What Happens in Chinese Hospitals? | David Matas

The first known survivor of China's state-run forced organ harvesting regime recently went public with his story in Washington, D.C. Back in November of 2004, Falun Gong practitioner Pei Mingcheng was forced to undergo surgery and woke up with a foot-long scar across his side. As we were able to get Mr. Cheng here in the United States, we were able to get independent experts to look inside and see what's missing. Comprehensive medical examinations revealed he was missing a big part of his liver and a portion of his left lung. So what is the significance of this case, and what's next? In this episode, I speak with international human rights lawyer David Matus, as well as several other leading human rights experts and advocates. This machine is eating up the Chinese population, sort of group by group. Matus was among the first to independently investigate allegations of forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners. If there are any American institutions involved, they should be told to stop, and if they do not stop, then there ought to be litigation against them. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. David Matus, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Glad to be back. So David, never in a million years did I expect that I would meet an actual survivor of forced organ harvesting, of this barbaric practice that the Chinese regime has been involved in for decades. Tell me about Mr. Cheng's case. I could see in terms of the raw data, there's something there, because he's obviously a Falun Gong practitioner. He's obviously been organ harvested, because we've got the medical reports. The x-rays don't lie. I spent a fair amount of time basically just kind of getting the chronology, the names, the dates, and so on. It really is unusual for someone to survive. One of the problems we dealt with is the lack of media attention commensurate with the gravity of the problem, and nobody can talk about it. It's an actual victim, because all the victims are dead. Nobody stopped topsy and so on. The conclusions we reached are the result of putting together a lot of different pieces of evidence. The problem that we faced in communicating the issue is not too little evidence, it's too much. We've got thousands of footnotes, hundreds of pages, which together tell you a story. You can't pick out a sentence here and say, that's it. But with him, it's very simple. This happened to me. On September 4, survivor Pei Mingcheng publicly responded to and challenged the Chinese regime's bizarre assertion that it operated on him for his own good. In a stunning admission, the Chinese regime has recently publicly acknowledged that its doctors operated on Cheng without his consent while he was imprisoned for practicing Falun Gong. They claim it was to save his life. My name is Pei Mingcheng. In November 2004, I was forcibly taken from Daqing Prison to the hospital of Daqing, where they did a surgery on me. This is my surgery scar. It's 35 centimeters long. Today, as I stand here, I may appear normal. I walk and speak normally, but in reality, I can never return to the person I once was. My left side is in constant pain, and it throbs with every beat of my pulse. At night, I struggle to breathe when I lie down, and it is truly unbearable. Pei Mingcheng was able to come to America with the help of former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Robert Destro. What did it take to get Mr. Cheng here? I understand there was a bounty on his head. There was a bounty on his head. He was hiding in Thailand, and when I heard about the case, I said, well, let's get him out. And so we had to negotiate with the Thai government because he wasn't in Thailand legally. So we got him out, and we brought him here, and the rest is history. We put him through extensive medical testing and imaging and everything else, and it's pretty clear consensus that they took stuff out. We are now confirming the suspicions we've had for all these years that Mr. Cheng was a victim of forced organ harvesting. We now know that, and the Chinese have confirmed the details. Explain to me about that. How is it that they could have possibly confirmed the details? They confirmed that the surgery happened. They confirmed where it happened. They confirmed when it happened. Because we were able to get Mr. Cheng here in the United States, we were able to get independent experts to look inside and see what's missing. We confirmed that. At the time, Cheng had been serving an eight-year sentence and had endured extreme torture and repeated electric shocks. The Chinese regime claims the surgery was to help him after Cheng, in protest of his persecution, swallowed a small blunt nail and blade. But medical experts say there's no reasonable scenario where the operation, which removed significant portions of Cheng's liver and lung, could have been to retrieve such swallowed items. As the record shows, they didn't need to go into his side, all the way around his back and through his chest. They could have gone down into his esophagus with an endoscope and pulled everything out. They were fishing. You, of course, are speaking to the official narrative. Is it surprising to you that there was any official narrative at all? Yes, I'm amazed that there's any official narrative at all. They've engaged on the conversation. And as we lawyers would say, that's an admission against interest. Among those who are now speaking up for Cheng's case is international human rights lawyer Nina Hsieh, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Hudson Institute. It's immensely important to have an actual survivor come forward and publicly state that he has been a victim of forced organ harvesting, and to have the medical scans and doctor testimony. That is hard evidence, and that's direct evidence. It's not circumstantial. And then to have this odd response, this really quite damning response by the security police and the Chinese government that he was in fact a prisoner, he was in fact in a hospital, he was in fact subject to surgery without his consent. It's damning. How could it be that he is alive? The protocol is basically to get rid of the evidence. And he's a living embodiment of