CCP's Organ Harvesting: It Will Continue to Expand to More Groups Unless We Stop It | Ethan Gutmann

Hi Ethan, thank you so much for coming on to my program. Thank you, glad to be here. Okay, so Ethan, I'm really glad that we get a chance to talk to you while you're in Taiwan. You have done a lot of in-depth investigations on live organ harvesting in China and you published books and reports. So first, could you give us a 10,000 foot view of this issue and also tell us what is the current situation in China today? The last question is the hardest, which is to know the current situation. Almost all the research we do, if you like, even from the 10,000 point of view, it's got a time delay built into it almost. It's like we're looking at a star, that star could have exploded, things could have changed. Usually we're at least six months to a year behind on any information and that's true always because China, the Communist Party, is masters of deception and they're masters of keeping things out of the news and not letting witnesses go. So we have very little to go on. They don't put very much on the web on this. It's not even clear if there are materials to hack into it. So given that, here's the 10,000 point of view, which is in the 80s, the late 80s, China was harvesting organs from criminals on a very low scale. Around 1994, 1995, they start doing live organ harvesting and that occurs in Xinjiang, in several places, mainly near Urumqi. In 1997, there's the Gulja Massacre and that is followed by some, a small handful of Chinese Communist Party cadres coming to Urumqi and acquiring organs from political and religious prisoners. It's the first time it happens, but we're talking about a small group, maybe 12 people harvesting organs at that time. Very small. In 1999, as you know, and I'm sure a lot of your viewers know, the biggest persecution since the Cultural Revolution in China began, the persecution of Falun Gong. It took about two years, but then we suddenly start picking up cases. I've personally talked to witnesses who were examined for their organs around 2000, late 2000, and into 2001, it becomes widespread. Now, that is reflected in the hospital numbers. In other words, the hospital numbers start shooting up. There's this massive amount of transplants which are suddenly done. Initially, it's kidneys and then it's livers, and then it into lungs and heart over time, over a couple of years. And you're seeing this chart, a graph, that is just exponential rise, and that is because there's a lot of Falun Gong in the detention system. In fact, I would estimate that it's about half a million at any given time. At one point, it was about one and a half to two million in the early 90s. I'm sorry, in 2001, 2002, around there. That's when the crackdown reached its height. Now, what were they doing? Well, we do know something else about that. We know that they were going after fairly young people. In fact, 28, 29 years old appears to be the age that Chinese surgeons prefer to do live organ harvesting and strip the person of their organs and then sell them to Chinese citizens and also to citizens from around the world. So, desperate people come looking for organs and they go to China. This is not actually a big secret. It does not require brokers wearing trench coats like I'm wearing. The way they do it is usually through Google. Google has a translate function. The hospitals would advertise and you could easily make contact with those hospitals and set up appointments as long as you had the money. The more money you paid, the quicker you'd get the organ. Of course, the big tip-off to a lot of people who studied this is that they were advertising at about a two-week period turnaround for a rich organ tourist. That's impossible in any other part of the world. It's also impossible to make an appointment for a heart transplant unless you control the twilight zone. If you can create car accidents and the person will be pulled out of his fiery car and you could cut their heart out. Yeah, that's true. The other way that China was really doing it was they had a massive bank of people waiting, falling on, and they tested them and cross-matched them and tissue-typed them and they knew they could very easily select the right person. So, you've discovered a lot of those information or through your interviews with witnesses or people who had knowledge of that or people from the medical field. So, through all these investigations, that was the discovery about Falun Gong, the group of Falun Gong practitioners being organ harvested. And then later on, they move on to other groups like the Uyghurs, right? They go back to the Uyghurs and let me tell you, I only had a theory on that. In about 2013-2014, right around the time my book, The Slaughter, I was completing the book, a very strange thing happened that was reported in Ming Hui, a kind of practitioner, internal news and magazine that also discusses spiritual matters and so forth. In nine provinces, Falun Gong practitioners who were not in prison and were not detained were having police come to their houses, not even knock on their doors, break in basically and take blood samples and do DNA cheek swabs from these practitioners. Now, at first when I heard this, I thought this has got to be a scare tactic