'Organ Harvesting Is the Genocide Aspect': Expert | China In Focus

The persecution of Chinese meditation practice Falun Gong going on for 25 years. The peaceful gathering of 10,000 people on April 25th, 25 years ago, has been seen as the trigger of the brutal suppression, which includes forced organ harvesting. But the reason might be coming from somewhere else. We sat down with Ethan Gutman, an author and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, for his take. He has investigated the forced organ harvesting for years. It all started when he was in Beijing and heard about Falun Gong practitioners gathering at Zhongnanhai, the Chinese governmental compound. Ethan Gutman, thank you so much for joining us. Great to have you back on the show. It's great to be here. Now, April 25th, 1999, it's almost been 25 years to the day. That was when about 10,000 practitioners of the mind-body practice Falun Gong gathered to appeal to the Chinese regime to release the Tianjin 45. You were actually in China at the time for a wedding. Tell us about what you saw and heard about that day. Basically, on April 25th, I was living in Beijing, and my boss was getting married that day in Beijing at the most famous Catholic church in Beijing. And she was expecting a lot of press. She was a little bit of a starlet at the time. No press really seemed to show up. I asked another producer, who always knew what was going on in Beijing, why aren't the press here? She said, many people came to Zhongnanhai today. I said, what kind of people? She said, I don't know, but maybe the press went to Zhongnanhai too. I called Jasper Becker, who ran the South China Morning Post at the time. I said, Jasper, what's going on at Zhongnanhai? He said, there's a lot of them. There are thousands, and we think they're called Falun Gong. I said, but what do you know about them? He said, nothing. I was not at Zhongnanhai. What I did was, when I determined I was going to write a book about Falun Gong, the idea was to write the ultimate history of the conflict between the Chinese state and Falun Gong, which had not been done. I wrote about very early adopters of Falun Gong, some of whom taught the PSB, the Public Security Bureau of China, to do the exercise, some of whom taught CCTV people to do the exercise, and even a PSB agent who was Falun Gong and had actually dropped his card off at Zhongnanhai the night before saying, there's a kind of crisis coming in, had really gotten close enough to get somebody to interview and said, why are you here? They would have said, because the appeals office is here. It's right off of Fuyang Street. It is the only place where we can legally lodge a protest as a Chinese citizen in our state. A lot of us wanted to make our feelings heard, and we wanted to have our voices heard on this, because a lot of practitioners had just been arrested at Shenzhen University. In China, in the main papers, and even not in the main papers, if someone comes out and says you're a danger to the state, and you're a danger to children's minds, that's a big warning. That means you don't have long to live, and you have a choice. You can either be quiet about it and get your head chopped off, or you can stand up and get your head chopped off. But you really don't have a lot of options in these situations. When it comes to history, especially with the Falun Gong, you mentioned in your book, The Slaughter, how April 25th has often been used as that starting point, rather than, say, 1992, when Falun Gong started spreading and gaining popularity inside China. Most people see that day as the starting point when you look at the history of Falun Gong, rather than, say, 1992, when it started spreading. That's a laziness on the part of the journalism. In the case of Falun Gong, it's incredibly important to go back to 1992. You have to see the roots of Falun Gong within Buddhist tradition. I said this is a Buddhist revival movement. It was remarkable in that way. It was a slightly more simple message, or at least a message that people can understand from illiterate peasants all the way up to university professors. I saw people struggle to apply those principles every day. It seemingly had no way of making money. That was the strangest thing about it. It actually forbade you to make money out of Falun Gong, which just destroyed the whole Guangxi system of China right there. Whatever you do, you make your connections, and then you're supposed to use your connections to make money. That is the Chinese entrepreneurial style, and God bless it. It's a very successful style. But this short-circuited that. It said, no, this is the most important thing to you, but you can't make money out of it. You can just do it. I didn't realize any of these things when I first saw Falun Gong, or even when I first started doing the interviews. I couldn't do those interviews in the mainland, because anybody I talked to would have gotten in trouble, or gotten their family in trouble, and people would have died. I waited until I was back in the U.S., and then some practitioners approached me and said, would you be interested in writing about, you know, my first book was about surveillance in China? Would you be interested in writing about Falun Gong? I said, well, if you still exist, yeah. A Buddhist revival movement, to me, is something any society should be robust enough to survive. I don't see that as this massive threat. So there was something else going on, and part of that, what I felt, was that the values that Falun Gong was espousing were actually quite against that sort of new China that was being presented by the Chinese Communist Party, which demands that one lies. In fact, the truth is supposed to be completely elastic, and bendable, and so forth. Compassion is not one of the hallmarks of the Chinese Communist Party, and toughness is. So you think they'd go for the forbearance part, but they didn't like that either, because they said, oh, well, that means putting up with other people's crap. No, no, no. The rest of the world is supposed to put up with our crap from this point on. These are very different values, a very different approach. They saw it, I guess, in some ways as a throwback to, which to some extent it was. It was a throwback to kind of correct it for Chinese culture. You lay out a good point, right? Because in, under the Communist Party's history, right, if they go after a certain group after, say, probably max two months, it gets wiped out, it disappears. You mentioned some other qigongs that disappeared, but then with, say, the Falun Gong, they're like, oh, maybe three months, right? It's been 25 years, and it's still, people are still practicing this in China, right? 