MCLC: organ harvesting (2)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Matthew Robertson <mprobertson11 at gmail.com>
Subject: organ harvesting (2)
***********************************************************

Incidentally, Wang Lijun was knee-deep in these activities in his time in
Jinzhou. So Bo almost certainly knew about it, at the least. I wrote about
this based on Chinese documents in February; the story is below, and the
incriminating documents (an award speech of all things) are archived
(http://goo.gl/bju5W). They were removed from the Chinese site at some
point after the story came out. I have come to attribute the lack of
attention to this to just the fact that it seems so crazy, so
unbelievable, that it 'mustn't be true.' Otherwise, I'm not sure. It's a
huge story, will almost certainly have a major impact on the regime when
it is finally unearthed in a big way, and the lack of curiosity and
interest by the big press and policymakers is simply puzzling.

MPR

==============================================

Source: Epoch Times (2/15/12):
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/chinese-would-be-defector-may-ha
ve-revealed-coup-plot-to-us-191615.html

Would-be China Defector, Once Bo Xilai’s Right Hand, Oversaw Organ
Harvesting
Former Chongqing vice mayor involved in ‘thousands’ of transplantation
operations
By Matthew Robertson

The high-ranking Chinese official who sought to defect to the United
States last week has a story to tell about his participation in thousands
of atrocities—and may have already told it to U.S. consular officials.
Wang Lijun, formerly the director of public security and vice mayor of the
southwestern China megapolis of Chongqing, fearing that Bo Xilai,
Chongqing’s Communist Party chief, meant to assassinate him, fled on Feb.
6 to the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu, a four-hour drive west.

He spent over 24 hours in the consulate and, according to a Radio France
International report, revealed to consular officials details about crimes
committed by him and Bo. He then left Chengdu under the protection of
Beijing security officials.

Prominent among Wang’s crimes was his participation in forced organ
harvesting from prisoners of conscience, a practice the Chinese regime has
denied. Earlier in his career, Wang gave a speech in which he discussed
his involvement in organ harvesting.

Wang’s Award

In 2006, three years after becoming director of the public security bureau
in Jinzhou City, Liaoning Province, Wang was given an award—but it wasn’t
for fighting crime. Wang’s team had done pioneering research on how best
to transplant organs taken from prisoners—who were possibly still alive
when their organs were removed—and surgeons acting at his direction had
honed new techniques over “thousands” of on site trials.

Wang received the award in September 2006 from the Guanghua Science and
Technology Foundation, a charitable organization meant to promote science
and technology to youth. According to its website it is under the direct
leadership of the Communist Youth League, one of the Chinese Communist
Party’s mass organizations used for recruitment.

In Wang’s acceptance speech, which is still available online (and archived
here), he thanks Guanghua Foundation staff for “painstakingly traveling”
to Liaoning Province to observe his work.
He notes one time when Guanghua staff had to rush back from overseas to
view a trial. “They wanted to witness organ transplantation and examine it
from their point of view: organ transplant benefits the public and
improves Chinese law enforcement in a humane and democratic way,” Wang
said. 

“As we all know, the so-called ‘on the scene research’ is the result of
several thousand intensive on-site transplants,” he added.

Wang accepted the award as director of the “On-the-Scene Psychological
Research Center,” which according to its entry on the website of the
Ministry of Commerce is an adjunct of Jinzhou City’s public security
bureau. Its brief introduction says it has relationships and scholarly
exchanges with universities in over 10 countries. Emails to the research
center were not returned, and calls to the number listed did not go
through.

In his acceptance speech, Wang said, “For a veteran policeman, to see
someone being executed and to see this person’s organs being transplanted
to several other persons’ bodies, it was profoundly stirring. This is a
great endeavor that involved much hard work from many people. The
secretary general of China Guanghua Foundation, Jinyang and his staff were
right there at the transplant scene, they have experienced it all with us.”

In a speech given on the occasion of Wang’s award, Ren Jinyang, the
secretary general of the Guanghua Foundation, explained that Wang was
recognized for his “basic research and on-site experiments” in making
transplant recipients more receptive to organs.

“They have created a brand new protective fluid,” Ren said. “After animal
tests, out of body tests, and clinical operations, they have achieved an
important milestone where the recipients become more receptive to a liver
and kidney injected with such protective fluid.”

Execution Site

Researchers investigating China’s organ transplantation practices were
troubled by the remarks and what they implied.

“The so called ‘research scene’ that Wang Lijun refers to is either an
outright execution site with medical vans, or possibly a medical ward,
where peoples’ organs are surgically removed,” said Ethan Gutmann, who has
published extensively on organ harvesting from Chinese prisoners of
conscience. 

He added that the injections that the award refers to are probably
“anti-coagulants and experimental medications that lower the chance of
immune-system rejection as the organ is passed between one living
body—heart still beating, soon to expire from the trauma—to another.”
Gutmann added that this is “normal medical practice” in China, where
hospitals, military hospitals, and public security bureaus intersect.

“There is zero guarantee that consent was involved,” Gutmann said. “Ample
evidence has come to light that the victims could well have been Uyghur
Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, ‘Eastern Lightning’ Christians
or—exponentially more likely—Falun Gong practitioners. In other words,
Wang Lijun received an award for, at best, barbarism.”

It is not possible to know what proportion of victims Wang referred to in
his remark about “thousands” of on-site transplants were criminal
prisoners and how many were political prisoners or prisoners of
conscience, such as Falun Gong practitioners. Further, in China there is a
range of nonviolent crimes that can be punished with the death penalty,
but the communist state does not publish statistics detailing the numbers
of people executed and their crimes.

David Matas, an award-winning Canadian human rights lawyer, and David
Kilgour, a former Canadian secretary of state (Asia/Pacific) and crown
attorney, co-authored a report on organ harvesting from Falun Gong
practitioners in China. The pair estimate that in the six-year period
2000–2005, 60,000 transplantation operations were done in China and Falun
Gong practitioners were the likely source for the organs for 41,500
operations. 

In other words, approximately two-thirds of the organs used in transplant
operations during this time period—which in part overlaps the period of
Wang’s “research”—came from prisoners of conscience, most of whom would
have been Falun Gong.

CQ Global Researcher, a leading global affairs journal, quotes Kilgour and
Matas and Gutmann as independently estimating over 62,000 practitioners
have been killed for their organs in the period 2000–2008.

Live Harvesting

In the eyes of experts, a significant question left worryingly open in
Wang’s remarks is whether the prisoners actually died before their organs
were taken from their bodies. Given the reference to drug injections, it
is highly possible that the hearts of the victims were still beating when
their organs were removed, these experts say.

“It used to be that China would shoot for execution, then they shifted
from shooting to using injections,” says Matas. “In effect they’re not
killing by injection, but paralyzing by injection, and taking the organs
out while the body is still alive.”

When an organ is removed from a still-live body, it is fresher and
rejection rates are lower. “It’s possible to source an organ immediately
after the victim is brain dead, but much more complicated,” says Matas.
“The organ deterioration is more marked once they are brain dead, but if
you keep the body alive through drugs you can harvest organs over a longer
period of time.”

Wang’s conversations with the U.S. consular officials in Chengdu might
shed light on such details as the function of the drugs he used in
transplantation operations in Liaoning Province.

In any case Wang’s visit to the consulate provides the best opportunity to
date of confirmation from a Chinese official of the ongoing practice of
forced organ harvesting in China.

At a press conference on Monday in Washington, D.C., Falun Gong
spokesperson Dr. Tsuwei Huang called on the U.S. government to release the
contents of Wang Lijun’s conversations.

With research by Sophia Fang.