Before he kicked off the biggest political storm in recent Chinese communist history last February after attempting to defect at a U.S. Consulate in southwestern China, police chief Wang Lijun supervised the cutting of thousands of organs from the bodies of prisoners of conscience—while they were still alive.
Wang was merely a mid-ranking officer in a dark conspiracy that reached to the top of the Chinese Communist Party.
In Jinzhou City in Liaoning Province in northeastern China, Wang Lijun ran a research laboratory in the same building as the security bureau he headed. His research focused on live, human organ extraction and transplantation.
He was working under the watch of Bo Xilai, the recently disgraced official who was head of Liaoning Province when Wang began his research.
The facts about Wang were revealed in 2006 when, three years after becoming director of the public security bureau, he was given an award—but not one for fighting crime. Wang’s team had done pioneering research on how best to transplant organs taken from prisoners—who were possibly still alive when their organs were removed—and surgeons acting at his direction had honed new techniques over “thousands” of on-site trials.
“As we all know, the so-called ‘on the scene research’ is the result of several thousand intensive on-site transplants,” he said in his acceptance speech for the award.
He talked up his research: “For a veteran policeman, to see someone being executed and to see this person’s organs being transplanted to several other persons’ bodies, it was profoundly stirring.”
‘Still Alive’
Researchers of abusive human organ transplantation in China were startled by the revelations.
“The so called ‘research scene’ that Wang Lijun refers to is either an outright execution site with medical vans, or possibly a medical ward, where peoples’ organs are surgically removed,” said Ethan Gutmann, who has published extensively on organ harvesting from Chinese prisoners of conscience.
David Matas, an award-winning Canadian human rights lawyer who co-authored, with former Canadian Secretary of State David Kilgour, the 2006 ground-breaking report “Bloody Harvest” revised and published as a book in 2009) on organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners, said, “In effect they’re not killing by injection, but paralyzing by injection, and taking the organs out while the body is still alive,” referring to Wang’s operations.
When an organ is removed from a still-live body, it is fresher and rejection rates are lower. “It’s possible to source an organ immediately after the victim is brain dead, but much more complicated,” said Matas.
Most of the organs used in transplant operations in China come from prisoners of conscience. Matas has estimated that of the 10,000 transplantations done on average in recent years in China, the organs for 8,000 operations come from Falun Gong practitioners, 500 from other prisoners of conscience, 500 from voluntary donations from family members, and 1,000 from executed death row prisoners.
CQ Global Researcher, a leading global affairs journal, quotes Kilgour and Matas and Gutmann as independently estimating over 62,000 practitioners were killed for their organs in the period 2000–2008.
Bloody Hands
Wang is not the only one with bloody hands. Bo Xilai, along with his wife Gu Kailai, pioneered using detained Falun Gong practitioners for organ harvesting when Bo was governor of Liaoning Province (2000-2004), according to a source knowledgeable about the matter.
Former CCP leader Jiang Zemin made the atrocity possible. When he launched the persecution of Falun Gong, Jiang ordered that the practice should be “eradicated,” “no measures were too excessive” in dealing with Falun Gong, and “deaths would be counted as suicides,” according to Party officials who have defected. Jiang rewarded those, like Bo Xilai, who were especially brutal in their treatment of Falun Gong practitioners.
The organ harvesting is a nationwide operation in which hospitals and doctors work hand in glove with courts and security officers. This could only happen with the consent, if not the active encouragement, of the head of the regime’s security apparatus—Luo Gan from the beginning of the persecution in 1999 through 2002, and Zhou Yongkang from 2003 until this past November.
A series of other top-echelon officials associated with Jiang were also involved.
The hate propaganda spread against Falun Gong by Jiang’s faction was a piece to the puzzle, according to Kilgour and Matas. “The sale of organs from unwilling donors combines hatred with greed. A state policy of persecution is acted out in a financially profitable way,” they write in “Bloody Harvest.” “The incitement to hatred against prisoners and their dehumanization means that they can be butchered and killed without qualms by those who buy into this official hate propaganda.”
