VI. Reactions from All Sides: CCP Deception and Cover-up, and International Investigations

The steady emergence of witnesses shocked not only the international community but also alarmed the CCP. The CCP's habitual response is deception and cover-up.

1. CCP Deception and Cover-up

The day after the secret camps and the live organ extraction from Falun Gong practitioners were exposed (March 9), information on the relevant websites was deleted or altered in order to cover up the facts.

For example, the statement disclosed by the China International Transplantation Network Assistance Center in Shenyang -- "being able to perform such a volume of transplant surgeries is inseparable from the support of the Chinese government" -- and similar content were deleted.

Chen Guihua, president of the Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and director of its liver transplant center, had performed more than 1,000 clinical liver transplant surgeries -- a figure that had a zero quietly dropped, becoming "more than 100."

At the same time, the CCP moved and destroyed evidence. On March 28, after three weeks of silence during which evidence was moved and destroyed, the CCP's Ministry of Foreign Affairs finally responded publicly to the Sujiatun camp affair, first denying that any camp existed, while simultaneously "inviting" journalists to go investigate Sujiatun themselves. Some did go -- and, naturally, found nothing.

The "veteran military doctor" testified on May 7 that a Logistics Department official (holding the rank of lieutenant general) had recently forwarded to relevant military institutions across the country the directives from the "Central Military Commission Conference on Handling Foreign-Related Religious Issues," which had concluded in secret in Beijing. The conference emphasized the importance of information confidentiality and security to the state, reiterated the importance of treating information about special military-controlled management zones as vital state secrets, and reaffirmed severe penalties for leaking such information. The "veteran military doctor" specifically pointed out that the "religious issue" referred to here means the Falun Gong issue.

The inaugural meeting and founding conference of the Whole-Army Organ Transplantation Professional Committee, originally scheduled for May 12-14, 2006, at the Shanghai Everbright Convention and Exhibition Center, was urgently postponed. The Organ Transplant Research Institute of Changzheng Hospital (full name: the PLA Organ Transplant Research Institute at the Second Affiliated Hospital of the Second Military Medical University, Shanghai Changzheng Hospital), which was responsible for hosting the conference, stated in its emergency notice that the postponement was "in accordance with instructions received from higher authorities."

Under pressure from international public opinion, on March 29, 2006, China's Ministry of Health published on its website the Interim Provisions on the Clinical Application and Administration of Human Organ Transplantation Technology, a new regulation set to take effect on July 1, 2006, requiring health departments across the country to comply. But laws that go unenforced are a common phenomenon in China, so whether this "interim provision" from the Ministry of Health could itself be enforced was already in question -- and moreover, military hospitals do not fall under the Ministry of Health's jurisdiction at all, so this "interim provision" has no power to bind military and armed-police hospitals.

2. Independent Investigations by International Third Parties

The CCP "invited" the international community to investigate, yet refused to allow the legitimate North American media outlets run by Falun Gong practitioners to enter China to investigate. Under these circumstances, overseas Falun Gong practitioners organized an investigative delegation, inviting the international community to join in the investigation. Legislators and human-rights advocates from a number of countries took part in the delegation, and Chinese human-rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng also joined it. Most notable of all was the independent third-party investigation led by Canadians David Kilgour and David Matas.

On May 8, 2006, David Kilgour, former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific, and David Matas, a prominent human-rights lawyer, announced they were launching an independent investigation and planned to travel to China to gather evidence on the live organ extraction from Falun Gong practitioners. They completed their investigative report on July 6.

After two months of investigation and evidence-gathering, the two investigators, through the proof and disproof of eighteen categories of evidence, reached the conclusion: "Based on what we now have before us, we are able to make a determination... that the allegations are true. We believe that there has been and continues today to be large-scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners."