or something. It was not a scare tactic. They were running out of 28-29 year old Falun Gong at that point. Now, that's 2013-2014. In 2015, they start doing health checks on every Uyghur in Xinjiang, every single one. Anybody above the age of 12 was required to get a health check. Not Han Chinese, only Uyghurs, okay? And other Turkic ethnic groups. These tests were basically blood tests and DNA tests. In fact, Dermot Fisher supplied the DNA kits to an American company. And we're looking into that now. This was for tissue typing and cross-matching, in my opinion. It was also for surveillance. I think it had other purposes as well. But in this case, that wrapped up in around 2016. What happens at the end of 2016? The camps, huge camps get built in Xinjiang. Lots of you have seen pictures of these. It's like watching a mushroom build very quickly over time. We estimate that at least a million people are or were in those camps, and probably at least about a half a million now. Maybe there's still a million. A lot of them have been converted to prisons or basically just factories where people work and live, and they're really under detention. Now, that group—and this is what the thrust of my investigation has been for the last couple of years—China has learned to not let witnesses out. During the Falun Gong era, some Falun Gong got out. In fact, it was in the thousands over the world. I would go and interview them, and it wasn't that hard. I could go to Hong Kong. I could go to Taiwan. One of my researchers went to Dharamsala, Jaya Gibson. A lot of people went to Canada, and I interviewed a lot of them there. A lot of people went to America. I interviewed them in the West Coast. That all stopped. There are only about 10 real witnesses who have come out of the camps, the Xinjiang camps, in the West right now. The rest are mostly hiding out in Kazakhstan. So I had to go to Kazakhstan, and I had to go incognito because if I was recognized at the border, they probably wouldn't have let me in, or they would have put a tail on me. Then it gets your witnesses in trouble. I wasn't personally worried about getting thrown in jail for a night or two. That's great material for my book. But it is unfair to put somebody—I mean, they will kill a witness at this point. China will detain them, and then they will be deported back to Xinjiang. They will be tortured and killed in the camps, and maybe their entire family will. So I could not put people in that danger. I went in without using a computer at all. I used a map and a compass and drove from Germany all the way to Almaty. While I was there in Almaty for a couple of months, I interviewed people. What I found was something almost predictable in a way. Two and a half to five percent of people who are at age 28 or 29—right in that age, 27, maybe 30, but right in that area—those people disappear over the course of a year, and they disappear at a rate of about 2.5 to 5 percent. In other words, Uyghurs disappear in the middle of the night, are never seen again, of this age group after blood testing. They are selected, they disappear, and they're gone. Those people are being harvested for their organs. This is a number that is absolutely consistent with the findings of transplant volume in China, which requires at least about 35,000 people to be stripped of their organs a year. And that's one group, right? That's the group at 28, 29, 30. Yeah, it's 28, 29, right in there. In many cases, I could not find any other explanation. I looked for that. I would ask people, I'd say, well, these women who disappeared, were they attractive? I'm trying to see if they were maybe used for sexual slavery or something like that. So you have to look into these questions. I said, this is a very rude question. I'm sorry to ask it. And one of the women came back and said, I'm sorry, this is something rude to say too, but these women were not attractive. And I said, well, what could they have in common with anything? And she said they were healthy. That's what's so disturbing here. We are seeing the same signs we saw with Bolivar. And the only difference is it's very systematic now. Everybody I interviewed was from a different camp, every single one. And yet the stories were so consistent from place to place. So it's obviously a very tightly run ship now. Is it both women and men? Yes, both women and men. Yes. And at the prime of their life, at 28, 29 years old, this is when your organs are in perfect health. This is when your mind is in perfect health. It's also a way of getting rid of the people who potentially would form the backbone of an independent Xinjiang or something like that, would be strong credits in the Uyghur community. But they're gone. And that population has been wiped out, as far as I can tell, or is being wiped out during this period. I don't think it necessarily ends there. I think it's important to say that they will run out of Uyghurs at that age, at the age they like. And at some point, they're going to shift into some new populations. The Tibetans are obvious. We know the Tibetans have been harvested in the past, but we could certainly imagine them doing that again. But there's also Hong Kong. There is also Taiwan. I don't think, as long as there's huge money to be made here, and this is