25 years of persecution. And that whole concept of, say, basically the ideologies, right, this morality versus the party culture at odds, you lay that out and then ties into the persecution that unfolds, right, the torture, and then eventually the forced live organ harvesting, right, these things that normally you can't even fathom, right, in a free world. And in your book, you actually mention this term compassion fatigue several times, right, just all of these terrible stories coming up over and over and over again. Now, you've spent years researching this and studying it and learning about and hearing these stories. How do you maintain your humanity after being exposed to all of that? You know, it's possible to get addicted to almost any strong emotion. The feelings of great sorrow and horror can be a very strong feeling. And over time, it can become slightly addictive. So it is true that when I'm going to, when I'm traveling around Europe, say, I've often said, oh, I've got a day off. I've done that many times is going to sort of human rights sites, sort of what I do on my, kind of like my hobby or something. You just mentioned organ harvesting. You know, of course, most of the action in organ harvesting has kind of switched over to this huge population, the Uyghurs, which is sort of a million in the camps, and maybe about that same amount now, except that it's just all pretty much workers. In fact, it's this entire organ transplant system was built on the backs of Falun Gong, if you like. They've supplied the raw materials for this explosion of an industry, transplant industry that spread to every province in China. And it is, and it was all built on Falun Gong. Now it's being supplied mostly by the Uyghurs, that's my guess, and possibly by the Tibetans. Following your book, there's also, you mentioned at the end, right, the controversy around the body exhibitions, where exactly those bodies come from, you know, note Dalian and also the rise in incarcerations of Falun Gong at the time and also organ harvesting, obviously. Now we have seen some legislation come out banning Americans in certain states from going to China for organ tourism or unwittingly helping to commit these crimes against humanity. But have we seen a lot of action against it? Do we know if organ harvesting is just continuing underground? What do we know about that? Well, I think what we can say is that in terms of the action, sort of taking the question almost in reverse, that the Stop Organ Harvesting Act, look, we just had a hearing on it again, okay? And there were senators, there was a Senate, really, they're pushing this now in the Senate. It's passed the House. It would pass the House again. I think there were three votes against it in the House, okay? That's a significant act. It's not, it doesn't have the strongest teeth I've ever seen in a bill, but it's embarrassing as hell for the surgeons, Chinese surgeons, all right? They can't come into the United States anymore. They can be blocked so easily. It does demand that we study this as a country in a serious way, that we put some research muscle into it. It does interfere with companies who are directly collaborating with the Chinese transplant industry. So one of those might be Thermo Fisher, for example, which apparently sold all the DNA kits that were used on the reagers, okay? And that was millions and millions, maybe 10 million kits that were sold. That's a killing, okay? That's really something. And these aren't DNA, fun DNA kits, which sort of tell you, did you know you're partially healing? No, this isn't about that. This is about, how do you match? This is about a tissue match, tissue typing, tissue matching. If there had not been the Ukraine war, that bill would have gone through. If there had not been October 7th, if October 7th hadn't happened, that bill would have gone through. It'd be long, I know. You see, up till now, the problem was always that the medical world wanted to engage with China, okay? And they wanted to follow the WHO's lead, the World Health Organization's lead, in that engagement. And that meant, pretty much do what China says, don't embarrass China. They went along with this, and they ended up covering for China. Something very, very, very unusual happened in the last year. And that was, actually, it was a year and a half ago. The International Society of Heart and Lung Transplantation suddenly declared an academic boycott of China. In other words, China could not publish in their journal. Well, these are, by the way, the top transplant doctors in the world, in the West. These aren't the liver and kidney guys. This is the heart and lung, okay? We're talking a little bit higher here, kind of the top of the heap. So that's a huge change. But the main reason it happened was because of COVID. You say it didn't come from China, it came from a bat, you know? And there was just so much, and then it was so obvious that the World Health Organization was doing China's bidding. It was lying for China. And now doctors were supposed to lie. This outraged