Skip to main content

THE MEDICAL BUTCHER SHOPS OF CHINA published 12/06/16

Eric DeLeon was dying of liver cancer.  He was told he would have to wait at least two years for a liver transplant.  So he flew to China and paid $110,000 for a liver transplant which he financed with a loan on his home.  He was one of a growing number of Americans who have gone to China for transplants.  However, there is an ongoing controversy about where the transplants come from - executed prisoners or even political prisoners who are still alive at the time of the removal of vital organs, and who then die on the operating table.

For several decades, China has engaged in widespread and systematic harvesting of organs from prisoners,   and people of conscience whose political or religious views conflict with the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

In an article published this week by the Town Hall website and written  by Jeff Jacoby, we learn that China is still killing large  numbers of imprisoned men and women by strapping them down to operating tables, still conscious, and forcibly extracting  their organs - and then delivering those organs to the hospital transplant centers that have become a major source of revenue.

Doctors, nurses and medical students work in state-run civilian and military hospitals to remove organs and other body parts from political prisoners while they are still alive. Some victims were still breathing after their organs were removed, but they were thrown into the hospital’s incinerator anyway.

It is a business for these hospitals, an organ-on-demand transplant system.  Waiting times are short due to a massive prisoner population, drawn on like an organ bank to provide organs on request.

Transplants range from about US$60,000 to over $170,000 depending on the operation so there is a lot of money to be made.

One Chinese doctor in a secretly recorded phone conversation, describes his first encounter with a live organ harvesting as a medical student saying,  “When I cut through the body, blood was still running, he was not dead.   I took the liver and two kidneys.  It took me 30 minutes.”

In a recent documentary from SBS, a national public television network in Australia, on their own investigative special called Dateline, they report that China has become a destination for people wanting to avoid waiting lists and get a quick transplant. The industry is said to be worth a billion dollars.

“I testify to the atrocious crime that the hospital committed in removing livers and corneas from living Falun Gong members,” says former worker Annie.  “Some of them were still alive when they were secretly burnt in the incinerator that was in the boiler room.”  Her husband at the time was a surgeon responsible for removing organs.  (They fled China to escape the atrocities.)

Falun Gong refers to a religious group which accounts for the greatest number of victims of the hospital room butcher shops in China.  Falun Gong is an ancient Chinese spiritual discipline in the Buddhist tradition.   It consists of moral teachings, a meditation, and four gentle exercises that are a truly unique and highly effective way to improve one’s health and energy levels.  

At the core of Falun Gong are the values of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. They teach that these are the most fundamental qualities of the universe, and take them to be a guide for daily life and practice.Their organs are prized by the Chinese due to their clean living habits.

Practitioners of Falun Gong were demonized as dangerous cultists by the Chinese and by the hundreds of thousands they were arrested and imprisoned, often subjected to ghastly torture until  they signed a document renouncing Falun Gong.  Approximately 65,000 practitioners were killed for their faith between 2000 to 2008, and the slaughter continues.

Tibetans, underground Christians (known as house Christians) and a group called Uyghurs are also arrested and used in the highly lucrative transplant industry.

Now two extraordinary Canadian films, one a chilling documentary, the other a riveting drama based on its findings,  are about to blow the lid on the illegal organ trade that is now allegedly worth a staggering US$1billion a year.

On November 5 of this year, “The Bleeding Edge”, a film exposing China’s state-sanctioned organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners, was shown as part of the Vancouver Asian Film Festival.

Quoting now from a blog called Truth In China, “The film is a “feature length thriller” by award-winning Vancouver-based director Leon Lee, who won a Peabody Award in 2015 for his documentary “Human Harvest” about the horrors of forced organ harvesting in China.

The film stars the gifted Chinese-Canadian actress Anastasia Lin, the current reigning Miss World Canada for 2015.

Miss Lin drew international headlines last year when she was denied a visa to enter China where the 2015 Miss World pageant was being held.  She was born in China and lived there until age 13 and has used beauty pageants as a means of calling attention to human-rights abuses in her native land, but China succeeded in denying her a platform from which to speak.

No theater chain is willing to show the movie because China’s regime exerts enormous leverage on the U.S. movie industry.  (AMC Entertainment, for example, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chinese conglomerates.)  But it will be screened in Washington D.C. a few days before the 2016 Miss World final on December 18.  It is currently available on iTunes, Blue-Ray and DVD.  For more information you should check the Facebook page entitled “The Bleeding Edge”.

As has been the case recently with my Wednesday articles, I was just barely able to scratch the surface of what is happening in China with regard to the trafficking in body parts from living humans.    I hesitated in even describing it because my research literally made me sick, but we cannot keep our heads in the sand.  I found this subject to be very timely in view of the media discussion this week about how the U.S. must be so careful not to offend China.  Needless to say, China offends me.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Moneymaker House on Harwood Avenue

I was so thrilled to read in last night's Lebanon Daily Record that the Laclede County Historical Society has now received title to the Moneymaker House on Harwood Avenue. I have always loved that house. As a little girl living in Old Town Lebanon on the corner of Wood & Apple Streets, and walking to school each day, I passed that house every day and always thought it was the most beautiful house in town. The large mature trees in the front yard were always so stately with their long curvy branches sweeping the ground and creating a canopy for the squirrels to have their own private playhouse during the spring and summer. In the fall, the leaves became a gorgeous array of colors gradually falling to the ground and making a carpet under the trees, eventually paving the way for the white snow which inevitably would come as winter would arrive. I loved the low branches sweeping the ground at the Moneymaker house so much that I asked Milan in the early years of our marriage to le...

"Mary Did You Know" by Mark Lowry

THE NIGHT GOD WATCHED OVER MY SON IN LAW

  I’m sure most of us who read the Lebanon newspaper on a daily basis are appalled at the number of drug stops, domestic abuse, and break-ins that take place in Lebanon every day. I often wonder how our law enforcement men and women keep a straight face at the stupid statements made by the people they encounter during these incidents. We sometimes have to laugh, wondering how dumb these people think our officers are. But we become very serious when we think of so many drug and alcohol impaired drivers being out on the roads and highways at the same time we are transporting our loved ones back and forth over those same roads. And we must never forget that every one of those traffic stops, domestic disturbance calls and other 911 calls puts those officers at tremendous risk of serious injury or the loss of their own lives, even when the situation appears to be routine and mundane. Such was the case on December 9, 1991 when Deputy Sheriff Leslie Roark went to the home of James R. Joh...