Talking about the Chinese regime’s human rights abuse is no easy matter—even if you are in the West.
When human rights lawyer David Matas released an investigative report on forced organ harvesting and went around to give public talks, hosts who organized events featuring him canceled and booked venues suddenly became unavailable.
One clearest signal came through a direct threat from a Chinese police official. That man called in during a live Q&A session.
“Are you afraid of death? You are brutally interfering in our Party’s internal policies,” he said. “We'll take revenge against you, are you not afraid of that?”
Matas didn’t cave in; but the suppression campaign from the Chinese Communist Party didn’t stop.
From economic coercion to diplomatic pressure, Beijing has created fear in the free world, so that even a mention of it can invoke fear.
“Stop, stop, stop. No, no, no,” an executive from a major U.S. distributor said at the American Film Market in Santa Monica, California.
The scene, in late 2023, took place as film producer Cindy Song looking for distributor for the film “State Organs,” a documentary investigating the mysterious disappearance of two Falun Gong practitioners in their 20s suspected of becoming a victim of forced organ harvesting.
The executive told his staff member who mentioned to him about the film that they can’t do any film related to Falun Gong, or otherwise, “you can’t sell any of your films to China.”
The fear he expressed was hardly an isolated incident.
A Canadian copyright insurer around the same time also declined working with the film. “The subject is too contentious for our appetite,” they said in an email that The Epoch Times has viewed.
“We couldn’t get comfortable with the exposure. China has a lot of resources and won’t be afraid to protect their reputation.”
From Canada to United States to elsewhere, money seems to have worked to great effect to make people self censor.
“As long as you want to make money from China, you have to submit to their rules,” Ms. Song told The Epoch Times. “People check their speech even outside of China lest they offend the CCP. Then bit by bit, we all become silent enablers of its crimes.”
In the political realm, pressure has worked too.
In 2017, California state Sen. Joel Anderson tried 18 times to get a resolution condemning forced organ harvesting to a floor vote.
It didn’t happen.
The resolution had been gaining some support earlier. But just then, the Chinese consulate in Francisco began sending letters and making phone calls telling his colleagues that supporting the resolution “may deeply damage the cooperative relations between the State of California and China.”
“To think that California or any U.S. legislator would be influenced or intimidated by the Chinese government is scary,” he told The Epoch Times in a previous interview. “We should feel confident in our own country to call out atrocities when we see them.”
Surprising or not, silence has been the response across the medical community.
International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation, a leading international research group in the field, then began a boycott against academic papers from Chinese surgeons citing the possible complicity in the abuse.
“No single surgeon or doctor that I know of would say, yes, that a government orchestrating its medical system to kill innocent people is okay or justified in any way,” Dr. Weldon Gilcrease, a gastrointestinal cancer specialist at the University of Utah, told The Epoch Times.
“But the confrontation comes in because you’re dealing with one of the most powerful nations in the world, and you’re dealing with the Chinese Communist Party, which has had now decades to exert power and propaganda over its own people and the rest of the world.”
He has seen that at his own university: when he took the findings from the China Tribunal to the health authorities of his school, the officer he talked to declined to take action for fear that China will send its students to Texas instead of Utah.
In the latest incident that has puzzled him and others involved, American Transplant Congress declined an application from two organizations focused on the issue to have booths at its June conference.
The reason? They “have made the decision to move in another direction for 2024.”
From Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), lead sponsor of a bill that aims to sanction perpetrators of the abuse, the idea of possible censorship is “reprehensible.”
“It’s reprehensible and wholly unacceptable for any organization—especially the American Transplant Congress—to censor anyone trying to combat forced organ harvesting,” he told The Epoch Times. “Medical professionals must be made aware of the real and ongoing infiltration of forced organ harvesting into the modern day medical community.”