state-sponsored, China is a surveillance state. The Communist Party knows fully well what's going on here, and they are magging their beak. They are making money off this. I don't think that's going to change. I don't think it's just the money. I think this is a way to destroy enemies. So those two things go together. Sometimes Westerners have a very hard time understanding this. As somebody who lived in China, I have an understanding that there's often a very practical nature to the way the Chinese Communist Party works, that they will do two things at once. They will make money, and they will also get rid of enemies. It's perfectly possible to do both. I think what you just raised is a very important and very good point, is that it doesn't stop there. And actually, that leads to my next question, which is, in recent years, there are more and more cases about missing teenagers and college students in China. Now, people suspect, and a lot of them are afraid, that these young people became the victims of live organ harvesting, whether those are true or not. But do you believe that this organ harvesting practice has been extended to the general public in China? I believe it has on the edges, but I don't want to get away from the main point. I don't think these numbers are very significant. Now, there are missing children in Xinjiang, in the Uyghur population. Many people mentioned this to me. And it is possible. Certainly, we know that there was this recent case of a hospital advertiser bragging about the fact that they did three heart transplants. They don't give exactly the age of the children, I believe, but it's the school of the children. And they did three heart transplants. They must have gotten the hearts from somewhere. And they don't explain really where and how you could do it on a single day. So I think that is a significant change and a broadening of the problem. But I also think that it could be kind of a setup. You see, the Chinese Communist Party has been very clever in the past and sort of saying, well, there is some problems in organ harvesting going on. And they're done by organized crime. And then they go and arrest a few people. And there's sort of this flashy stories. And the West buys into that. Reuters reports it. Oh, well, China's solving its organ harvesting problem and so forth. We really have to be aware of this. The children are very small numbers. However, there is one last piece of evidence I'd like to put on the table, which leads me to say it's possible. I have been following the purchase of ECMO machines. ECMO machines are basically a way of oxygenating the organs. And it can be used when you're live organ harvesting somebody. You can preserve the organ. You take out one organ at a time. Take your time. Don't worry about it. Basically, the organ is going to be very fresh. And then you can put it on a plane and jet it off to whoever you need at the right hospital. So it solves a lot of problems. Those ECMO machines, up until 2019, a significant portion of them, about 25 percent, were being sold to children's hospitals in China. My assumption was they're doing that because they kind of want to cover this up. In other words, this is a children's hospital that's set up with an established transplant hospital. There were several cases. I know these. I actually know their names. I've studied them long enough that I can pick them out. And I just go, well, that's that hospital. And they're buying it for the children's hospital, but they'll just move it to another building. Maybe not. Maybe not. What we do know is that in 2019, in June of 2019, they stopped buying ECMO machines from Germany, portable ECMO machines, and started buying ventilators. What's up with that? Maybe that's when COVID really started, June 2019. Some people have suspected that for a long time. We have no proof. What we have is questions, a lot of questions. And of course, I appreciate you bringing this topic up because it has to be explored. And I caution against falling into this idea that the entire Chinese population is being harvested. I don't think they are. I think China reserves this for special groups that it hates. Okay, sorry, the CCP reserves this for special groups which it hates and holds in contempt. In the case of the Uyghurs, I believe that if China invaded Taiwan, they have set up nine crematoriums in Xinjiang. They're huge volume crematoriums. I believe the Uyghurs would probably just be wiped out under the fog of war. That is my concern. Now, as long as China doesn't go to war in Taiwan, and as long as international attention stays on this, I think that we may save these people from complete, we may save them from death. They don't have very good lives. Could you tell us a little bit about how did you know about the persecution of Falun Gong, and how did you get involved in discovering the truth about organ harvesting? I saw the persecution of Falun Gong firsthand. I was in Beijing. I was working with an adjunct to Beijing television, actually, at the time. They hired me as a producer. The day of the crackdown was very upsetting because everybody suddenly had to start watching television. They reported that Falun Gong was basically illegal. One of the girls started crying and said, this is like the Cultural Revolution all over