The Bloody Harvest: China's Forced Organ Harvesting Through First Hand Accounts

This man is crying because he witnessed China's forced organ harvesting first hand, an ongoing crime against humanity. Today, we will dive into how the CCP uses prisoners of conscience and ethnic minorities as a source of organ supply. Welcome to China Insider, I'm David Zhang. To get a kidney transplant in the United States, it could take up to 3-5 years, but in China, in just two weeks, you could get a surgery done. How is that possible? Because of the nature of this topic, we don't want to draw YouTube's community violation strike, so we'll be putting the full video on Ganjing World, and you can click the link in the description or the comment or in this card here to watch it. This man is Zheng Zhi, a former surgeon who did his practicum at a top military hospital in northern eastern China, and he witnessed first hand the case of a young soldier having his organs removed while he was still alive, back in 1994. And since that experience, he has decided to survive until he can get out of China, and after he moved to Canada, he began searching for a news organization to reveal what he witnessed. In 2015, he gave an anonymous tip to the Epoch Times Chinese edition, and then this year, he went public to tell further about his own story. For more detail, I'll leave that in the second half of the video. Now, a growing body of evidence has indicated that China's hospitals are working with the police in a nefarious scheme known as organ harvesting, and their main source of organ supply comes from prisoners of conscience, and against the will of the victims, their organs are harvested and their bodies are cremated. The vast majority of the prisoners of conscience targeted in this manner are believed to be Falun Gong practitioners, possibly running into the tens of thousands annually, and according to an estimate by Ethan Gutman, an investigative journalist, David Mattis, an international human rights lawyer, and the late David Kelgore, a former Canadian member of parliament, they published their findings in the 2016 Bloody Harvest. We'll be basing a lot of the evidence findings from this paper. In recent years, the Uyghur population in particular has also been subjected to forced organ harvesting while they're being kept in the concentration camps in Xinjiang. And prior to 2013, China didn't officially have an organ donation system. Yet, since 1999, its yearly organ transplants reached 10 to 20 thousand, according to official reports, each year. To give you a scale for comparison, if the US, with more than 145 million people registered as organ donors, at least in 2017, they were able to perform 35 thousand transplants, how could China, in the same time, 2017, with only 260 thousand registered organ donors, perform 17 thousand transplants? China, that means at the time, had only 0.18% of America's organ donors, yet it performed half of what the United States was able to do in the same year. How is this all being done? The conclusion of many experts suggests the following. The Chinese Communist Party has engaged in the crime of forced organ harvesting as a business, a method of execution, and as a way to punish its religious and ethnic population. Forced organ harvesting is not only a lucrative business, it's also a perfect political weapon against certain groups in the Chinese diaspora. We'll first dive into how this all started, and then provide some evidence, although most of it you can argue is circumstantial. They, however, in fact, provide very much a conclusive understanding to where things are at the moment in China, and why organ harvesting is taking place on a large scale. To go back to the earlier days, there's been evidence of forced organ harvesting at least into the 90s. One Canadian doctor wrote in 1992 that executed prisoners were supposed to be the source of organ supply. Now, in the case of Zheng Zhi, he witnessed perhaps one of the earlier cases of organ harvesting committed by the regime. In 1994, he was part of a team that got a phone call from somewhere up above to get ready to carry out a special operation. And in two identical vans, they were taken to a remote building. That building was guarded by armed soldiers. That night, a young soldier was strapped to the bed. The team of six, including Zheng Zhi, then performed organ removal with armed guards outside. Zheng Zhi found that the man's body temperature was hot, and his neck wound had red blood flowing out. That meant that he was still alive. At this point, the operation already began, and the head surgeon started to operate by slicing open his stomach, and pushed past the intestines to quickly remove a kidney, and then the other one. The head nurse swiftly placed both kidneys in a temperature-controlled box. Next, Zheng got the order to extract the man's eyes, but he was too sickened to do so. Another doctor swiftly carried out the procedure instead. The now motionless body was then placed in a black plastic bag and carried away by soldiers. While this man was still lying there on the operating table, his legs were twitching, and his throat was moving, but he wasn't able to make a sound. Zheng Zhi says that the victim was