This exhaustive article goes through the chronology of how two Canadians aroused worldwide suspicions that China is killing members of the Falun Gong and selling their organs, corneas, et. al. to the highest bidders. The only thing new and the reason I link to it is the transcript of phone conversations the Canadians held (or allegedly held) with the gatekeepers of China’s organs-for-sale industry.
As part of their report alleging that China was executing Falun Gong prisoners and harvesting their organs for transplantation, Canadian lawyers and human rights activists David Kilgour and David Matas included transcripts of telephone calls made by Mandarin Chinese speakers from North America to hospitals and other institutions in China. The callers inquired about the availability of organs from Falun Gong prisoners. The caller below is identified only as “M” to protect his or her identity. Excerpts from English translations of some of the transcripts follow:
From a call to “Li” at the Mijiang City Detention Center in Heilongjiang Province (June 8, 2006):
M: Do you have Falun Gong [organ] suppliers? …
Li: We used to have, yes.
M: What about now?
Li: … Yes.
…
M: Can we come to select, or you provide directly to us?Li: We provide them to you.
M: What about the price?
Li: We discuss after you come.
…
From a call to Shanghai’s Zhongshan Hospital Organ Transplant Clinic (March 16, 2006):M: … So how long do I have to wait [for organ transplant surgery]?
Doctor: About a week after you come….
M: Is there the kind of organs that come from Falun Gong? I heard that they are very good.
Doctor: All of ours are those types.
Read the article to see just how much credibility this story has gained, and to see how poor a job the Chinese government has done in disproving the charges.
In a phone call, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Li Jianhua, also called the allegations “totally fake” and said the Chinese government had already investigated the claims and found them meritless.
But by immediately dismissing their report “out of hand,” Kilgour and Mr. Matas said in a reply, the Chinese government has admitted that it has conducted “no investigations to determine whether or not what the report contains is true.”
Come on – at least pretend to hold an invstigation, and then announce that all the allegations are false. This sort of cavalier dismissal only increases suspicion.
1
By michael
Not that I trust the authorities there an inch, but these transcripts prove nothing. We all know that when you ask a Chinese seller something about their wares they will always tell the customer what they want to hear.
Is this a real Ming vase?
Yes
From Jingdezhen? I hear they are very good …
That’s where all our vases come from.
August 3, 2006 @ 4:48 am | Comment
2
By Brendan
Interesting — the CSM usually has some of the best China coverage out there – perhaps the best, in fact, in US media. But then you get this:
The Falun Gong movement, whose guiding principles are truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, was founded in China in 1992 by Li Hongzhi, who now lives in the United States. Its philosophies incorporate ideas from Buddhism and Taoism and include slow-motion meditative exercises.
And you totally lose me. I don’t care if all Falun Gong members are adorable little bunny rabbits being oppressed by the big, bad Chinese government; it’s still a wackball cult that recruits aggressively, worms its way into overseas communities, and consciously spreads disinformation, slanders, and flat-out lies through its own channels (the Epoch Times, New Tang Dynasty TV, etc.) and credulous crackers like whoever wrote this article.
August 3, 2006 @ 4:58 am | Comment
3
By richard
I’ve always said pretty much the same about the FLG – they give me the creeps. But then, if it’s in the CSM, how can it be denied?
August 3, 2006 @ 5:01 am | Comment
4
By richard
Brendan, this is interesting – I think they cut and pasted that from somewhere.
August 3, 2006 @ 5:03 am | Comment
5
By richard
Michael, I agree the transcripts prove nothing. But they’re funny.
August 3, 2006 @ 5:04 am | Comment
6
By Pete
I can only assume that people in China are somewhat intelligent and that when receiving an anonymous phone call would say the organs are from car crash victims or something like that. I think the organ harvesting from coerced prisoners is a little more believable though.
August 3, 2006 @ 6:39 am | Comment
7
By Aramel
Hmm… I wonder about that transcript. I’d expected them to say “What do you mean? I’m sorry, I don’t follow you.” and such. Not to cough up at once (if this did happen. FLG’s known for exaggeration). But if this is true… FLG freaks me out (actually, most religions do at some point or other) but it would be terrible if they were having their organs harvested without consent. I mean, I don’t object to being cut up after I’m dead if it can help someone living (I won’t be able to feel anything anyway) but apparently in China, doctors don’t work as hard to save organ donors. 🙁 Sorry, off-topic. But nobody should get their organs harvested without consent.
