Crime of Organ Harvesting in China Not Receiving Attention It Should, Expert Says

Paramilitary police officers march next to the entrance to the Forbidden City in Beijing on May 22, 2020. Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) record of gross human rights violations against its own citizens needs to be continually exposed, particularly its practice of forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, says Levi Browde, executive director of the Falun Dafa Information Center.

In an in-depth interview with Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, Browde describes the imprisonment, torture, and organ harvesting that practitioners of the spiritual discipline face inside China. He said there needs to be more awareness of these atrocities.

Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong, is a practice of five meditation exercises and spiritual teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. The practice has been severely persecuted by the Chinese regime for the past two decades.

China’s organ transplant system has been scrutinized in recent years, with a London-based independent people’s tribunal concluding in June 2019 that, “beyond reasonable doubt,” the CCP was targeting prisoners of conscience for their organs. The main source of organs was practitioners of Falun Gong.

“With a crime of the level of forced organ harvesting, that should be front page news again, and again, and again, until it stops—and it hasn’t been,” Browde said in the Aug. 18 podcast.

In a 160-page report released in March, the tribunal found “no evidence of the practice having been stopped” and said that the lack of international oversight has allowed “many people to die horribly and unnecessarily.”

Large numbers of practitioners are held in detention centers and prescreened for tissue type. When someone pays for an organ, the detainee is killed, said Browde.

“They extract the organ, they do the transplant,” he said, adding that the illegal, state-run organ industry involves billions of dollars.

As the CCP virus (commonly known as the novel coronavirus) ravaged China in the first half of the year, it was business as usual for China’s organ transplant industry, with no “obvious organ waiting time delays,” according to an investigation by U.S.-based nonprofit World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong. One nurse in the Guangxi region told the investigators that, despite fears of infection amid the pandemic, they will “do the surgery whenever there is one.”

Browde said the CCP’s persecution campaign against the practice was launched due to fears held by some Party leaders about the fact that there were more Falun Gong practitioners than there were Party members. In 1999, the year the persecution began in China, there were 100 million adherents of the practice—40 million more than CCP members at the time, said Browde.

“What unfolded over the next two decades was basically a systematic persecution characterized by widespread detention, imprisonment, torture, and many dying,” he said. “Conservative estimates say that ... several million people have been detained at some point during this campaign, let alone thrown into a labor camp or any kind of facility like that.”

News of this forced organ harvesting practice inside China is not known widely by Chinese citizens, due to the effectiveness of state-run media inside China, said Browde. The CCP also controls what information its citizens can access through its internet blockade, dubbed the Great Firewall.

Editor’s Note: To listen to the full interview with Browde, click here.