Kilgour noted that the CCP began persecuting Falun Gong and arresting practitioners starting in July 1997, with many practitioners going missing after being sent to labor camps and losing all contact with the outside world. After years of tracking, investigation, and evidence-gathering, they identified eighteen reasons to believe that the CCP was using live organ extraction from Falun Gong practitioners as a "donor bank," allowing people around the world urgently seeking organ transplants to obtain a living donor within a short period of time. Kilgour stated that, as of 2005, China was performing nearly 60,000 organ transplant cases per year, nearly triple the figure from five years earlier -- and that these organs were not obtained through voluntary donation, but drawn from this transplant bank.

The report noted that, since the CCP's crackdown on Falun Gong began in 1999, the source of organs for 41,500 transplant surgeries could not be explained. The report stated that the account of live organ extraction from Falun Gong practitioners provides the answer to this mystery.

Although China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs "invited" the international community to investigate, Chinese embassies refused to grant them entry into China to conduct on-the-ground investigations.

On September 29, the U.S. House of Representatives held a bipartisan hearing on "the CCP's live harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners' organs." Kilgour reported his latest investigative findings at the hearing and pointed to an incident that occurred during the first World Transplant Congress held in Boston: during the conference, Dr. Torsten Trey, a German physician, chatted with a surgeon from a hospital in Tianjin. The surgeon told him that three hospitals in Tianjin could perform organ transplants, his own being one of them, and that his hospital alone performed 2,000 full-liver transplants a year. At the end of their friendly conversation, when asked who the donors for these organs were, he told the Treys: go ask the Falun Gong practitioners protesting outside the hotel. His implication could not have been clearer.

3. International Telephone Investigation

Some international investigators contacted hospitals and doctors in mainland China directly by telephone, conducting their investigation under the guise of inquiries. According to investigative records from the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG), hospital staff or doctors directly involved in transplants told investigators, in at least Henan, Shandong, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Tianjin, Liaoning, and Hubei, that they could supply organs from Falun Gong practitioners. The investigation found that Sujiatun-style camps using Falun Gong practitioners as living organ donors are not limited to a single location in China, but exist across most of the country (the "veteran military doctor" indicated there are 36 such camps nationwide). For example:

-- On April 28, a reporter from Sound of Hope Radio Network contacted Li Honghui, director of the kidney transplant center at Yuquan Hospital, the second affiliated hospital of Tsinghua University in Beijing. He said that because Chengdu, Sichuan, had an abundant supply of donors, he had been dispatched to assist at a local military hospital there. Over three consecutive days, doctors at the air force hospital confirmed that donors included young, healthy Falun Gong practitioners. He said they performed more than 100 cases a year, and that in previous years their donors had come from Falun Gong; when the reporter asked whether they could supply a kidney from a Falun Gong practitioner, he said yes. Director Xu Yahong, who had 22 years of experience at the air force hospital, said he himself had performed more than 500 kidney transplants, averaging more than 100 a year over the past two or three years. He told the reporter directly over the phone that the hospital used kidneys from Falun Gong practitioners.

-- On June 8, 2006, an official at the Mishan Detention Center in Heilongjiang admitted that the facility had, at that time, at least five or six male Falun Gong practitioners under the age of 40 who could serve as organ donors.

-- In April 2006, a doctor surnamed Zhu (transliteration) at a Guangzhou Military Region hospital said that he had, at that time, some type-B kidneys from Falun Gong practitioners on hand, that "several more batches" would arrive before May 1, but that there might be none left after May 20.

Foreign media also reported numerous inside leads. For instance, organ-transplant patients and their families reported seeing many "prisoners" being held inside the People's Armed Police General Hospital in Beijing (a hospital holding prisoners is clearly abnormal); and the People's Hospital of Chenxi County, Hunan Province, brought in a transplant surgeon from a hospital in Yunnan last year who had performed more than 100 kidney transplants there and said that all the donors were living people from labor camps.