the evidence that the Chinese regime never wants to see the light. Well, he was in a hospital twice. The first time he had organ sex crime. The second time, I really think his life was in danger. If he hadn't escaped, I don't think he'd be alive today. There are other people who escaped from China and escaped from detention and so on. I think what's unusual about him is not so much that he escaped, but that he was only partially organ harvested, that he survived the organ extraction. People are basically being systematically killed through organ extraction, even when it's not necessary for a particular organ to kill them. I would say that's what's unusual about him. The Chinese health system, I don't think, was killing Falun Gong practitioners to silence them. They were killing Falun Gong practitioners to make money out of their bodies. What happened about why it was only partial in this hospital, I mean, it's really up to the Chinese government or the hospital to explain what they were doing. I'm in no position, and all I know for sure is that Falun Gong practitioners and organs are missing. That much is obvious, but one can speculate. Wendy Rogers, who's involved with this international coalition, she's the chair of the advisory board, she said maybe it was done partial liver extraction because it could be used for a child. Another possibility was just training, it was research, because this hospital is not a transplant hospital. What happened to him was unusual, unprecedented. Maybe they were just trying to figure out how to do it or trying to develop some techniques. What you're describing is so macabre. You have to realize, this is the problem with dealing with mass atrocities. We don't live in Canada and the United States surrounded by mass atrocities, so it's not part of our daily lives. It's quite the opposite. If somebody raises their voice, it strikes us as unusual. The problem is that very often people, instead of believing what they're seeing, seeing what they believe. Because people don't believe this could be happening, or it's very hard to believe it's happening, they don't see it. Communism isn't just the ideology of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China. The whole country is, from childhood, indoctrinated into communist ideologies. They see the world in a different way. For what us would seem macabre, unusual, for China, under communism, it has become a matter of daily life. Yes, this is a mass atrocity, but it's not the first one. It's Tiananmen Square, which didn't just happen at Tiananmen Square. It was a countrywide repression. There's the mass starvation. There's the Cultural Revolution. China has had one series of mass atrocities after another, and cover-up, lying, pretense, immunity. It's just a repetition through which generations of people under communism have lived, and they just develop a different mindset as a result of it. David, we're going to take a quick break right now, and we'll be right back. And we're back with international human rights lawyer David Matus. You were involved in writing the original report assessing this question of whether this forced organ harvesting was a thing in communist China in the first place. Maybe briefly tell me about that and how that took you to the present day. Well, that all started off, this was 2006, and a woman with a student named Annie made a public statement in Washington, D.C. that her ex-husband had been harvesting corneas from Falun Gong practitioners at Xuzhen Hospital in Shenyang City in Liaoning Province, that other doctors at the hospital were harvesting other organs, that the organs were being sold to transplanters, that the bodies were cremated. The Chinese government, almost immediately after Annie said this, publicly denied what she was saying. There was this NGO, Coalition to Investigate Prosecution of Falun Gong, that actually came to David Kilgore, my colleague. They'd worked up a list of 20 people they thought could maybe do an independent research on this issue, and I was on the list, David Kilgore was on the list. And what we're told from the get-go is no victims to interview, no bodies to autopsy, no witnesses, just perpetrators and victims, because of the closed surroundings, prisons and hospitals. No documents, except government documents of prisons and hospitals, which you're not going to look at. And so the issue became, for me, not to establish that this was happening, but simply to determine whether it's true or not. The coalition that asked us to do it didn't give us any money, didn't give us any data, didn't give us any direction, they just asked us, as indeed many other human rights victim communities have asked me in the past to do. So what we did is not try to prove it, but either try to prove it or disprove it, rather than just leave it up in the air. And so what we did is we constructed evidentiary trails, both of proof and disproof. And if you're going to disprove it, what would disprove it? If you're going to prove it, what would prove it? And we had a whole bunch of them, 15, 20 of these evidentiary trails, and basically, in a nutshell, the evidentiary trails of disproof went nowhere, whereas the evidentiary trails of proof, each on its own produced some evidence and put them all together, the answer was pretty clear that this was happening. At this point, it's pretty well established that this is real. There's been the China Tribunal, I think that was very definitive, the Ethan Gutmann and the slaughter. Your original reports were what convinced me back in the day. You've described this as an evil yet to be seen on this planet. You alluded to that idea earlier when we were talking. Where's the outrage? I mean, the problem is, to a certain extent, the newness. I mean, the capacity for good and evil is innate in all of us. But what changes over time is technology. And what made the Holocaust different from antisemitism before, which it existed for millennia, was not antisemitism itself, which was not new. It was trains, it was poison gas, it was tanks, it was radio, it was microphones. I mean, these are the things that made the Holocaust what it was. And what made this a new form of evil was the development of transplant technology. I mean, the Holocaust itself, at