China and organ harvesting
Emma Alberici speaks with Ethan Gutmann, who released a report which revealed evidence that Chinese hospitals were engaging in harvesting the organs of executed inmates for profit.
Read more at www.abc.net.au
Ah the "cruel" Chinese. There are millions of falun gong devotees in China and in 70 countries and they are Chinese. So they're cruel because they are killed and their organs removed. What a world. Below picture of the "cruel" race.
Loopy Falun Gong
Falun Gong has failed to make the list of five official state-sanctioned religious organizations in China, and if you listen to the government, the group is a “cult”. Beijing says that Falun Gong is responsible for the needless deaths of thousands of practitioners because “they refuse to seek medical treatment for their illnesses”. According to officials:
Falun Gong is against modern science, preaches the end of the world, forbids its followers watching TV or being treated in hospital and maintains that diseases do not exist and that ailments are due to sins people commit. They preached that UFOs had arrived on earth; aliens had taken over human bodies, and were trying to annihilate humanity through the control of TV and radio.
Okay, I get the not-allowed-to-watch TV part. But aliens landing on earth and taking over the bodies of humans? This sounded like good-old fashioned Chinese propaganda to me. But I was able to dig up a 1999 Time magazine interview with the group’s founder, Li Hongzhi, in which he makes some astounding claims about the role of aliens “from other planets” that “have corrupted mankind”. According to Hongzhi:
The aliens have introduced modern machinery like computers and airplanes…everyone thinks that scientists invent on their own when in fact their inspiration is manipulated by the aliens. In terms of culture and spirit, they already control man…the ultimate purpose is to replace humans. If cloning human beings succeeds, the aliens can officially replace humans.
According to a BBC report, Hongzhi believes that “he is a being from a higher level who has come to help humankind from the destruction it could face as the result of rampant evil”. And it’s interesting to note that his story dovetails with a recent news report on another Chinese leader who preaches the gospel of qigong and has amassed tens of thousands of followers.
Wang Lin recently sought asylum in Hong Kong after being charged with fraud and tax evasion in China. In a recent New York Times article, he is described as “a diminutive 61-year-old whose sculptured eyebrows and slicked-back hair are reminiscent of Liberace’s” who was “wearing the glittery style of ring and watch favored by many newly wealthy Chinese people.” He owns three Hummers.
It is said that Lie has the “power to cure cancer and has performed other mysterious feats like conjuring snakes out of thin air”. (You can see the video above.) Reports elsewhere say he has the ability to “fly”. It is also claimed the supernatural abilities he possesses can be learned by his followers.
So is the Chinese government, which has accused Lie of selling “spiritual opium” and labeled the Falun Gong “a menace to society” merely protecting its own people? Or is its greatest fear the rapid growth of these spiritual communities and the fact Falun Gong practitioners now outnumber Communist party members almost two-to-one?
I don’t know the answer, but either way it has to make you appreciate the religious freedom we have here in the United States. We’re free to follow whatever freaky religion we want—without the fear of having the government forcibly removing our body organs as a consequence
Transcript
EMMA ALBERICI, PRESENTER: Ethan Gutmann, welcome to Lateline.
ETHAN GUTMANN, US HUMAN RIGHTS INVESTIGATOR: Great to be here.
EMMA ALBERICI: As you heard there, China is rejecting claims that it continues to harvest organs from executed prisoners. It says it's stopped the practice in January last year?
ETHAN GUTMANN: Yes, I don't really accept that this is about insults or anything like that. This is just about the facts.
When we actually looked at the hospitals there's 146 hospitals which are approved by the Ministry of Health to do transplants and actually a lot of them are just major transplant centres.
When we looked at them individually, and looked at their internal communications which are often, you know, sometimes they throw them in the trash, sometimes they're not, but they do have to communicate inside and this took several years, actually, to do. We found something very peculiar, we found a very, very high volume of transplants.
Now when we added that up we get to a number of about 60,000 transplants per year to 100,000 transplants per year.
Now the Chinese have been waving this figure 10,000 transplants per year for years now but we're not seeing that, we're seeing something completely different. We're seeing confidence in the future that this source of organs is almost unending. There is no peak oil.
EMMA ALBERICI: How can you say for sure that the Chinese regime is actually killing prisoners to supply the demand for organs?
ETHAN GUTMANN: Well they admit that they were, I mean for years they've admitted, since 2006, actually 2005 ...
EMMA ALBERICI: I mean contemporaneously given they say they stopped the practice in January last year?
ETHAN GUTMANN: Well, we just see no sign of it. What we see is tremendous continuity and the voluntary organ donations in China, I mean, the numbers are quite clearly, they're not high enough, even the made up numbers aren't high enough.
What we had researchers calling in to voluntary organ donation centres in many Chinese cities and they would call every day and the phone would ring and ring and ring and then after a month or so somebody would answer the phone and they would say I want to donate my organs but I'm also interested how many other donations have you received and they say well five, or three.
So you know, this just isn't there. The Chinese have, I understand this is the issue of high sensitivity and in a sense I feel that the Chinese Communist Party sees it as a dagger into its heart. But the facts are the facts. They have to grapple, I think everybody has to grapple with these new numbers. I have to grapple with them. They're very difficult.
This is not an expected result. I believe the Chinese were going to stop this.
EMMA ALBERICI: What can a country like Australia do to apply pressure on China to respect the human rights of its own citizens, given how guarded it is and how unkindly it takes to other countries meddling in its affairs?
ETHAN GUTMANN: That's a great question and I really believe that Australia is in some sense a pivotal country in the world on this issue. In part because the two of the presidents of the Transplantation Society are here at Westmead Hospital and the Transplantation society, since 2012, has tried to take the lead on this issue somewhat unsuccessfully to get the Chinese to reform. Well, actually fairly unsuccessfully.
But at the same time, China's medical leadership in this area is prized and valued by the Chinese.
So I think it's extremely important that Australia sends a signal, the kind of signal that Israel have already sent, that Spain has sent and recently Taiwan.
Now, all of those countries have banned organ tourism to China and that is making, that's a significant act. It sends a message to the Chinese leadership that the medical establishment in China is not trusted and that there's not only reforms have to be made but there has to be some sort of accountability for the past as well.
EMMA ALBERICI: When you've spoken about Westerners taking advantage of the Chinese organ surplus, if you like. Is these individuals that are going to China as you say on organ holidays, or is this Western hospitals engaging in the import of the organs?
ETHAN GUTMANN: You know, there's been a lot of sort of rumors flying around about this and I just wanted to clear it up. Most people, as I understand it, I mean organ tourism is not our focus. Our focus is on the victims in China, we think that's a profoundly important question and the organ tourism is sort of secondary to that.
Having said that, it's my understanding that you can pretty much Google the words "Help, I need a kidney" and you will very quickly get to a discussion board or something like that where people will kind of say hey, you can call this hospital in China, Tianjin Central Hospital, they speak English and you can get it for a fairly reasonable price.
So I don't think that's and we're not going to close down the internet or shut down these sites, that's not the point.
The point is for us to make a stand of the kind of stand that Israel did and Taiwan did.
To point out one more thing, Israel has a software industry which has a lot of Chinese investment in it. I think they were very nervous about making this decision when they did back in 2008. Taiwan has God knows how many thousand missiles aimed at it right now from the mainland but they did it. They showed the guts to do this and I think it's very important.
This is why I'm here in Australia in many ways to talk to people about this issue and try to get something moving here.
EMMA ALBERICI: Well all the very best with that. Ethan Gutmann, thank you for your time.
ETHAN GUTMANN: Thank you.