4. Organs Arrive Batch by Batch, Like Wholesale Goods

In numerous recorded phone calls made in March, April, and May, many hospital transplant doctors spoke without any hesitation, telling callers over the phone that the organs came from Falun Gong practitioners. For example, the following exchange:

(A hospital in Guangzhou)

Caller: How long would I have to wait (for a kidney transplant)? Doctor: It can be done about a week after you arrive. Caller: But the kidney provided needs to be healthy and fresh, and alive -- it's not from a dead person, is it? Doctor: Of course it's good! Caller: Are there any from Falun Gong practitioners... Doctor: Everything here is that kind.

Not only that, but many doctors openly and shamelessly touted their supply:

"If we notify you today, we'll have a kidney source the day after tomorrow"; "Everything here is a full liver, guaranteed fresh and healthy"; "After mid-May there will be another batch of kidney sources -- we can supply young, healthy organs from Falun Gong practitioners"; "On the night of the 25th there will be eight kidney transplant operations; next month there will be another batch of donors"; "There will be some in early next month, and probably more later next month -- likely available anytime before June 26"; "We have plenty of kidney sources here, healthy and young -- we can even find donors as young as eighteen or nineteen"; "Kidney sources come in batches -- there will be another batch next week";

A doctor at Kunming First People's Hospital indicated that donors were all still breathing, with their hearts still beating, at the time their organs were extracted...

From the mouths of these doctors, we learn that organs "uniformly provided by the government" arrive batch by batch, like wholesale goods -- one batch entirely kidneys, the next batch perhaps entirely livers. This explains why, for instance, the Tianjin Oriental Organ Transplant Center once set a record in December 2004 of completing 44 liver transplant surgeries within a single week.

The fact that the "unified government" supply provides living organs in successive batches only further confirms the existence of a massive "living organ bank," in which these people (the "class enemies" in the CCP's eyes) are slaughtered batch by batch by relevant government departments, like animals.

5. Three Doctors Involved in Live Organ Transplants Face Criminal Charges in the United States

In late July 2006, the first World Transplant Congress was held in Boston, USA. On July 24, Chen Zhonghua, director of the Institute of Organ Transplantation at Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and Zhu Tongyu, director of the Organ Transplant Research Center at Shanghai Changzheng Hospital, both of whom had come to attend the conference, were criminally charged. They were accused of bearing criminal responsibility, whether as principal or accessory, for extracting organs without consent from prisoners -- including Falun Gong practitioners -- and illegally selling them for profit. In particular, the live extraction of organs from Falun Gong practitioners was alleged to constitute not only the crime of torture, but also the most serious crime under international criminal law: genocide.

On July 26, Shen Zhongyang, director of the Oriental Organ Transplant Center at Tianjin First Central Hospital, who had also come to the United States to attend the conference, was accused by Falun Gong groups of committing the crime of torture. The accusation against Shen Zhongyang was based primarily on recorded phone calls in which doctors at his hospital admitted that some of the hospital's organ-transplant sources were Falun Gong practitioners. The accusation relied on the same U.S. and international laws used against Chen Zhonghua and Zhu Tongyu -- namely, that the defendant had violated the U.S. Torture Victim Protection Act (Title 18, U.S.C. Section 2340) and the Convention Against Torture, ratified by the United States in 1994, along with related international human-rights conventions.

It is reported that after receiving these legal complaints, Shen Zhongyang, Chen Zhonghua, and Zhu Tongyu all hastily left the United States immediately.

VII. A Bloody Industry Run by the Communist Party's Military

The human organ trade in China has now become an extremely lucrative business. Some people, however, believe that the live extraction of organs from Falun Gong practitioners is merely the work of a few corrupt individuals, finding it hard to believe this could be a state government action. This is, in fact, the result of a lack of understanding of the CCP's true nature. It is indeed hard to believe that a government would carry out large-scale live organ extraction from "class enemies" -- yet, unfortunately, this is the truth.