August 3, 2006 @ 6:44 am | Comment
8
By Michael Turton
ROFL. I have to go with Brendan. FLG has such a long history of lying that it is impossible for me to believe these transcripts.
August 3, 2006 @ 8:57 am | Comment
9
By skystreaker
I wouldn’ be surprised if the conversation were true. But why didn’t they just record the conversation? Be so much more convincing.
August 3, 2006 @ 9:43 am | Comment
10
By Jing
Does anyone know the telephone numbers that they actually dialled and the person who answered the phone?
I mean you can call me and I can answer in Chinese that I’m selling organs harvested from Falun Dafa people. Doesn’t make it neccessarily true.
August 3, 2006 @ 10:14 am | Comment
11
By orb
There really is not much of a wait for corneal transplants in the US. The delays are primarily for tissue matching and and patient testing. The US eye banks are pretty efficient.
August 3, 2006 @ 10:48 am | Comment
12
By zhu hongbing
Hi, guys. I was coming from China and now work in Singapore.
FLG media does offen tell lies(often very funny lies). Even they provided the record voice, that is not difficult for them to do. they can just ask their members to pretend to be a doctor and accpect the incoming call.
and I am from the “heilongjiang province” metioned in the transcript. But in my mind, I am sure there is not “Mijiang city” in my province.
don’t fool by FLG. FLG’s master “Lihonhzhi” said our earth had been destoryed 9 times and would be destoried 10th time in 1999. and in 2000, he claimed he prevent the earth to be destoried in 1999. My dear!!
August 3, 2006 @ 11:32 am | Comment
13
By skystreaker
It doesn’t matter what the FLG says about their religion. People believe in Fen Shwae, and astrology. Those raised without a free media are also likely to have perspectives farthest from reality. It doesn’t mean you should get your orgnans pulled out for it.
The focus here is on the investigation of the CSM.
August 3, 2006 @ 12:45 pm | Comment
14
By abc
Hi Hongbing,
I think you don’t tell truth here. I once curiously read the FLG book and found all of what it writes is just to tell people to be nice and tolerant, I never found the words you mentioned as our earth will be destroied 10th time in 1999. Have you found it by yourself? I read the book by myself, and I didn’t find.
As for the report, I read it carefully. Here is the linkage, http://investigation.go.saveinter.net/ , if you are really interested in knowing what is truth, I suggest you read it with your logic sense rather than with the emtions.
For skystreaker,
According to my medical knowledge, the normal wait time for finding a matching liver here is North America is usually 2 years, but those hospitals in China publicly boast in their website that they could find a matching organ for a patient as quick as even within a week! The normal time to reserve a fresh organ is within 48 hours. It would be impossible if without a large bank of alive people waiting to be butched at any time. Most hopitals removed those words from their current websites after the allegations come out, but it is still can be found in their archive, just give you one example, you could find the following words in this linkage:
http://archive.edoors.com/render.php?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fen.zoukiishoku.com%2Flist%2Fqa2.htm&x=19&y=11
“When you want to apply for organ , you should make a payment US$5,000 to our appointed account .Once we confirm the money has been deposited in our account , we can put forward a formal organ application . It may take only one week to find out the suitable donor, the maximum time being one month because the kidney transplant needs to find a HLA tissue match ”
Again, I suggest you all guys to read the report carefully, and then judge it with the logic reasoning.
August 3, 2006 @ 12:51 pm | Comment
15
By Raj
skystreaker makes a good point that unsympathetic Chinese should take to heart.
Just because you believe in something strange doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be treated like any other human being.
August 3, 2006 @ 4:21 pm | Comment
16
By skystreaker
abc, I’ve never seen that before. That’s some fucked up shit. Reminds me of that movie “The Island.” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399201/plotsummary
August 3, 2006 @ 6:51 pm | Comment
17
By Ivan
Mm, well as I’ve often said, for the Communists to call the FLG “superstitious” is really the pot calling the kettle black.”
August 3, 2006 @ 7:39 pm | Comment
18
By t_co
At least the CCP is enlightened enough not to believe it’s own superstitions.
August 3, 2006 @ 9:24 pm | Comment
19
By skystreaker
Too bad the CCP’s not enlightened enough to not harvest organs from those who are not as enlightened.