looking at him, and he had a pair of very horribly looking and unutterable eyes, looking directly at Zheng Zhi. In his words, it was horror, horror that could not be expressed in words. And he says that he was looking at Zheng Zhi, his eyes were still moving, he was clearly alive. Now, after the deed was done, the team then moved on to deliver the organs back to the hospital, and the nurses quickly cleaned up all the operational equipment like gloves, scalpels, scrubs, and so on, and then that same van took them back along with the organs in containers. Then, a team at that hospital was already set up with an operating room ready to transplant the organs onto a patient lying on the bed. And that was the story. Now, this may seem like it's just a one-off, but I'd rather think it's not. A similar story happened with Enver Tohti, an oncology surgeon working in Xinjiang. That was one year after the incident with Zheng Zhi, in 1995. Now, in his words, Enver says that, quote, as I started my insertion to expose the internal organs, blood could be seen, implying that his heart was still pumping blood, and that he was still alive. Now, Enver found himself unexpectedly also recruited for a special assignment, particularly an order from above, just like Zheng Zhi. Now, he would then be made to remove the liver and kidneys from a man which allegedly was gunned down, but still breathing. But he was forbidden from ever talking about what they had done at the time, until he was saved to do so while out here in the West. Now, what we understand from these stories, and so much more now about the organ harvesting situation in China, it seems that there was a plan in the making to make that country, set up a system in which it is a nationwide operation to profit off of this, and this coincided with the development which we're going to talk about now. Right, what is the scale of this whole organ harvesting operation? Now, to this day, the CCP still maintains that death row prisoners are the main sources of organs for transplants, but it doesn't really explain Zheng Zhi's experience, which is that a PLA soldier was killed. It also raises a very important question. That man was killed at a precise time and date, aligned with a transplant operation, which meant that his organs were targeted for the right organ to match with the recipient, and then he was slaughtered on that particular time for the organ transplantation, which this may make sense in terms of the scale, right, prior to 1999, which I'll talk about why. Most cases after 1999, because of the sheer volumes of transplant that was taking place in China, which the officials claim to be about 10,000 to 20,000, and the skyrocketing number of transplant hospitals, the numbers don't match anymore. You see, China doesn't officially publish data on how many prisoners they execute each year. This was true back then, it's still true today. It's considered a state secret. But from various reports estimating that number, it could start in the low thousands to be as high as the 10,000s. And that's where things get really interesting. For example, China against the death penalty estimated that at least 12,000 people were executed each year. And that was based on estimates in 2007. Now, if we say that the official state figure says that 10,000 transplants took place each year, the numbers still don't match up. Why? Well, it's very simple, because that not every organ that's being donated will match with every recipient, meaning that every executed prisoner doesn't mean they will match with a donor. So for an organ transplant to be successful, you need at least two factors to be achieved. In most cases, the first is a blood type match, and the second is a tissue type match, which means that for a donor to get a matched organ with a recipient, they would have to take more than just a one-to-one. So for many, it could mean that for a single organ transplant, they might have to go through three to four donors, if not more, before they can find a suitable match. And in some cases, for example, like the kidney, the ratio to match could be higher. So for one organ, it could be one in two, one in three, if you're lucky. But for some other organs, it's a 10-to-1 ratio to match. So for every 10 donor, you might have one suitable recipient, or one recipient, you need 10 donors, vice versa. By that estimate, China would have to execute 40,000 to 50,000 people yearly. But then if we use that 10-to-1 ratio for other organs, it could be as many as 100,000 or even 200,000. And there's also plenty of other issues to consider. An organ donation requires a healthy organ, but that's not always the case with death row prisoners. There was also a widespread hepatitis B in the prison system still to this day. And there's a seven-day rule of execution, which means that from the sentencing to carrying out the death row sentence, it has to be done within the seven days. So you can't ensure that always you have the death row prisoner ready to be harvested for their organs. And then how can China's rising number of transplants and transplant hospitals sustain its operations purely based on organs from executed prisoners? If they were to sustain a yearly figure of 10,000 to 