Chinese Professor Disappears From Social Media After Video of Him Discussing Organ Theft Surfaces Online

Falun Gong practitioners re-enact illegal payment for human organs in Washington on April 19, 2016. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

A Chinese criminal law professor’s social media account was recently scrubbed after a video surfaced of him speaking about the crime of organ theft in the country.

Luo Xiang, who has over 2.5 million followers on China’s Twitter-like Weibo, is a professor at the School of Criminal Justice at the state-run China University of Political Science and Law.

Luo’s remarks on organ theft appeared in an undated video, which began circulating on China’s social media on June 26.

On the same day, all his social media posts were found to have been deleted.

It is unclear whether he deleted the posts himself or whether the posts were deleted by China’s censors. But his comments hit on a sensitive topic for the Chinese regime: organ harvesting.

While Luo’s remarks were directed to criminals conducting illegal organ harvesting, the practice is also carried out on a much broader scale at the direction of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). State-sanctioned organ harvesting from live prisoners of conscience has been occurring for years in China and continues to this day.

A screengrab of legal academic Luo Xiang talking about organ theft in an undated video, which began circulating on China’s social media on June 26. Screengrab/YouMaker

In the video, Luo spoke about criminals running illegal organ harvesting operations in the country. They would abduct mentally unsound homeless people and house them in remote areas, he said. At these locations, the victims would be well-fed but treated no different than animals.

These victims were then forced to sell their blood or donate an organ on a scheduled date, according to Luo. He added that these acts constituted either a crime of intentional injury or intentional homicide.

“If social Darwinism reaches its limit, and if you don’t really respect others, you would treat other people like animals,” Luo said in the video.

“So in this era of ‘involution,’ we must do something ourselves, which is to resist social Darwinism instinctively, because we are humans, we are not just animals,” he said.

“Involution” is a buzzword being used among China’s youth over the past year. It refers to how people feel hopeless and trapped in society with no sign of making any advancement, such as people holding dead-end blue-collar jobs or students seeing few opportunities for their futures regardless of how hard they work.

Previous Crimes

The death of a homeless man made headlines in September 2009, when China’s state-run magazine Caijing reported that he was found dead at a dam with his organs harvested. Before his death, he was seen by locals in southwest China’s Guizhou Province getting a haircut and having his beard trimmed. It was also noted that he had put on clean clothes. Soon afterward, he disappeared.

Caijing reported that three doctors from the Third Affiliated Hospital of China’s Sun Yat-sen University were implicated in harvesting the vagrant’s organs after one of the doctors got in contact with an organ trafficker in Guizhou.

Further details of the case are not known as Chinese media and social media stopped their coverage of the death soon after Caijing’s report. Nevertheless, the Third Affiliated Hospital has since been singled out for harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners, according to U.S.-based nonprofit the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG).

Chinese doctors carry fresh organs for transplant at a hospital in Henan Province on Aug. 16, 2012. Screenshot/Sohu.com

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline involving meditative exercises and a set of moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Since 1999, the discipline has been heavily suppressed by the CCP, as millions of adherents have been detained or imprisoned where they are tortured and killed—sometimes as a result of being subjected to forced organ harvesting.

In 2006, a Chinese doctor from China’s Guangxi Ethnic Hospital told an undercover WOIPFG investigator on the phone that organs from Falun Gong practitioners were available for transplantation at the Third Affiliated Hospital.

WOIPFG has also documented that large numbers of transplant surgeries were carried out at the Third Affiliated Hospital over the years, and as recently as 2019, when a nurse at the hospital’s liver transplantation ward said hundreds of transplant cases were done.

In 2019, an independent people’s tribunal found that “forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale,” with detained Falun Gong practitioners being one of the main sources of organs.