There’s a reason it’s so easy and quick to get an organ transplant in China — and it’s not because the nation has so many people. It’s because, according to multiple reports, the country uses its concentration camps as organ-harvesting farms, forcefully removing organs from prisoners, some of whom were still alive when the procedures took place.
Jennifer Zeng, a Falun Gong practitioner, told Fox News that she was arrested for her spirituality, and interrogated at one of China’s labor camps. While being questioned about her medical history, she told officers she had hepatitis C. She believes this is what kept the Chinese government from harvesting her organs.
Han Yu was kidnapped and detained for 37 days in one of Beijing’s detention centers, Fox reported. More than 10 years earlier, her father had been taken to a detention center for practicing Falun Gong, which is banned in China. Some believe the practice is banned because its non-violent meditation teachings creates a sense of community outside the Chinese Communist Party.
Three months after Han Yu’s father was taken, she received a call that he was dead. The family was not permitted to see his body until a month later. Even then, her family was surrounded by state officials.
“I saw obvious injuries on his face, even after the makeup, the severe bruise below his left eye stood out. There was a trace of stitches starting from the throat down to where his clothes covered,” Yu told Fox News. “I tried to unbutton the clothes, the police saw and quickly dragged me out. Later another family member went in and continued to unbutton and found stitches that went all the way to the stomach.”
Her father was quickly cremated without an autopsy. Han Yu said she believed her father was targeted for his organs.
Another woman, Jian Li, told Fox that when her family was told her father died in a labor camp, the family visited his body in the freezer room. She said her older sister touched their father’s face and realized he was still warm. They also noticed he was biting his lip.
“We pulled out my father’s body halfway. We touched his chest, and it was warm. He was wearing a down jacket. My older sister prepared to perform CPR,” Li told the outlet. “But were each forcibly dragged out of the freezer by four people. Uniformed and plainclothes officers pushed my father’s body into the freezer. They demanded that we quickly sign for cremation and pay the fees.”
These harrowing stories are backed up by reports from entities outside China. The U.S.-based China Organ Harvest Research Center (COHRC) released a report in July concluding “on-demand killing of prisoners of conscience is driven by the state, run on an industrial scale and carried out by both military and civilian institutions.”
COHRC also determined that China’s claims of 10,000 transplants a year was a significant understatement — the number is closer to 60,000 to 100,000 a year. China claims the organs are coming from death-row inmates who offer them willingly, but there are simply not enough of these inmates to provide the amount of organs China provides each year.
The communist nation’s organ-harvesting scheme is a lucrative business, with “medical tourism” bringing in millions a year. The COHRC used data from 2007 to show that people from around the world paid $150,000 for a lung or heart transplant and more than $65,000 for a kidney transplant.