Indeed, the Ministry of Health has since drawn up a new regulation banning the buying and selling of organs. But this is much like China having long ago signed the United Nations human-rights covenants: even after signing international agreements, it continues violating human rights behind closed doors, and China's human-rights record keeps getting worse -- the CCP's disregard for international law is widely known internationally. Moreover, before this regulation, China had no relevant laws or rules on the subject at all. And even with this interim regulation now in place, it cannot bind military and armed-police hospitals. What's more, the CCP has stated outright that the law does not apply to Falun Gong. The CCP has never had much regard for the law when it comes to ordinary Chinese citizens, and it has even less regard for the law when it comes to "class enemies" -- this has always been the case.

Of course, ordinary Chinese people understand the Communist Party's two-facedness fairly well. They describe China's public security police as "pulling up their pants to crack down on prostitution, then dropping their pants to solicit prostitutes themselves" -- an equally vivid portrait of the CCP's true face. What the outside world sees is only the CCP with "its pants pulled up."

The CCP's much-touted "rule by law" simply means drafting many legal provisions, without actually acting in accordance with them. In other words, China has a "legal system" but no genuine "rule of law" -- and there is a huge difference between the two. What the CCP does with its "pants pulled up" (what it says publicly) and what it does with "its pants dropped" (what it does privately) are entirely different things.

As far back as the 1960s, the military issued secret directives turning "class enemies" into industrial raw material, to be treated as commodities -- a practice that continues to this day. This is one of the CCP's "pants dropped" behaviors. The 1984 "supplementary regulation" provided legal cover for extracting organs from "class enemies," effectively casting Falun Gong practitioners, viewed as "class enemies," in the role of a "pregnancy machine." A friend once described the practice of forced live organ extraction to a fairly senior CCP cadre, who said doing such a thing was wrong. When the friend then mentioned that those subjected to forced live organ extraction were Falun Gong practitioners, the cadre said that in the case of Falun Gong, it was acceptable.

This is exactly how Communists regard "class enemies" and "counter-revolutionaries." Once one understands this, it becomes possible to understand the cannibalism that occurred in Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution: since they were class enemies, of course they could also be eaten -- a mindset entirely consistent with the spirit of the Central Military Commission's own directives. If cannibalism in Guangxi could be an open, public act, then secretly extracting organs in the dark can be carried out with even less restraint. Who could have imagined that the CCP, throughout its rule, could remain so bloodthirsty? Since 1949, it has slaughtered as many as 80 million Chinese people through a variety of means.

The CCP's "Party spirit" is the exact antithesis of humanity. Once this is truly understood, it becomes easy to understand the dark secret of its theft of living organs from Falun Gong practitioners.

1. The General Logistics Department of the PLA Is the "Management Authority" for Organ Transplantation

Because Falun Gong practitioners believe in Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance, and because their sheer numbers made them intolerable to the Communist Party, they were branded "class enemies." Chinese police could abduct Falun Gong practitioners at will, illegally detain them in labor camps, detention centers, prisons, concentration camps, and hospitals, torture and kill them, and "turn waste into treasure" by treating them as a living organ bank. As a result, China rapidly became the world's largest center for organ transplantation in just a few years, and the organ trade became a massive black market supported by the CCP regime and managed by the military -- one of China's black-market economies.

From the examples given above, we can see that the hospitals setting transplant records and ranking first are essentially PLA and armed-police hospitals -- these hospitals have an extremely ample supply of donors and have performed a large volume of live organ transplant surgeries. The "veteran military doctor" pointed out that "the management system for organ transplantation is the military."

Military and armed-police hospitals differ from civilian hospitals: they operate independently of the Ministry of Health and are managed entirely by military departments. Responsible for managing hospitals throughout the entire military and the armed police is the Health Department under the PLA's General Logistics Department. Based on the "veteran military doctor's" account, we can conclude that the management system for organ transplantation is, in fact, the PLA's General Logistics Department, which itself falls under the CCP's Central Military Commission.

