THE first known survivor of China’s alleged forced organ harvesting says he had part of his lung and liver cut out.
Cheng Pei Ming says he endured years of prison and torture for practising the Falun Gong religion against the will of the Chinese Communist Party.
Rumours of organ harvesting by the Chinese government have swirled for years, with experts now saying Cheng is “incontestable” proof.
The survivor has X-ray scans that show part of his organs were removed when he underwent the horror experience.
In 2002, Cheng was imprisoned for eight years prison after advocating for an end to the persecution Falun Gong by the government.
The one day during the sentence, he said the horror began unfolding.
Cheng said: “After they took me to the hospital against my will, they tried to force me to sign consent forms for an operation.
“When I refused, six guards grabbed me and held me down and I was injected with something.
“The next thing I remember is being in a hospital bed with tubes in my nose and I was going in and out of consciousness.
“There was a tube with bloody liquid coming from under the bandaging that was on my side.”
He woke up shackled to the hospital bed.
Oxygen tubes were up his nose and a fresh 35cm cut on the left side of his chest had appeared, with the a drainage tube coming out of it.
Two years later, he was still in prison and was again booked in for forced surgery.
“When they took me to the hospital again and said I had to have another operation, I thought for sure they were going to kill me,” he said.
But this time Cheng said he managed to escape after a guard forgot to lock him to the bed and fell asleep.
Cheng evaded the Chinese authorities as a refugee in Thailand for several years before moving to the United States in 2020.
Now transplant experts say scans have confirmed parts of his left liver and left lung are missing.
He is seen by experts as a “typical victim” of China’s organ harvesting horror where Falun Gong practitioners are forcibly cut up – but he is also unusual because he survived and ran away.
It’s unclear why only portions of his organs were taken.
Falun Gong is a meditation regime and conservative religion that appears free of politics – but in China, it’s an outlawed movement branded as “evil”.
Those who stick to their guns and don’t renounce the movement are taken prisoner and were previously summoned to the 610 office – known as China’s “Gestapo” in a nod to Nazi Germany – to learn their fate.
The 610 office was established with the destructive goal of persecuting Falun Gong.
Although the feared office has now dissolved, it remains illegal to be a member of the spiritual group.
Many are said to be shackled down in surgical rooms, where their organs are cut out and then sold off.
There was a tube with bloody liquid coming from under the bandaging that was on my side
Cheng Pei Ming
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) denies this.
Professor Wendy Rogers, chair of International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China, said: “I do not know why the Chinese doctors removed parts of Mr Cheng’s liver and lungs, but I do know that he did not have a disease or illness requiring this surgery.
“The portion of liver removed is consistent with securing liver tissue suitable for transplantation into a child, but I have no means of knowing if this was the purpose.
“What I do know is that Mr Cheng was surgically assaulted as part of a wider pattern of persecution, incarceration and torture, and that these events happened to him because he is a practitioner of Falun Gong.”
Human rights lawyer and organ harvesting investigator David Matas told The Sun he hopes having a survivor speak out will help attract the attention China’s sick scheme deserves.
Mr Matas said: “The gravity of the harm and the systematic nature of the harm and the State-institutionalised nature of the harm, there hasn’t really been publicity about the atrocity commensurate with the scope of the atrocity.
“There are several reasons for that, but one of them is that nobody can get up and say I’ve been killed for my organs … so it’s very difficult to get the immediacy of the victimisation.
“And this fellow Cheng provides it because he can say ‘This happened to me’.
“The advantage of Mr Cheng – it’s easy for them (CCP) to dismiss what he says, they dismiss everything that people say – but what’s incontestable is he’s had organs removed, you can see it from the x-rays.
“What’s also incontestable is that he’s Falun Gong. So it’s a very simple and visible story.”
When China started to move from simply sentencing to death political opponents, taking out their organs became the new form of execution, according to Mr Matas.
At the same time, the health sector began to realise there was a lucrative market for organs – or as Mr Matas described: “inexhaustible demand.”
He added: “What China could offer which no other country could is organs on demand, because they just had this supply of prisoners that that were sitting waiting to be executed.”
Prisoners didn’t sport the healthiest organs to sell, however.
Enter Falun Gong, a CCP enemy whose members likely had healthier bodies given their constant yoga-type exercise.
Falun Gong members were randomly detained and then “demonised” to create a sense of legitimacy over why they were locked up, Mr Matas said.
He added: “Falun Gong is an exercise regime. And so their organs were a lot healthier than death penalty prisoners, so they became the primary source for organs.
“And that was in the early 2000s … that’s basically how it all got started.”
Mr Matas says the market for organs from China is more “underground” now.
But he and former Canadian cabinet minister David Kilgour found it was brazen in the mid 2000s, when they probed the transplanting terror for a book.
Hospital websites listed up prices for organs and seemed to have free-flowing supply, their investigation found.
Mr Matas said: “They offered a complete global service on demand: ‘Tell us when you want to come, whatever the organ, even the vital organ, you can have it’.”
The international human rights campaigner said websites with organ sales were in Korean, Japanese, traditional Chinese (“which would cater to Taiwan”), Arabic and English.
It suggests many organs were sold to be placed in bodies around the world.
The Falun Gong Protection Act was tabled to the US Senate last week after being boosted by bi-partisan support in the House of Representatives.
The new law would aim to slap sanctions on anyone found to be involved in involuntary organ harvesting, with an emphasis on those targeting Falun Gong members.
Dr Eric Patterson, President of Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, said there was an “urgent need” to do more.
Dr Patterson said: “We stand in solidarity with all victims and call for robust action to prevent such atrocities, including support for measures like the recently introduced Falun Gong Protection Act.
“It is imperative that we work together to end these human rights violations and hold perpetrators accountable.”
Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice president Dr Katrina Lantos Swett added: “This outrageous violation of fundamental rights continues, despite the Chinese government’s claims to the contrary.
“We must do more to raise awareness about it and call on governments to implement laws and policies designed to stop it.”
