The 2022 International Religious Freedoms Summit has heard evidence that the Chinese Communist party is still engaging in forced organ harvesting, despite claiming to have stopped the barbaric practice in 2015.
The summit, held in Washington DC, heard that “clean living religious minorities” including practitioners of Falun Gong, Christians, Muslim Uyghers, and Tiebtian Buddists are being targeted in what seems to be ‘on demand’ organ harvesting practices.
The CCP reportedly compiles tissue match data bases from the vast number of people held captive in the communist nation.
The summit heard that the detention system sends detainees, who are found to be a match for those seeking organ transplants, to medical centres where organs are removed while the victims are still alive.
Former Commissioner of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, Nina Shea, detailed the alleged practice saying it allows transplant organs to be sourced within a “a few days or weeks” which is “an incredibly short time” compared to western waiting lists which typically take “months or years”.
She continued, “China now has the world’s second largest organ transplant industry” describing how it “kills two birds with one stone”, by getting rid of unwanted minorities while profiting from the sale of their organs, and in doing so “both incentivises and monetizes religious oppression”.
Having come under pressure from the international community China announced the cessation of its barbaric practices in 2015, establishing a registry for ‘voluntary organ donation’.
Senior Research Fellow in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Ethan Gutmann, stated that data produced by Chinese hospitals recorded anything between 60 – 100,000 organ transplants per year, adding that claims the statistics represented voluntary organ donation could not be substantiated.
Gutmann says that in 2014 the CCP introduced compulsory health checks specifically targeting Xinjang’s Ughur population of individuals over 12 years old. He says the data collected was used to facilitate DNA profiling and “tissue cross-matching”.
He continued saying that detainees from various detention facilities had reported that every year around “2.5% to 5% of camp residents were disappearing”.
“These people were aged 28 to 29”, continuing that this was the age set by the Chinese medical system as the ideal point for organ viability.
He went on to describe an area of Xinjiang called Aksu where he says some 33,000 Ughyrs and Kazaks are detained, saying that a hospital established in the area to treat SARS had evolved into an organ harvesting facility with a huge crematorium only 30 mins away.
The area, he said, is also serviced by an airport which he says has a “green lane specifically “ for human organs. He added “A fast lane set up by China Southern Airlines” for the export of human organs.
Addressing the question of where these organs are being sent Gutmann related events at a hospital in Shanghai saying it ‘had its kidney transplant rate increase by 100% while its liver transplant rate went up 200%.’
He continued that the hospital was “the first to perform a double lung transplant” adding that the operation had taken palace “during the pandemic”.
“ It was an advertisement to the world that China was open for business,” he said.
Last year Gript Media interviewed the EU Policy Coordinator of the Uyghur Congress, Koen Stoop.
Stoop detailed a catalogue of alleged human rights abuses where behaviours such as having a beard, reading the koran, or being born after 1988 were considered by the CCP as dangerous.
Stoop also discussed the accounts of camp escapees who spoke of forced labour, sterilisation, and abortion being inflicted on detainees.
Time Magazine featured the story of a 29 year old Uyghur woman named Mihrigul Tursun who testified before a US Congressional Committee saying,
“I would rather die than go through this torture. I begged them to kill me,” she added, “They told me my mother and son had died.”
She continued saying she had been told her father “was serving life in prison and that my family was torn apart because of me.”
Tursun was arrested by the Chinese authorities while visiting her family from Egypt where she says she was studying. He testified that she was separated from her three infant children, and that by the time she was allowed to see them again, her son had died.