them. And this is what prepared the ground for this major shift in the medical world. So that means that really it is down to, now it's very easy for the politicians to move, because there's no longer this sort of leaden hand going, no, no, we have to engage with China. When it originally started, it was seen as a kidney in the bathtub story, a conspiracy theory, something that was being bandied about by old ladies who were acting out crazy things on street corners in New York City. Over time, and you might say the investigation had the worst beginning of any investigation I've ever seen. You had a kind of very shaky witness, Annie, coming out from China, who supposedly, she complained she was some sort of hero, and she discovered this single-handedly, and then threw herself in front of her husband when people were coming at him. But what happened was, eventually, over time, everybody kind of did better. Practitioners coming from China, a lot of them have amazing research skills, and they have patience and tenacity that I've never seen before. So they did this kind of, one of the things they did was this kind of superhuman effort to actually tabulate all the hospitals in China, and what they were really saying about their own transplants, which disagreed with the number that was being given by the central committee, or by the sort of official numbers. And of course, they were completely different. Basically, when you added up their numbers, the stuff that the hospitals were saying was nearly 60,000 or more. And the, at the same time, the figures that China was claiming was 10,000 transplants per year. That was a Falun Gong achievement. I mean, I think me and David Kilgore and David Matus helped with that. We were kind of, oversaw some of that investigation. But it was really, we couldn't have done that. I mean, this was all Chinese source material. This was stuff dug out of people's dissertations. It was dug out of Nurses Weekly. It was just all kinds of just little glimpses. That was an incredible achievement. And I believe that no other group could have done that. No other group has accomplished anything like that in terms of, now there's been some amazing work done with the Uyghurs, for example, on family members and interviewing family members. And there's some incredible databases out there now. But this kind of thing, this kind of investigative work, phenomenal. Add to that, you have some great figures within the Falun Gong community, like Matt Robertson, who were doing great research work. So you had the Epoch Times coming in. And sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong, but mostly they're right. And they really brought some incredible new ground in this area. And I think that was very important because the tenacity required this. This was not, you're not going to be handed this on a silver platter. There is never going to be a single witness. There will never be a database, which will just be sort of flipped over to us like the Xinjiang police files, okay? We will never have that because the sensitivity of this topic is what it is. And no, you cannot film everybody. A lot of people can't be filmed because they have family back in China. And that family will die the minute they're identified. You can't put their voice on them, even over some B-roll, because that voice can be analyzed, okay? And even with the disguises, Chinese are brilliant at getting through those disguises. If you can put a disguise on it, they can remove that disguise. So we're back to the pen and paper. Look, the China Tribunal in London took a year and a half to read through all the material, just to sift through it all. The organ harvesting is the genocide aspect. This is the outright murder. Yes, rape on a large scale is a terrible thing. It's not really the technical definition of genocide, though. You're not destroying people. Yes, the sterilization of women is very significant. But from the Chinese perspective, who lived under a one-child policy for all these years, Han Chinese, they're kind of like, what? You're complaining about this? For a long time, I think some Uyghurs kind of associated the issue of organ harvesting with is a Falun Gong issue. And I think that's a mistake. This is something that is going to hit every group. It's going to hit the Tibetans. It's just a question of getting the right hospitals set up in their region. So this is a very long-term struggle. And I'm happy to play a role in it. It's been the hallmark of my life. And what a very important role. I learned so much from your book. Good, good. It took a long time to write. The new one's taking a long time to write. You asked earlier about my own motivations. This is a genuinely interesting puzzle. And it does require doing things that are unusual. I got to travel the world all over to write this letter. I had to go and interview practitioners wherever I could find them, okay? All over Europe and America and Australia and all over Hong Kong. Back then, you could interview people in Hong Kong. And of course, Taiwan and all the rest of it. Japan, Korea. But the main reward has been to work with people of great courage and dignity. And I found that in spades with the Falun Gong. I was privileged to meet some of the most steadfast people I've ever met. And I'm kind of stubborn too, but not like this. I mean, I would last 10 minutes in torture, maybe 15, but really not much more. And these are phenomenal, phenomenal people. That's been an incredible privilege. Well, we look forward to your next book. But for today, Ethan Gutman, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. That was the interview with Ethan Gutman, an investigative reporter and senior research fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Thank you for joining us for this special report. Please join me for China In Focus right here on NTD News. See you soon.