WASHINGTON—A man who had part of his liver forcibly removed in communist China has stepped forward after escaping the country, drawing attention to Beijing’s mass killing-for-profit scheme known as forced organ harvesting.
Cheng Peiming, a Falun Gong practitioner turning 59 this month, in an Aug. 9 press event recalled six prison guards pinning him down in a Chinese hospital to administer anesthesia against his will while being held in a prison in northeastern China over his faith.
That day was Nov. 16, 2004. When he woke up three days later, he said, his right foot was shackled to a hospital bed. He had one arm receiving intravenous therapy and tubes on his feet, chest, and through his nose.
He began coughing non-stop and felt pain and numbness around his left rib.
Only after escaping to the United States in 2020 and taking a series of medical tests did he confirm his worst fears: part of his liver was gone, along with a portion of his lung. During his speech, he took off his shirt and revealed an approximately 14-inch-long scar around the left side of his chest.
To this day, his left arm and ribs ache on a rainy day or when he’s tired, he said.
At the event, the organizers shared three assessments from medical transplant doctors who said the missing organ parts from Cheng can only be a result of forced organ removal.
Cheng, mostly expressionless, at one point squeezed his eyes hard as tears fell.
“I’m just incredibly lucky to have survived,” he told The Epoch Times.
There’s a deeper significance to this beyond his personal survival: he is living proof of a wider pattern of state-sanctioned persecution and abuse.
“Most of the time people are dead, they can’t talk,” Robert Destro, a former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, who facilitated his rescue, told The Epoch Times.
The evidence of the systematic abuse first emerged two years after Cheng’s forced surgery, in 2006, with whistleblowers approaching The Epoch Times with accounts of the killing of detained Falun Gong practitioners taking place in secretive Chinese facilities.
It’s unclear why Cheng’s abusers only partially removed his organs and let him survive in 2004.
Wendy Rogers, advisory board chair of the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China, noted that such liver tissue could be used on a child patient, while David Matas, a human rights lawyer who has done extensive investigative research on the subject, suggests the hospital could be experimenting or training doctors for the craft—the initial step of a hospital “getting into the business” for massive profits, he told The Epoch Times.
The place of the incision is also unusual: instead of an abdominal cut typical in an organ transplant surgery, the doctors opted to make a cut between his ribs. The organizers of the press event noted such a move, while not common, allowed wider access to organs in both the chest and abdomen.
Regardless, the organizers and human rights advocates said the forced surgical procedures and lack of clarity around it all speaks to the brutality of the regime, and the need for an open and transparent investigation.
“Ultimately, the onus does not fall on Cheng to say what happened to him. The onus falls on the government of China,” Matas said at the event.
Cheng, sentenced to an eight-year term because of his faith, was at the Daqing Prison in Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang Province, at the time of the nonconsensual surgery.
He suffered shortness of breath over the following two years. In Feburary 2006, he began a hunger strike in protest of a new round of torture inflicted upon him, according to reports on Minghui.org, a website dedicated to tracking persecution accounts first hand. The prison administered intravenous drips and took him to Daqing Longnan Hospital on March 2, shackling him to a bedpost.
Weak, and watched by prison guards, Cheng heard guards talking to his sister, who had come to see him, Cheng told The Epoch Times. The guard claimed, falsely, that Cheng had ingested a knife blade and required a high-risk surgery. Later, a white-clad doctor came and pressed on his chest and abdomen, declaring they’d perform the surgery the next day.
Cheng thought that that would have been the end of him. But an opportunity availed itself. In the early hours of next morning, the two exhausted guards monitoring him fell asleep before putting shackles on him. He was then able to flee through a fire escape.
That was only days before Cheng read about the forced organ harvesting issue on Minghui.org. He “trembled all over” at the thought of what could have happened to him, he said during the interview. He dared not to take off his clothes to sleep for the next two months, just in case he had to flee.
Chinese police put out a bounty of 50,000 yuan, about $6,500 at the time, to hunt Cheng down. He lived in hiding until eventually escaping to Thailand in 2015.
Multiple human rights advocates also shared statements of support for Cheng.
Katrina Lantos Swett, president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice, commended Cheng’s courage to speak out. She said her organization had spoken to Cheng previously and she found his account “deeply disturbing.”
“They offer further evidence of the egregious human rights abuse happening in China in the form of forced organ harvesting,” she said. “This outrageous violation of fundamental rights continues despite the Chinese government’s claims to the contrary.”
Eric Patterson, the head of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, similarly said the case highlights the “urgent need to address medical atrocities carried out by the Chinese Communist Party.”
At the event, Cheng said he wasn’t speaking just for himself, but for the many who are still at risk of abuse in China.
He said that while detained, Cheng and several other fellow Falun Gong practitioners made each other a promise: whoever among them made it out alive would tell the world what happened there.
