Terry Glavin | Published on: June 22, 2016
What we know about the pillaging of vital organs from still-living prisoners in the People’s Republic of China, and the sale of their livers, lungs, hearts and kidneys, is that it is a widespread, outrageous and lucrative business and that the Chinese government habitually lies through its teeth about it.
What we know about the Chinese government’s paranoia about Falun Gong, a harmless spiritual discipline not unlike a form of contemplative Buddhism, is that the Beijing authorities have jailed, executed or otherwise “disappeared” thousands of its adherents, who numbered perhaps 70 million before the reign of terror against them began in the 1990s.
We know, too that Falun Gong prisoners have been singled out as sources of raw material for China’s shadowy organ-harvesting industry. We know this thanks largely to the persistent efforts at documentation undertaken by former cabinet minister David Kilgour and B’nai Brith senior legal council David Matas, and also owing to the more recent investigations carried out by the London-based foreign policy analyst and journalist Ethan Guttman. Their books on the subject are banned in China.
We also know that an early epicentre of Falun Gong persecution and the trade in their body parts was in Dalian, the feifdom of the cruel Communist Party boss Bo Xilai. Before corruption charges and the disfavour of Chinese President Xi Jinping brought the former Chinese commerce minister low and landed him in prison four years ago, Bo was facing lawsuits alleging torture and crimes against humanity filed against him in 10 countries.
Bo was also a favourite of Canada’s China lobby. He was a “good ally,” Sergio Marchi, the onetime Liberal trade minister and president of the Canada China Business Council lamented when Bo was jailed in 2012. Jean Chrétien, the Liberal prime minister who went on to a fabulous career in China-trade consultancies, called Bo an “old friend.”
It is fitting, then, that it is in Ottawa ‘“ where only a few days ago Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi ruined a little favour-currying affair the Liberal government had arranged in his honour by barking at Canadian journalists for impudently mentioning the words “human rights” in his presence ‘“ that Kilgour, Matas and Guttman are releasing a new report this week, exposing Beijing’s top-to-bottom complicity in the organ-harvesting racket. Titled Bloody Harvest / The Slaughter: An Update, the report runs to 564 pages, followed by 2,360 footnotes.
The entire enterprise is controlled by the state, with the intimate involvement of China’s military and security apparatus. The report exposes the Chinese government’s efforts to enforce a systemic cover-up of the whole thing. It is an industrial-scale enterprise involving the traffic of tens of thousands of organ transplants every year ‘“ at least 15 times as many as claimed in official government statements.
Guttman’s 2014 research had settled on a “best guess” that 65,000 Falun Gong practitioners have been slaughtered for their organs over the past several years. The new report’s primary research findings, gathered together from hospital records, medical journals, whistleblower accounts and hard-to-hide databases, translated from the Chinese, appears to confirm that those earlier estimates were wildly over-cautious.
What we know about the number of people sentenced to death by China’s rubber-stamp judiciary every year is that the number is a state secret. Amnesty International doesn’t bother trying to count anymore ‘“ the last time was 2008, when at least 1,066 people were sentenced to death ‘“ but the usual death row organ-pillaging cannot account for the massive upsurge in transplant traffic in recent years. Voluntary organ donation in China is exceedingly rare. No organ donation system existed anywhere in China before 2010. A public, national organ donation system began only in 2014.
The United Nations, international medical associations and a variety of non-governmental organizations have persistently questioned Beijing about the spectacular disparities and transparently fraudulent official numbers surrounding its transplant industry. Beijing’s response has consisted entirely of the same well-practised farrago of lies, how-dare-you conniptions and instructions to mind one’s business that was so perfectly ventriloquized by the dutifully obedient Wang Yi in Ottawa the other day, on the subject of human rights in China more generally.
“There is no other plausible explanation for the sourcing of this number of organs than the killing of Falun Gong (and to a lesser extent, the killing of Uyghurs, Tibetans and House Christians) for their organs,” Kilgour, Matas and Guttman conclude.
Last week, giving every impression that Canada’s postures on the subject of human rights in China are negotiable, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau allowed that perhaps the free trade agreement with China that his party’s decrepit old sell-outs so feverishly desire might take a bit longer than they would want, owing to “an awful lot of work to do to get towards that, whether it’s on human rights and governance issues, whether it’s on respect for the rule of law around Canadian investments.”
Yes, quite. An awful lot of work will be required to shift President Xi Jinping, whose family has mysteriously accrued hundreds of millions of dollars to itself in the course of his rise to the pinnacle of China’s gangland power structure, and who has accrued to himself greater power than any Chinese president since Mao Zedong, and whose accomplices in the National People’s Congress include more than 200 gluttonous parasites with a combined net worth of $463 billion, roughly equal to the gross domestic product of Sweden.
Having driven the Chinese people into penury ($18 trillion in debt, as of last year) and after sucking the lifeblood out of China’s captive pool of slave labour (the number of workers’ strikes and protests has tripled over the past three years), two-thirds of China’s Communist Party overlords are preparing to abscond from the country altogether, according to a 2014 poll by Shanghai’s Hurun Research Institute. “Capital flight” from China reached nearly $1 trillion last year.
And what of Kevin Garratt, the innocent missionary the regime kidnapped in retaliation for the Canada having mentioned two years ago that Beijing’s military hackers had just broken into the National Research Council’s mainframes? And what of the 319 Chinese lawyers, human rights activists and their family members who have been interrogated, locked away in dungeons, held under house arrest or simply made to disappear over the past six months? What of the 20 people arrested in March for having the temerity to write a letter calling on Xi Jinping to resign?
We should mind our tone, Trudeau’s hapless, gawping foreign affairs minister, Stéphane Dion, continues to instruct us. The ghastly and unpardonable crimes of Beijing’s ravenous elites are best left to polite exchanges, in parlours. Says Dion: “I think that’s the best way to see progress made.”
Terry Glavin is an author and journalist.