again. Over time, I recognized while I was in China that Falun Gong was the central issue in China at that time. The stuff that was being written about it was just trash and not very good. Even Danny Schechter, who was a friend of mine before he passed away, just wrote a very legal book. It was very bloodless and so forth. I felt that somebody had to go out and interview these people and get to know them. I considered that. I'd already written a book on China, so I decided to write a new one. Then I went around the world. Me and Lishai Lamesh, who was my fixer and translator—he's an Israeli Falun Gong. It's an incredible combination. I recommend it to anyone. We went around and I interviewed people all across the world. I spent seven years working on that book because I wanted to get it right. It was very important to me. I understood that Bloody Harvest was already out there. I wasn't coming out with conclusions that were that different than Bloody Harvest. My numbers were a little different, obviously. But my method was completely witness-based because I feel that witnesses are as rare as snow leopards. They're valuable and you have to listen very carefully to them. Sometimes you have to interview them for 12 hours to get through, especially people who've been exposed to camps and prisons. They're very damaged in some respects. It's very hard for them to plan events and talk about their stories in a coherent way. Often they tell the story backwards, for example, instead of forwards. So I believe in that. Now, the difference back then, when I was doing the Falun Gong story—and I will continue to do Falun Gong stories, I'm not moved away from it—but I have to follow organ harvesting because very few reporters can do the story effectively. It's a very complicated story. They don't have enough as a leash from their networks and so forth. I think a lot of people don't have the ability or even the financial—it costs a lot of money. You have to do a lot of traveling. You have to go out and find these people. You can sit there and you can do amazing things on the computer. Matt Robertson and Jacob Levy have proved that. They did an amazing report showing that the voluntary donations in China are a made-up number. Essentially, it's a chart, a graph that seems to be going up, but it's based on an equation. It's not real numbers. They also showed that up until 2015, the doctors in China were blatantly talking about live organ harvesting. I think this is all great research and very important, but you can't do it without witnesses. You certainly can't answer that question of what's going on there today or even last year without talking to witnesses. Therefore, you have to follow the witnesses. You have to follow where the main event is taking place. Right now, the main event is taking place in Xinjiang. That may change. I think I saw it somewhere that you said when you initially interviewed some Falun Gong practitioners, you weren't interviewing them for the purpose of discovering organ harvesting. You were just doing a general interview with them. Maybe it was when you were working on the Falun Gong story. Then you found out things related to organ harvesting. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. I actually was interviewing. I had not planned to make my book about organ harvesting at all. It was really supposed to be just the first fair and balanced treatment of the conflict between the Chinese state and Falun Gong. Nobody had written that history, and I thought it was about time to do it. But along the way, there was this old woman who had been not all that old—she was in her 50s, I guess—and she'd obviously been tested for organs. She wasn't interested in talking about it. She didn't see the point. She never once mentioned it. She just said, oh, they did this examination, and I kept pulling her back to it. She got angry at me, like, why are we talking about this? I'm telling you about torture. I'm telling you about my spiritual development, and you want to talk about this examination, this silly examination. Who cares about that? That's red meat to a journalist. Why did you keep pulling her back? Why did you feel it's important? Because I sensed, I knew what was going on when she described the examination. The giveaway was that they were looking at her eyes very closely, so they were shining a light in her eyes, and they did that for about five minutes in both eyes. They did not do a vision test. They weren't interested in her vision at all. They were simply interested in the health of the corneas, which you can sell. They're about $30,000 each. They had no concern over her brain function. They were simply looking for the health of something they could sell. I think she's lucky that she didn't live. I don't know quite why that happened. Probably her other organs were not in such great shape or something like that. Eventually, she got released from the camp, and she's alive today, I believe. But a few of my witnesses did die after my book came out. One of them is a beautiful lady. I'm glad I saw her before she died. But the point is, so I actually even do that sometimes to go back and visit witnesses later. But I think the important point is to, you know, you can't find these things out without that kind of witness or the