Based on an analysis of publicly available online information, Sun Dafa, political commissar of the General Logistics Department (a lieutenant general), was likely one of the main officials in the military responsible for organ transplantation, answerable, of course, to the CCP's Central Military Commission. In 1999, Sun Dafa served as political commissar of the Shenyang Military Region; in 2001, he was promoted to lieutenant general by Jiang Zemin, marking him as one of Jiang's sycophantic generals. In 2005, his official career advanced by two more ranks in quick succession. Before this year's Whole-Army Organ Transplantation Conference was forced to be postponed in May, Sun had personally gone there to inspect and make arrangements.

The "veteran military doctor" testified on May 7 that a General Logistics Department official (holding the rank of lieutenant general) had recently forwarded to relevant military institutions across the country the directives from the "Central Military Commission Conference on Handling Foreign-Related Religious Issues," which had concluded in secret in Beijing. This "General Logistics Department official holding the rank of lieutenant general" was likely none other than Lieutenant General Sun Dafa, political commissar of the General Logistics Department.

The CCP's military is the most corrupt institution in China -- it will smuggle anything for money, even using warships and aircraft for armed smuggling operations. Some drug- and human-trafficking criminal gangs have discovered that "smuggling organs is more profitable than smuggling drugs" -- but the military discovered this long ago (the CCP was already cultivating and smuggling drugs back in its Yan'an days). All the more so given that the CCP's Central Military Commission had long since issued directives calling for "revolutionary treatment" of serious offenders in keeping with economic development needs, allowing it not only to steal these people's organs on a massive scale, but to do so with even greater concealment and deceptiveness.

The CCP's state power, propped up by its military, has become the largest criminal organization in the world engaged in the theft of human organs.

2. China's Military Rakes in Huge Profits on the International Organ-Transplant "Market"

Because China has such a massive living organ bank, major hospitals, transplant centers, and military and armed-police hospitals controlled and managed by the government and the military openly solicit "business" internationally to earn huge profits. Every year, more than 10,000 overseas transplant patients flood into mainland China in droves, coming from South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Israel, Egypt, Europe, Australia, and Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. According to Voice of America, citing testimony given to the U.S. Congress by a Chinese doctor named Wang Guoqi, China's military reaps enormous profits from the illegal trade in human organs.

The massive "living organ bank" made up of healthy, living Falun Gong practitioners serves as a "pregnancy machine," with their healthy hearts, livers, kidneys, spleens, corneas, and other organs openly priced on websites -- for example, $62,000 for a kidney, $98,000 to $130,000 for a liver, $160,000 to $180,000 for a combined liver-kidney transplant, $150,000 for a combined kidney-pancreas transplant, $150,000 to $170,000 for a lung, $130,000 to $160,000 for a heart, and $30,000 for a cornea -- and sold at high prices to patients from other countries needing organ transplants (domestic patients pay lower prices). In Taiwan, middlemen even emerged who arrange for patients to travel to the mainland for organ transplants, collecting commissions that can run as high as $15,000.

When a patient needs a transplant, their blood-test data is entered into a computer; when the patient's blood type matches the blood sample of a particular Falun Gong practitioner in the living organ bank, that practitioner is identified as the donor source. According to the process disclosed by the "veteran military doctor," it generally works as follows: a Falun Gong practitioner identified for an organ transplant is often taken from a prison, labor camp, detention center, or camp, at which point they lose their name entirely, retaining only a code number, which corresponds to a fabricated "volunteer" who supposedly consented to the organ transplant. The practitioner is then told they will undergo a physical examination, followed by local anesthesia, and then the live extraction of organs -- the needed organs are removed and transplanted into the patient's body. Finally, the body is cremated to destroy the evidence, vanishing from the world forever. According to insiders, the scene of live organ extraction is exceedingly gruesome; doctors who do it repeatedly grow numb to it. Because these doctors, police officers, and others know too much about this dark secret, there are reports that they may themselves become targets for elimination to silence them.

According to the Chosun Ilbo, as many as 1,000 South Koreans alone travel to the mainland each year to receive organ transplants. Israeli media have reported that about 30 Israelis travel to mainland China each month for organ transplant surgery. Investigators have found that in Taiwan, preliminary estimates suggest that 3,000 to 5,000 people a year are brought to the mainland by intermediaries for transplant surgery.

