecting Incriminating Evidence
Since its inception in Jan. 2003, the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) has been collecting names of the perpetrators of the persecution of Falun Gong and investigating and verifying the evidence. The intent is one day to hold trials and bring to justice the guilty.
Dr. Wang Zhiyuan, president of WOIPFG, said that they have a list of 9,500 doctors, who are suspected of involvement in organ harvesting, and another 49,100 individuals in national and domestic security or prosecutors in the justice system, who are suspected of being involved in the “illegal arrests, detention, torture, and persecution of Falun Gong practitioners.”
He said the WOIPFG wants “to get ready for the upcoming big historical trial.”
Wang said that publishing the lists of names has led many people to contact WOIPFG and pledge to stop committing crimes and expose others’ crimes as a way of redeeming their own crimes.
‘Alive When Extracted’
Charles Lee, M.D., spoke of the analysis by the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) of more than 300 medical research papers authored by the surgeons who did organ transplantations. The articles were about organ transplantations from mainland China from over 200 hospitals in 31 provinces and municipalities in China, mostly from years 2000 to 2012.
Dr. Lee said that 103 of these papers provided information on the number of organ “donors.” Summing the numbers up, these 103 studies represent 8,710 “donors.”
The research papers provided descriptions about the “donors,” such as age, sex, and cause of death. But Dr. Lee focused on one particular data item: the transplanted organ’s warm ischemia time.
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) defines warm ischemia time as the time the organ “remains at body temperature after its blood supply has been reduced or cut off but before it is cooled or reconnected to a blood supply.”
The warm ischemia time is critical to the success of a transplantation. The aim is always to get it as short as possible. “Organs with prolonged warm ischemia time are not transplantable,” states the WOIPFG website.
Generally speaking, warm ischemia time of organs harvested is reported to show how “fresh” they were, and it’s a figure that surgeons in China have been in a race to the bottom over. The papers describe the warm ischemia time to be less than 10 minutes, and in some cases just a few, or zero minutes. That is a remarkably short time, said Dr. Lee. One wonders what kind of death occurred for such a short warm ischemia time. Normally, “cadaveric donors,” and “no heart-beat donors” would have considerably longer warm ischemia times. It suggests that these were living donor transplants.
In 54 research papers for livers, all times were 10 minutes or less. In 42 research papers for kidney, the vast majority of papers report the warm ischemia times were under 10 minutes.
“Such fast organ removal can only be possible when the time and location of ‘donor’ death are predictable,” states the WOIPFG website. When is that? Executed prisoners have predictable times and locations. But the number of executed prisoners in China with transplantable organs is quite limited.
Dr. Lee and WOIPFG could only conclude that that there must be another group of “donors,” whose time and location of death are predictable, who out-number the executed prisoners, and whose organs are of high quality. The logical inference is that very large numbers of captive and healthy Falun Gong practitioners and, likely, other prisoners of conscience, were kept as living “donors.” From 2000 to 2008, in particular, huge numbers of Falun Gong practitioners were killed on demand for their organs.
One research paper described five liver transplants performed by Wuxi No.2 People’s Hospital in Jiangsu Province on Dec. 25, 2000, Jan. 30, 2002, March 13, 2002, Sept. 28, 2002 and March 24, 2003. The paper said that the 5 livers, from healthy young men, were from “fresh cadavers whose hearts just stopped beating.”
The warm ischemia time of the five livers was nearly zero. How is it possible that the warm ischemia time would be almost zero minutes? “The only explanation is that the healthy young men were alive when their livers were extracted,” states the report.