Am I the only one that finds abc’s link alarming? I’ve heard reports saying that China’s able to get matches too quickly for this not to be a harvesting scheme. But if this is a cache from an actual oragnization handling organ transplants from China, it’s sickening.
August 3, 2006 @ 10:58 pm | Comment
20
By Thomas
I don’t think the truth is 100-percent important in this case. It is the perception of the truth that matters. I don’t doubt that something like this could happen, and I don’t blindly think it is happening either. But to foreign readers, the Canadian reporters are more trustworthy than the big bad Chinese gov’t. And the outright denials of the officials, without any transparent investigation, only add to the perception that they are lying.
The real problem is the lack of transparency on the Chinese side. If they could conduct a fair and open investigation to disprove the claims of the Canadians and the FLG, this might not be an issue. Unfortunately for the Chinese, being so transparent, even if they are/were telling the truth, would turn even more of a spotlight to the FLG, and their repression in China. This is why, true or not, the creepy, yet media-savvy FLG has won yet another round. The Chinese deny w/o apparent investigation = the FLG must be telling the truth.
August 3, 2006 @ 11:07 pm | Comment
21
By Ivan
t-co,
The CCP do believe in their own superstition. Their superstition is economic determinism, the same as yours.
August 3, 2006 @ 11:19 pm | Comment
22
By zhu hongbing
abc,
I think a lot of western medias are fooled by FLG’s lies. In Chinese sociaty, seldom people believe what FLG said.
and when I see the CNN news everyday, I will believe the China/Russia is hell.
I think there must be some Chinese people around you. You can ask them whether they trust what FLG said.
Because you are not a Chinese speaking, you don’t really know what or how the Chinese think.
If say the organs were from the crimal man who were sentenced to death, I may believe it. But if say the organ is taken from the living man, it is too ludicrous.
and could you find the “MiJiang city” in Heilongjiang?
August 4, 2006 @ 1:01 am | Comment
23
By zhu hongbing
abc,
About the earth has been destroyed 9 times, I watched a video clip about LiHongzhi’s addressing to FLG members very long time ago.
August 4, 2006 @ 1:05 am | Comment
24
By zhu hongbing
moreover, when I talked to a FLG member in QQ(most popular chat software in China), I asked: will you trust all the word what the master Li(Li Hongzhi) said? She replyed: “absolutely yes!”. Then I think I knows everything about FLG. becaues the members think their master is not human being, and he is GOD.
August 4, 2006 @ 1:11 am | Comment
25
By richard
Everyone here is completely familiar with the FLG’s and the CCP’s bullshit (and the GOP’s, while we’re at it). No one here believes the Epoch Times propaganda. However, this story is being supported by established mainstream media and is receiving international attention. If it proves nothing else, it shows the FLG is superb at public relations.
August 4, 2006 @ 1:13 am | Comment
26
By Aramel
FLG have got some seriously subtle people– unlike some organizations I could name. 😛
Because you are not a Chinese speaking, you don’t really know what or how the Chinese think.
The old argument again. Hongbing, I mean no offense, but how can you be sure that Abc isn’t Chinese? Because he disagrees with you? Because he writes in English? I’m afraid I don’t understand your reasoning (and don’t try that one on me, please).
August 4, 2006 @ 3:46 am | Comment
27
By The Iron Buddha
Write on Aramel.
The flip side to “no forienger can ever really understand all the complexities and intricacies of China” is “no Chinese person can ever really comprehend how much foreigners know about China.”
August 4, 2006 @ 6:09 am | Comment
28
By Lu
“hospitals in China publicly boast in their website that they could find a matching organ for a patient as quick as even within a week! The normal time to reserve a fresh organ is within 48 hours.”
They do boast that, but it would be interesting to see if they really are that creepily fast, or if it does in fact take longer.
Doesn’t the Chinese government harvest organs from criminals who have been put to death? And if they do that, why wouldn’t they also harvest from FLG-ers that have been put to death? And why would that be worse?
August 4, 2006 @ 8:51 am | Comment
29
By davesgonechina
I’ve read the report a couple of times now, and I’m thinking about fisking it on my blog. Basically, I seriously question Matas and Kilgours argumentative structure. For example, this sentence doesn’t make any sense to me:
“Many of the pieces of evidence we considered, in themselves, do not constitute ironclad proof of the allegation. But their non-existence might well have constituted disproof.”