Britain's The Independent reported on March 21, 2006, that due to a shortage of organs available for transplant in Japan, many wealthy patients suffering from serious illnesses, having exhausted all other options, resort to the black market to purchase living organs from China. In 2004 alone, more than 100 Japanese traveled to China to receive organ transplant surgery.

Patients at the "Zhejiang Provincial People's Hospital" in Hangzhou come from all over the world -- white, Black, as well as South Korean, Japanese, and others.

Eighty-five percent of the organ-transplant patients at the Tianjin Oriental Organ Transplant Center come from overseas, mostly from nearly twenty countries and regions including South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan.

...

This disguised form of smuggling is managed and orchestrated behind the scenes by the military; China's judicial, procuratorial, and public security organs, hospitals, military, and armed police act together to murder innocent people, steal their organs, and then sell them internationally. Any individual or organized-crime gang pales in comparison to smuggling on the scale of the Chinese military. This is an unprecedented state crime. The international community likewise bears a responsibility to put a stop to this "evil that has never before existed on this planet."

3. Exporting the Living and the Dead

The "veteran military doctor" also disclosed that China uses Falun Gong practitioners to conduct "live exports": "Everyone knows China exports a great many products, but among China's exports there is also a massive export of living people. So-called 'live export' means that forces both inside and outside the country work together to sell qualifying individuals abroad as commodities, where organ transplants are performed on foreign soil; afterward, the body is likewise cremated (note: China maintains organizations overseas specifically dedicated to disposing of the bodies of those subjected to live transplants abroad, and many Chinese embassies and consulates overseas are involved in this). Among all export products connected to living human beings, China's output ranks first in the world."

Almost all of these exported living people are accompanied by forged consent documents; the specific methods are unclear, but what is known is that approximately 1,000 living people were exported in 2005."

At first hearing, "live export" sounds even harder to believe, yet reality is brutal. As mentioned earlier, Voice of America reported back in 2002 that Italian officials had investigated sixteen Chinese criminal organizations, finding that they smuggled human organs, and that some people forced to undergo organ-removal surgery disappeared entirely. This is consistent in nature with the secret "live export" disclosed by the "veteran military doctor" -- the only thing not yet known is whether these Chinese criminal organizations were secretly working together with the Chinese military (or other government departments) to carry out this "live export."

There are also other locations, such as a cadaver-processing plant in Dalian, Liaoning Province, which exports processed corpses abroad; and the anatomy department of Harbin Medical University in Heilongjiang Province, which secretly sold cadavers both domestically and internationally, a practice that was exposed after being discovered by local residents...

VIII. Other New Developments

1. Organ Transplants Incorporated into "Medical Insurance"

The Morning News reported on July 14, 2006 that seven Grade-A tertiary hospitals in Shanghai -- Zhongshan, Huashan, Ruijin, Renji, Changhai, Changzheng, and Shanghai First People's Hospital -- would henceforth have their kidney-transplant surgeries covered under the medical insurance scheme. Xinhua News Agency reported from Shanghai on July 12, 2006 that, starting July 15, hematopoietic stem cell transplant treatment would be included within the scope of Shanghai's basic medical insurance coverage, meaning the out-of-pocket medical costs for bone-marrow transplant patients were expected to drop by a third, or even half.

The New Express reported on September 6, 2005 that, given Guangdong's status as the province with the highest number of hepatitis B cases nationwide -- earning it the label of a "major liver-disease province" -- the provincial Department of Labor and Social Security was urgently conducting research and calculations, aiming to obtain approval from the national labor and social security authorities as soon as possible to include liver-transplant surgery, which can extend the lives of end-stage liver disease patients, along with post-operative anti-rejection medication costs, within the scope of public healthcare and basic medical insurance reimbursement. Southern Daily reported on July 21, 2006 that Shenzhen had become the first city in the country to include heart transplants, liver transplants, and cellular immunotherapy for malignant tumors as three items covered under its local supplementary medical insurance program.

