Survivor Story: China’s forced organ harvesting
Mr. Cheng Pei Ming is the first known survivor of the ongoing state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting campaign carried out by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) against prisoners of conscience as reported in The Diplomat. His testimony comes at a pivotal time as new legislation has just been introduced to the U.S. Senate aiming to address the CCP’s forced organ harvesting and hold the CCP accountable for the crime.
Forced organ removal for political and genocidal reasons
The sale of organs is illegal in every country but Iran and organ harvesting can be human trafficking in disguise. Increasingly it occurs under a power imbalance in which the “donor” is in a position of extreme vulnerability. The CCP engages in extreme cases of organ trafficking in which there is no agency on the part of the victim-donor. As with Cheng, the forced removal of organs is for political or genocidal reasons. He is a practicing member of the Falun Gong, a religious minority China has branded a “dangerous cult”.
For decades there has been allegations that China is engaging in forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience. And those prisoners are mostly members of Falun Gong, but also include Uyghurs and Tibetans. Due to his Falun Gong membership Cheng was imprisoned and tortured in China numerous times. It was during one of those detentions he unknowingly had parts of his organs harvested.
“They said that I had to undergo an operation, but I firmly refused. They held me down and gave me an injection, and I quickly lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was still in the hospital and felt terrible pain in my side.”
Cheng recounts he was shackled to his hospital bed with an IV tube taped to his foot, a drainage tube in his chest, oxygen tubes in his nose, and a 35 cm (about 1.15 ft) incision on the side of his chest. Included in the definition of “trafficking in persons” under Article 3, Section (a) of the UN Trafficking in Person’s (TIP) Protocol is “the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability for the purpose of exploitation”. Forced surgery while in prison clearly fits under this definition. But the horror didn’t stop there as Cheng didn’t discover the organ removal until much later.