kind of thing that really proves it to me. And that made me change my investigative style. I continued to ask about everything else, because I did not want to leave the witnesses. I think this is very important. I didn't want people telling me a story. I didn't want people saying, Oh, yes, I saw organ harvesting or anything like that. They're telling me a story because they thought it would further the cause. I wanted people telling me their personal story. And if the exams came up, I mean, if it didn't come up at all, I might ask them at the very, very end of the interview about this kind of thing. But I never pushed it. I don't believe in push interviews. And that's why I can stand behind my work. That's why I can stand by pretty much every word I've written in my books. I really do. So I think it's very important to have somebody out there doing that kind of work. Very few people are doing this kind of investigative work at this point. It's because it's become very expensive and very hard. Why do you keep doing it? Well, I resist. Because I think for history, it is the worst thing in the world to have a people destroyed and nobody knows about it. This is the most terrifying thing of all. I'm half Jewish. What if the Holocaust had never been reported? What if the Jews of Europe had disappeared without a trace? That would be the worst thing. So it's very important. History is important. And what's going on now today is important. And you're obviously going to get a lot more clicks and likes when you put something out about just today, what's happening with a balloon in the sky or something. But the point is, the long term, and this is why I still believe in books too, is because books last. I am going to Japan for a book tour of the August this year. And I'm going to Japan for a book tour in early March. I'll come back here. This Slaughter came out here in 2018. But I'm working on a new book. I hope to get it out by the end of at least by the end of 2023. I'm a very slow writer. But there it is. Do you run into dangers or difficulties when you go around the world doing all these dangerous interviews? Yes, especially in Central Asia. In Kazakhstan, I was threatened by the police several times. They were going to take me down the station, take away my passport, things like that. Once I actually misrepresented myself. Well, I didn't misrepresent myself. I just pulled out a card of a friend of mine at the consulate. And when they saw the eagle on the card, that American eagle, the supervisor who was drunkenly lying in the back seat suddenly got up and went, get him out of the car immediately. Because they assumed it was me. Having said that, there were some risks I took on that trip, which I would never take again, carrying actual sensitive material with me. Now what I do is basically get the sensitive material, put it in a very safe corner of the web and delete it immediately. So I've started to use computers that way. Initially, I wasn't using computers at all, but I was carrying some sensitive material. So have the CCP government given you any trouble? Oh, well, yes. I mean, for example, when I arrived in Tajikistan, an article came out. The second day I was there, it came out actually really the first day I was there, and suddenly it was published. The second morning in Tajikistan, I wake up and you know how you have an email that says, oh, you're mentioned in some article, right? Google search it. So it comes up in your email and I say, oh, okay, I wonder what article. Then it's like this Chinese Communist Party English language paper, and it had me and Adrian Zenz. It said we're the two most dangerous and worst cold warriors in the business today. We're doing these terrible things. Now, Adrian Zenz is used to getting that all the time. He's the one who studies the leaders. He's done amazing work and has come up with that. He gets mentioned all the time. It's constant. He gets attacked all the time by the Chinese Communist Party. But the Chinese Communist Party basically doesn't mention him very often. All of a sudden, here I was with him in this article. It said he's currently working on a book based on his Central Asian witnesses. Basically, it was saying he's in Central Asia right now. Detain him and arrest him. Arrest him, detain him, and then throw him out of the country. It was saying that to the That was a very disturbing morning. I got together with my fixer. We were very close, and I said, get us out of this hotel. Get us into an apartment somewhere in Tajikistan. We've got to do this today. Just put everything into it. That's what happened. He got us out of our hotel, got us into an apartment. We didn't have to sign anything, no names. That's the deal. After a while, after getting very, very drunk with the Central police, maybe the most important policeman in Tajikistan, they decided I wasn't a bad guy and let me go. They stopped following me. That's a story in and of itself. I wish I could tell you where I had somebody going after me with a gun or something like that. That would be great. But actually, the truth is I never really wanted that because I don't want my witnesses getting in trouble. They need to protect their identities above all. I've interviewed people who've been tortured severely. I've interviewed women