Because organ-transplant costs are so high, many patients cannot afford them. Guangdong and Shanghai have begun including some organ-transplant costs within the scope of medical insurance, which will substantially reduce patients' out-of-pocket costs -- and this will encourage more patients to seek organ-transplant surgery, increasing demand for organs. Given that China currently disregards the World Health Organization's international guidelines entirely, this will only worsen the theft of human organs.

2. The "Living Organ Bank" May Have Gained New Members: Religious Believers

Underground churches are common in many parts of China, and public security police have long kept them under strict surveillance. The recent, noticeable increase in incidents of persecution against underground churches reflects the authorities' fear of religious freedom. According to the "veteran military doctor," the May "Central Military Commission Conference on Handling Foreign-Related Religious Issues" announced, for the first time, that "stubborn and unrepentant" believers of Christianity, Catholicism, Islam, Eastern Orthodoxy, and other faiths outside government control would be treated the same as Falun Gong believers, and declared a severe crackdown on foreign-linked religious organizations, with severe sanctions, in accordance with relevant regulations, for organizations that are repeatedly disbanded yet stubbornly continue their activities and refuse to submit to control.

This news shows that the CCP has once again expanded its definition of "class enemies," elevating believers of Christianity, Catholicism, Islam, Eastern Orthodoxy, and other faiths not under CCP control to the same "class enemy" status as Falun Gong, and will subject them to "severe sanctions."

Recent reports confirm that the CCP has intensified its crackdown on underground churches. For example, recently (mid-October 2006), CCTV's midday news reported that grassroots units nationwide were to station dedicated personnel responsible for organizing and monitoring activities related to evangelizing and Falun Gong.

Radio Free Asia reported that Pastor Zhang Rongliang, leader of the Fangcheng Church -- said to be China's largest underground Christian church -- was sentenced by a court in Henan Province in late June of this year (2006) to seven and a half years in prison on a charge of carrying forged identification documents. Overseas observers monitoring religious conditions in China believe this charge is merely a pretext for persecuting religious figures. The U.S.-based Cardinal Kung Foundation said on September 30 that Chinese police had arrested two clergy members from an underground church in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, in Shenzhen. According to reports, the two priests had just returned to China from Europe and were arrested by police shortly after entering the country through Shenzhen.

So, under the CCP's "relevant regulations," devout believers of the faiths singled out by the Central Military Commission now appear to have become candidates for the "living organ bank" as well -- and some may already have unfortunately become its newest members.

Postscript

Analysts point out that, of China's massive volume of organ transplants, less than 1 percent of organ sources are legitimate, while 99 percent are problematic or of unknown origin, failing to meet the World Health Organization's 1991 international standards. In other words, the overwhelming majority of organ sources for transplants in China are illegal, constituting a state crime led by the military and coordinated by the government through the joint participation of the judicial, procuratorial, and public security organs and hospitals.

Some may feel that the Communist Party's live extraction of organs from Falun Gong practitioners has nothing to do with them personally. In fact, this massive organ trade, conducted in defiance of international norms, has a great deal to do with every single person:

The Communist Party continues, openly or covertly, to crack down on "the five percent who are class enemies," and one never knows when one might oneself become part of that "five percent." The CCP's expanded crackdown on believers of Christianity, Catholicism, Islam, Eastern Orthodoxy, and other faiths is just the most recent example.

Organ transplantation in China is steeped in blood and crime: women, children, and other vulnerable groups in society become targets for kidnappers who steal their organs; unscrupulous doctors steal organs from patients after death; organs are extracted from death-row prisoners; and organs are extracted alive from Falun Gong practitioners, who constitute the primary source. These victims span every level of society -- which means that every person's family members, relatives, and friends are all potential victims.

The CCP's theft of human organs concerns not only every Chinese person, but the civilization and moral conscience of all humanity. People all over the world must stand up against the CCP's theft of human organs and put a stop to this state crime.