So… if there had been no bloody footprints, it would’ve proved OJ innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt? How does a lack of evidence constitute disproof? I know nothing, therefore I can prove something is not true? This is rhetorical gibberish.
Many of us are aware of the network of FLG media, including Epoch, NTDTV, and a plethora of websites in multiple languages – links to all of which are provided at the bottom of the CIPFG webpage. CIPFG being the organization that asked Matas and Kilgour to investigate. They are known to be managed and paid for by practitioners who are not transparent at all about where funding comes from. Their Chinese language publications make far more outlandish claims than their English ones.
Kilgour and Matas refer to these phone calls, but do not make clear what the two “investigators” relationship, if any, is to FLG organizations, or otherwise how they came in contact with these people. They say they met with the callers to discuss the timing and routing of the calls, but apparently made no follow-up calls to verify the numbers or identities of the people who answered the phone. Neither, despite their political experience, do they attempt to confirm such phone calls were actually made (the Canadian phone system has records, I assume). Though asked to conduct the investigation by the CIPFG, they claim to have conducted it independently. Yet it is unclear if any of their testimony was found without the assistance of these organizations, or what affiliation the “surgeons wife” or the two phone callers had to these organizations. Considering the obvious political goals of these groups, as blatantly announced by the “Nine Commentaries” that are routinely regurgitated at every one of these organizations websites, newspapers and television programs.
My favorite part is where they address skeptics. I have to quote in full.
“In the course of our work, we have come across a number of people sceptical of the allegations. This scepticism has a number of different causes. Some of the scepticism reminds of the statement of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter 1943 to a Polish diplomat in reaction to being told by Jan Karski about the Holocaust. Frankfurter said:
“I did not say that this young man was lying. I said that I was unable to believe what he told me. There is a difference.””
“The allegations here are so shocking that they are almost impossible to believe. The allegations, if true, would represent a grotesque form of evil which, despite all the depravations humanity has seen, would be new to this planet. The very horror makes us reel back in disbelief. But that disbelief does not mean that the allegations are untrue.”
Right. So the only skeptic worth responding to, apparently, is comparable to a Holocaust skeptic. Someone overwhelmed by the “grotesque form of evil” involved. The hyperbole of calling it a “new” evil is enough to overwhelm anybody – who wants to be in support of a new super-evil? Never mind there are other forms of skepticism, such as wondering where they found these people who make these claims, how much information was provided by CIPFG, why CIPFG belongs to a network of organizations that echo each others words like some conservative American bloggers I could mention, and how they get off saying that while they don’t have enough evidence to prove or disprove the allegations, that they still came to the conclusion it is true. This is not the work of lawyers or logicians. This is lobbying.
August 4, 2006 @ 10:36 am | Comment
30
By greendwarf
First, I am not religious and I have no opinion on FLG as a religion. I guess every religion has something its followers blindly believe. In that sense, earth being destroyed and rebuilt N times isn’t a bit less conceivable than the world being created in 7 days. I happen to have watched a littel New Tang Dynasty TV (for those who don’t konw, it’s a pro-FLG tv station in US), all I can say is that their willingness to exaggerate (or maybe even lie) to serve their agenda is on par with CCP. FLG also has a newpaper distributed freely here in the US, and one of its ongoing headlines is “### (numbers) CCP members have openly denounced and quit the party”. Last time I checked, the number was above 10 millions. Anyone with a little common sense knows that can’t be true. ok, I know Chinese government is not the good guy, and FLG members are being persecuted. But come on, FLG, telling lies doesn’t help stop persecution. Aren’t facts powerful enough?
August 8, 2006 @ 6:53 pm | Comment
31
By kevin
to Zhu Hongbing:
Perhaps google was blocked?
If you want to find Mijiang in HLJ, all you need is google. It took me a grand total of 5 seconds!
MiJiang Village,HaiLin,MuDanJiang,Heilongjiang
August 9, 2006 @ 10:10 pm | Comment
32
By zhu hongbing
To Kevin:
please refer to this:
http://www.time.com/time/asia/asia/magazine/1999/990510/interview1.html
Mijiang is just a village, it is not a city. so I got why I didn’t know it.
I will check with it.
September 4, 2006 @ 3:50 am | Comment
33
By zhu hongbing
To Kevin:
http://www.time.com/time/asia/asia/magazine/1999/990510/interview1.html
September 4, 2006 @ 3:51 am | Comment