who've been raped many, many times. One recent interview, I interviewed her for a couple of days. I can't live with that in my conscience that I caused that, that I left an unclean table. It is my job to do these interviews. You have to put some faith in me that I'm not making things up, that I have the recordings, and if necessary, they can listen to the recordings. This is the best I can do. I'm not putting the recordings on the web and that kind of thing because the voice recognition in China is second to none these days. You remind me of a journalist I interviewed recently. He's also a journalist in China and he fled to the U.S. last year. He went to this rural place to find out the truth about the chained woman. I don't know if you have heard about the chained woman, mother of eight children, back a couple of years ago. That was a case that everybody was talking about in China. He went to the place to find out, to the rural place, to discover about the truth and the police chased after him. He's doing the same thing. He's going to different places to talk to people. It's a dangerous work, but it's so important, so valuable. What has made it so dangerous now is that China's influence over Central Asia is so strong. That's the problem. The Belt and Road Initiative comes with huge... The long arm of China has extended so far. These countries have taken money and they're very afraid to offend the Chinese. They would rather just get you out of the country or arrest you or arrest anybody who's a problem. There is no way to do this kind of thing without risk. I respect people who can do it in China. I can't go into China. I would simply get people killed if I did. I'm not going to do any grandstanding like that. I don't think you should go to China. Let me ask you this one last question. I'm sure you've been asked many times. What should the world do? This organ harvesting is still going on in China today. It's been going on for so many years. What should the world do? I want to say that if you'd asked me that a year ago, I would not have a good answer. Now I do. Something has changed in the medical world. The medical world used to be the big problem. The medical world tried to make a separate deal with China, particularly the transplantation society. The most revered society of transplant surgeons in the world tried to make a deal. China said they'd reform. China said, don't talk about polyglot, don't talk about Uyghurs, and we'll reform. Well, that didn't happen. I can prove that. But fortunately, there's been a rebellion within the transplant world. It started with the heart and lung transplantation, the heart and lung transplant doctors in America, and maybe in the world, who have suddenly said Chinese transplant surgeons cannot publish in our journal anymore. Now I'll be addressing their conference in late April in Denver, Colorado. I'm really looking forward to that. It's an amazing change, amazing shift. In this case, I think something has happened in the medical world that a lot of the credit goes to an Israeli doctor named Jacob Levy, who is the son of two parents who were in the Holocaust. His moral authority is so powerful, and he has never let up on this issue. He knows it's true because he had patients, at least one patient, who he knew was going to China for a heart transplant, probably from polyglot. Probably that's what the argument is coming from. So this is a real shift. In fact, this is not the time to give up. But I'd like to see the Uyghurs make this more of a central issue. I can't tell them how to run their own affairs. They're dealing with a lot of fires and a lot of terrible things are happening to Uyghurs and the Kazakhs in China. But I think it's very important not to let up, and I think it's very important also for Falun Gong. There are a lot of Falun Gong activists. I wish they'd recognize that talking about Uyghur organ transplantation is a way for people to deal with what happened and is still happening in some respects to Falun Gong and organ harvesting. They should pay attention to this issue. They should put stuff out there on it. I'm sorry that David Kilgore can't join us. He passed away and he was a close friend. But we still have David Matis. We still have me. We still have Matt Robertson. We have some terrific people working on this issue. We've been doing it for a long time. We've dedicated their lives at this point to it. And I have. I will. I'm not going to let go of it. I thought about letting go of it, but I decided to come back because it's too important. It's not solved yet. And even when it is solved, we'll have to go back and the Chinese people will have to go back and examine the bones and the ashes. That's right. So these are too important to let go or to give up on. So thank you so much, Ethan, for sharing all these with us. I think we need to have more journalists like you doing this type of work. There's a lot of people who put money into my investigation. I want to thank them. I don't want to get into the names right now, but that's coming. Believe me, I write very nice acknowledgments. This is a group effort. This is a group effort. It always will be. No person can do it alone. And that includes you, Jenny. So thank you very much for the interview. Great. Great talking to you.