Witness Exposes China’s Organ Harvesting | CLIP | China Insider

A witness of China's organ harvesting, a former gang member from Japan, tells the Epoch Times exclusively what he saw in a Chinese transplant hospital, the execution of prisoners of conscience for their organs, China's sudden boom in organ transplant. I speak with Ethan Gottman, a long-time investigator on China's organ harvesting against Falun Gong adherents, Uyghur Muslims and other religious groups, and his view of the methods and ways in which the Chinese regime is running this dark operation. This is Ushio Sugawara. He is a former Japanese criminal gang member. He says he was a witness of China's live organ trade, Sugawara having seen an anesthetized Falun Gong practitioner with tendons cut to stop him from running away. That was right before the man was placed on an operating table to have his liver carved out, in a booming organ transplant business in China. Now in an exclusive interview with the Epoch Times Japan, Sugawara recounts the memory from August 2007, when he, Ushio Sugawara, was still a member of the 6th Yamaguchi Gumi, and that is Japan's largest crime syndicate. After 2015, he left the organization, but the memory still haunts him. His friend's brother was desperate for a new liver. But with strict regulations, high cost, and long waiting times in the United States and France, which are two of the few countries offering liver transplant at the time, he turned to what appeared to be the only alternative, that was China. Around the same time in Beijing, the General Hospital of the Armed Police Forces, which is a state-run military hospital, had risen to become a national leader in liver transplant surgery. The man in need of a liver, now in touch with that Beijing hospital through what is called a middle man for organ tourism. Within a month, they had a suitable donor, telling the patient to fly over for surgery, quote, any time. Not only was the time frame shorter than in any other country, the price was around 30 million yen, which is roughly about $250,000, which is not even half the cost of what they'd been told in the United States and France. So where did Sugawara come in? Well, the patient's family found that the quality of the hospital's albumin, which is a protein produced by the liver that is infused during transplant surgery, wasn't up to par, and he helped them buy the solution in Japan to smuggle into Beijing, with the sanction of the Chinese hospital. Now, being the crime boss he was, the day before the scheduled surgery, Sugawara visited the patient and learned that the donor was just in the next room. He was then a Chinese doctor fluent in Japanese, told him, quote, would you like to have a look, drawing back the curtain to reveal a 21-year-old man. The man was unresponsive due to being anesthetized. Our Japanese boss Sugawara then asked in return, quote, what kind of a person is he? The doctor in response claimed the man to be a, quote, bad person and a death row prisoner. Sugawara realized that China used death row prisoners for organ harvesting. But wait a minute, only after Sugawara pressed for the identity of the 21-year-old donor did the doctor reveal it was in fact a member of the Falun Gong practice. And that's not a death row prisoner. The spiritual discipline Falun Gong, whose teachings are based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, was vastly popular in China in the 1990s but came under nationwide persecution under the Chinese Communist Party in 1999. In the decades since, millions of adherents have been arrested and subjected to various forms of abuse designed to decimate their faith. Concerns that the regime may have been harvesting organs for profit first surfaced in 2006. Multiple whistleblowers that year approached the Epoch Times offering testimony about the illicit practice. Ann, who is a pseudonym, had worked at a Chinese hospital in northeast China and said that her ex-husband, who was a brain surgeon at the same facility and other doctors, removed corneas and other organs from living Falun Gong practitioners before throwing the bodies into incinerators, sometimes while they were still alive. Sugawara recalls the surgery ultimately failed and the patient died, but not before the doctor told him, quote, they will have to die anyway, referring to the donor, so we should make good use of them. This begs the question, why did they have to die anyway? And what was the doctor referring to? Sugawara recalls landing in Beijing with the albumen the day before the surgery. And his hidden sample in the luggage was found by the authorities at the airport, yet a customs official came to stamp his passport as he was taken through a VIP immigration lane. He was then whisked away in a black luxury Lexus. What he calls, couldn't have done it without official participation. And this was one of the most shocking interviews I've ever come across. Since 2006, we've seen an increasing number of evidence on the fact that China is using organ transplants, which is a billion-dollar industry to fuel its persecution of prisoners of conscience, mainly Falun Gong and Uighur Muslims. Where one doctor, Damon Noto, calls, quote, the transplant itself becomes a form of execution. One such research paper this year came from two researchers, Dr. Jacob Levy from Israel and Matthew Robertson from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. The two were discovering in a paper titled, quote, Execution by Organ Procurement, Breaching the Dead Donor Rule in China. And it was here, quote, the dead donor rule is fundamental to transplant ethics. The rule states that organ procurement must not commence until the donor is both dead and formally pronounced so. And by the same token, that procurement of organs must not cause the death of the donor. In a separate area of medical practice, there has been intense controversy around the participation of physicians in the execution of capital prisoners, referring to likely death row prisoners. End quote. Now this is the case with China, where physicians, under direct orders from the Chinese regime's policing system, cooperating with the prison camps, sentence prisoners of conscience to death by the form of execution through organ harvesting. At the International Religious Freedom Summit, I spoke with Ethan Gutman, who is a long-time China watcher and human rights investigator, and the author of the shocking book The Slaughter, Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China's Secret Solution to its Dissident Problem. Where in the book he detailed extensive findings on Falun Gong practitioners facing the crime against humanity, and his latest research now includes another group facing persecution in China, and by extension also the horror of organ harvesting, which are the Uyghur Muslims. Ethan and I sit down to discuss his latest findings, numbers he estimates are of victims of organ harvesting, and the examples he told me that shocks me still. Here's our conversation. Ethan Gutman, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show today. Thanks, good to be here. What are some of the newest things or must-know things that our audience should know from your research? Well, to summarize what I'm going to be talking about, it's just there's a couple of pieces of strong evidence. A lot of doctors in the medical world in the West have wanted to kind of help China out in this area. China's trying to reform, they're trying to, they maybe did some terrible things in organ harvesting in the past, but that's the past, and let's look to the future. And this is understandable that they might want to do this. The problem is it doesn't match the reality. And the reality in a nutshell is that we have found a compound where you have a hospital with a labor camp built around it of 33,000 people incorporating this hospital into its heart. Within less than a kilometer away, you have another labor camp of 16,000 people and a crematorium. A 20-minute drive away, you have an airport with a green lane that is a human organ fast lane, export only, going out of Xinjiang, Aksu province. And we've even found the end user, at least one end user, which is a hospital near Shanghai, which is, you know, their kidneys went up 100% after this camp was built. Their liver transplants went up 200%. And in fact, they were the first hospital in China to perform a double lung transplant on a COVID patient.