the time it happened, people found it hard to believe. I very well informed, articulate Jewish people. Hannah Arendt at the time didn't believe it. Raymond Aron didn't believe it. These are important Jewish philosophers. Rudolf Werber escaped from Auschwitz with plans of Auschwitz and was going around telling Jewish communities, look what's happening, get out, get away. Some people believed in the left, other people didn't believe him, stayed and were killed. And it's just, it seemed so out of sync with what people had known and seen before that it was just incredible. And I think we see that, I mean, with each new form of technology. I mean, now we're dealing with the internet, social media, artificial intelligence, and that's producing a whole new set of problems because of the same old tension for doing good and bad that we've always had. But not dealing with these kinds of issues, and this is my self-reflection over time, not dealing with what we knew was happening as early as 2006. The effect is that this has spread to other groups. Well, no doubt about it. I mean, the Uyghurs, the big numbers for the Uyghurs didn't start until 2017. That's when the mass detention started. And with the Uyghurs, it was, I mean, partly there's the depletion of the Falun Gong population through the mass killings for their organs, but it was also the development of technology, the time the organs could survive outside the body. The ECMO technology, right? Well, the ECMO, the extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, but it wasn't only that. The refrigeration techniques developed, the liquid immersion techniques developed, so they were basically able to distribute organs throughout China from Xinjiang. What we saw with the Uyghurs is airport lanes in Xinjiang with the lanes had written on them, we could take pictures of them, reserved for transport of organs. It's the same phenomenon. The Chinese started boasting about this as technological advancement, that we're able to fly organs from Xinjiang throughout China until we noticed it, so they stopped talking about it. That would not have happened if the Falun Gong abuse had been stopped. There was a conference in Busan in South Korea where there was talk about developing within Asia a transplantation system like in Europe. Within the European Union, you can get the organs moving around, and the Chinese were basically trying to promote that within Asia, which would mean, of course, prisoners of conscience organs going into South Korea and Japan, because there's a lot of transplant tourists now that go from Japan and South Korea to China. I've been going fairly regularly to Asia to talk about these issues, and now what I see is, well, of course, the Falun Gong show up, the Uyghurs show up, and the house Christians and Tibetans, but what I've been seeing also now is that the Mongolians, which, you know, they're repressed, but I haven't seen evidence of being killed for their organs, but they figure they're next, so this machine is eating up the Chinese population sort of group by group. In prison, we made a pact amongst us prisoners. Whoever survives must tell the world the truth about the persecution we endured. Today, I'm here not just to speak up for myself. Many of the people who were with me in prison have died and can no longer speak up. Former Congressman Frank Wolf, a fierce defender of human rights in his three decades in Congress, says evidence of the Chinese regime killing prisoners for their organs has been known since as early as 1997. Yet Western leaders turned a blind eye. Harry Wu, who you may or may not remember, Harry came to me in 1997 to tell me and show me pictures what they were doing. The Chinese government was going in and taking the blood type of prisoners, and then people would fly in from the West, and they would execute. Harry showed me pictures of the execution, and they would give the transplant. And now it's increased, and nobody's doing anything about it. And there are indications that they say that there are some American institutions involved. This has to stop. What do you think can be done about it right now? You could get a trial firm, a trial law firm, or one of the human rights groups to bring suit against any American institution. If there are any American institutions, they should be told to stop. And if they do not stop, then there ought to be litigation against them. You're killing people. There's legislation that's been passed in a number of countries. You mentioned Jacob Levy earlier. He was instrumental in passing legislation that would prevent the social safety net for paying for organ transplants in China and Israel very early on. I forget what year it was. I think it was 2008 or 2009. He was the first. Recently, something very similar to that has been passed in three U.S. states that I'm aware of. I think it was vetoed in Arizona. And now there's something in this realm that's actually been passed by the House called the Falun Gong Protection Act by voice vote, and now it's gone to the Senate. This is the first federal law around this issue that I'm aware of. There's a Stop Organ Harvesting Act, which also passed the House of Representatives before the but it's not enacted. It's still kicking around. Indeed, I think Texas has passed an insurance law, and it's China-specific. Israeli law says you can't pay insurance if the person goes to a country and gets a transplant, and their laws are not comparable to Israeli law. China, although the target isn't specifically mentioned, but Texas actually mentions China, saying you can't insure transplants in China. I think Utah has one like that, too. What's your hope for the exposure of this story now and this increased media attention, this legislation that's in Congress now? What can be done with this? The wheels of justice and the wheels of human rights, they grind slowly, but they grind inexorably. You asked what I hope happened. My own view is, don't hope, don't predict, don't sit back and think about what the future will be. Make the future. David Matus, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. Pleasure to talk to you. Thank you very much. Thank you all for joining David Matus and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.