20,000 transplants, like I said, at any given time, they would need to have an organ pool of 100,000 to 200,000 death row prisoners each year, which by any estimate doesn't go that high. Now, according to investigations by David Mattis and the late David Kelgore, as well as Ethan Gutman, their assessment showed that to achieve that 10,000 figure, it actually only takes a few hospitals. So their estimate placed the actual number of transplants performed yearly in China closer to 60,000 to 100,000 since 2000. How many people were being killed for this? Well, the CCP turned forced organ harvesting against religious groups. Since 1999, China's rising transplant industry coincided with the beginning of the persecution of Falun Gong, which started on July 20th, 1999. Of course, many practitioners were illegally detained and illegally sentenced to prison. And Falun Gong practitioners were branded as evil people, so it gave the excuse for the state to persecute them. And so the adherents of Falun Gong received great health benefits because they simply don't drink or smoke, and they do physical exercises and meditation, so their organs were very healthy. Once the group's practitioners were sentenced to prison, they were blood tested regularly. Most recently, Ethan Gutman also told me that the concentration camps being built out of Xinjiang even have crematoriums attached to the camp, where the nearby smell in the air is it smells like burning flesh. So that's where ethnic Uyghurs are now being kept and killed for their organs. And now a most recent paper by Matt Robertson at the Victim of Communism Memorial Foundation and Dr. Jacob Levy, these two professional researchers, they've been involved in uncovering China's organ harvesting. They write that the method of execution is the organ harvesting itself. So what now you're seeing is that prisoners of conscience are being killed for their organs, and the organs are being then used for a industry in China. Now, because of the method carried out in the hospital has essentially matured over the years, you can go from disappearing to dead to cremated, and that prisoner would be essentially gone, and the whole process will be streamlined. Like Zhongzhi's experience, combined with a keeping a record of personal health for each of the prisoners, so China at any given time can execute a prisoner via live organ harvesting, and then have that transplant patient, who's already got his suitable organs, perform that transplant, and then be out of their way, cremate the body, all within a short span of time, maybe within a night. For example, one hospital, the People's Liberation Army Organ Transplant Center at the number 309 hospital, actually completed 12 kidney transplants in one night. So Gottman, Mattis, and Kilgore in their report writes for this hospital, Three doctors, the first one Dr. Shi Bingyi had completed at least 2,130 kidney transplants, 380 liver transplants, and many heart, lung, pancreas, small intestine, and multi-organ transplants by 2011. Director Chang Ying-yong at the same hospital in the transplant surgery department had also performed over 2,000 kidney transplants and many of the multi-organ transplants by 2013. Drs. Hai Ming had completed about 1,000 kidney transplants, 100 liver transplants, and several hundred organ procurement surgeries. That hospital alone had done 6,000 to 7,000 transplant surgeries by 2013, so it's not hard to account for that 10,000 figure that the officials report. And the number of hospitals performing transplant surgery also took an unexpected rise. In 1999, there were only 19 hospitals in China doing liver transplants. By 2006, it was 500. By that same operation, between 1991 to 1998, only 78 surgical operations were performed, from 1999 to 2006, 14,000 operations were done for liver transplants. So regardless of how we look at it, 1999 was a turning point for China's transplant industry. And until 2013, China didn't have any voluntary donation system, meaning that it officially claims to only rely on death row prisoners, but it doesn't explain the sheer volume of transplantation. Why is China able to continue to perform this evil deed to this day without anyone in China caring? Well, it's very simple. You demonize a group of people enough, whether that's a religious or political group, it removes any emotional reactions people have to them, and normalizes the evil that's being committed. People's minds have essentially been twisted to believe that this is all okay. And this has worked for the Nazis against the Jewish people, and it's worked for the Romans against Christians, it's now working against Falun Gong practitioners and the Uyghurs. So this is the crime of the century, and we really have to spread the truth to others to hear for them to hear and to tell many more people, because this is still ongoing today. Alright, that's it for today's episode on forced organ harvesting. If you enjoyed the content, leave a like and comment below your thoughts. And make sure to always check out Ganjing World's channel, whenever I post a sensitive topic, it will always be here instead of on YouTube, and that's where we discuss a lot of the key issues on China. Alright, until next time, take care, bye.