Taipei, Taiwan: Taiwan’s legislators (equivalent to members of the National Assembly) and private organizations held a press conference on March 15, calling for legislation to control “organ harvesting” and illegal organ transplants in China without the consent of the donors. At the conference, Dr. Zheng Ji, a former Chinese doctor and resident of Canada, gave a graphic account of organ harvesting that he witnessed firsthand at a Chinese military hospital.
According to Zheng, in 1994, when he was working as a clinical intern at the General Hospital of Shenyang Military District (now the General Hospital of the Northern War Zone) in Liaoning Province, he was ordered by his superiors to participate in a “secret military mission. The operation was to remove organs from soldiers under the age of 18 at the time and transplant them into high-ranking military officials.
The operation took place in a vehicle that had been converted for organ harvesting. A young soldier, his hands and feet bound, was carried from a military prison into the vehicle, and his right and left kidneys were removed without the use of anesthesia. Zheng said he was ordered to remove his eyeballs, but he was too afraid to do anything, so another doctor did it. The soldier’s eyes were still moving and he was staring at me,” Zheng recalled, choking on his words.
It has been pointed out that the alleged “organ harvesting” by the Chinese authorities targets followers of Falun Gong, a qigong group that the authorities consider to be an evil religion. In 2005, Zheng was told by an aide to a member of the Communist Party Politburo, who was close to his family, that “the basement of the provincial public security bureau in Wuhan, Hubei Province, is crammed with Falun Gong followers, some of whom are minors.
Shocked by this situation, Zheng left the country that same year and was taken into custody by the Canadian government.
A report compiled by former Canadian ministers and lawyers in 2004 estimated that the Chinese authorities are performing 60,000 to 100,000 organ transplants annually, and pointed out that the sources of organs are Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Falun Gong followers. In addition, in 2009, the UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur asked the Chinese government to accept an independent investigation into concerns that Chinese authorities are removing organs from prisoners without their consent, but the Chinese side denied the request and refused to investigate.
