American Thought Leaders - What the First Known Survivor of China’s Forced Organ Harvesting Reveals: David Matas

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

The first known survivor of China’s state-run forced organ harvesting regime recently went public with his story in Washington.Peiming Cheng, who was imprisoned for 8 years and brutally tortured for practicing Falun Gong, was also forced to undergo surgery in November 2004. He woke up with a foot-long scar across his side.Subsequent comprehensive medical examinations revealed he was missing a large part of his liver and a portion of his left lung.And in a stunning admission, the Chinese regime has recently publicly acknowledged doctors operated on Cheng without his consent—supposedly to save his life.So what is the significance of this case? And what’s next?In this episode, I sit down with international human rights lawyer David Matas, who was among the first to independently investigate allegations of forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners in China.I also speak to Robert Destro, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and was instrumental in getting Cheng to America; former Congressman Frank Wolf, a fierce champion of human rights in his three decades in Congress; and Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Hudson Institute.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guests, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The first known survivor of China's state-run forced organ harvesting regime recently went public with his story in Washington, D.C. Back in November of 2004, Falun Gong practitioner Pei Ming Cheng was forced to undergo surgery and woke up with a foot-long scar across his side. As we were able to get Mr. Cheng here in the United States, we were able to get independent experts to look inside and see what's missing. Comprehensive medical examinations revealed he was missing a big part of his liver and

a portion of his left lung. So what is the significance of this case? And what's next? In this episode, I speak with international human rights lawyer David Matys, as well as several other leading human rights experts and advocates. This machine is eating up the Chinese population sort of group by group. Matis was among the first to independently investigate allegations of forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners. If there are any American institutions involved, they should be told to stop. And if they do not stop, then there ought to be litigation against them. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.

David Matis, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Glad to be back. So David, never in a million years did I expect that I would meet an actual survivor of forced organ harvesting, of this barbaric practice that the Chinese regime has been involved in for decades. Tell me about Mr. Cheng's case. I could see in terms of the raw data, there's something there, because he's obviously a Falun Gong practitioner. He's obviously been organ and harvested because we've got the medical reports. I mean, the x-rays don't lie. And so I spent a fair amount of time basically just kind of getting the chronology, the names, the dates, and so on. It really is unusual for someone to survive. And

one of the problems we dealt with is the lack of media attention commensurate with the gravity of the problem. And nobody can talk about it that's an actual victim, because all the victims are dead, nobody's autopsy and so on. The conclusions we reached are the result of putting together a lot of different pieces of evidence. And the problem that we faced in communicating the issue is not too little evidence, it's too much. I mean, we've got thousands of footnotes,

hundreds of pages, which together tell you the story. You can't pick out a sentence here and say, that's it. But with him, it's very simple. This happened to me. On September 4th, survivor Pei Mingcheng publicly responded to and challenged the Chinese regime's bizarre assertion that it operated on him for his own good. In a stunning admission, the Chinese regime has recently publicly acknowledged that its doctors operated on Cheng without his consent while he was imprisoned for practicing Falun Gong. They claim it was to save his life. My name is Peiming Cheng. In November 2004, I was forcibly taken from Daxing Prison to the Forest Hospital of Daxing,

where they did a surgery on me. This is my surgery scar. It's 35 centimeters long. Today as I stand here, I may appear normal. I walk and speak normally. But in reality, I can never return to the person I once was. My left side is in constant pain, and it throbs with every beat of my pulse. At night, I struggle to breathe when I lie down, and it is truly unbearable.

Pei Mingcheng was able to come to America with the help of former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Robert Destro. What did it take to get Mr. Cheng here? Because I understand there was a bounty on his head. There was a bounty on his head. He was hiding in Thailand. And when I heard about the case, I said, well, let's get him out. And so we had to negotiate with the Thai government because he wasn't in Thailand legally. So we got him out, and we brought him here, and the rest is history.

We put him through extensive medical testing and imaging and everything else, and it's pretty clear consensus that they took stuff out. We are now confirming the suspicions we've had for all these years that Mr. Chang was a victim of forced organ harvesting. We now know that and the Chinese have confirmed the details. Well so explain to me about that. How is it that they could have possibly confirmed the details? Well they confirmed that the

surgery happened. You know they confirmed where it happened. They confirmed when it happened. And what we were able to do, because we were able to get Mr. Cheng here in the United States, we were able to get independent experts to look inside and see what's missing. We confirmed that part. So what did it take? At the time, Cheng had been serving an eight-year sentence and had endured extreme torture and repeated electric shocks.

The Chinese regime claims the surgery was to help him after Cheng, in protest of his persecution, swallowed a small blunt nail and blade. But medical experts say there's no reasonable scenario where the operation, which removed significant portions of Cheng's liver and lung, could have been to retrieve such swallowed items. As the record shows, they didn't need to go into his side, all the way around his back and through his chest. They could have gone down into his esophagus with an endoscope and pulled everything out. They were fishing. You, of course, are speaking to the sort of official...

The official narrative, yes. Is it surprising to you that there was any official narrative at all? Yes, I'm amazed that there's any official narrative at all. They've engaged on the conversation. And as we lawyers would say, that's an admission against interest. Among those who are now speaking up for Chung's case is international human rights lawyer Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Hudson Institute. It's immensely important to have an actual survivor come forward and publicly state that he has been a victim

of forced organ harvesting and to have the medical scans and doctor testimony that that is hard evidence and that's direct evidence, it's not circumstantial. And then to have this odd response, this really quite damning response by the security police and the Chinese government, that he was in fact a prisoner, he was in fact in a hospital,

he was in fact subject to, he was in fact in a hospital, he was in fact subject to surgery without consent, his consent. It's damning. How could it be that he is alive, right? The protocol is basically to get rid of the evidence, right? And he's a living embodiment of the evidence that the Chinese regime never wants to have see the light. Well, he was in a hospital twice. The first time he had organs extracted. The second time, I really think his life was in danger.

If he hadn't escaped, I don't think he'd be alive today. I mean, there are other people who escaped from China and escaped from detention and so on. I think what's unusual about him is not so much that he escaped, but that he was only partially organ harvested, that he survived the organ extraction. People are basically being systematically killed through organ extraction, even when it's not necessary for a particular organ to kill them. I would say that's what's unusual about him. The Chinese health system I don't think was killing Falun Gong practitioners to silence them. They were killing Falun Gong practitioners to silence them. They were killing Falun Gong practitioners to make money out of their bodies.

And what happened about why it was only partial in this hospital, I mean, it's really up to the Chinese government or the hospital to explain what they were doing. I mean, I'm in no position, and all I know for sure is a Falun Gong practitioner and organs are missing. That much is obvious, but one can speculate. Wendy Rogers, who's involved with this international coalition, she shared with the advisory board, she said maybe it was done a partial liver extraction because it

could be used for a child. Another possibility was just training, it was research, because this hospital is not a transplant hospital. What happened to him was unusual, unprecedented. And maybe they were just trying to figure out how to do it or trying to develop some techniques. You know, what you're describing is so macabre. Well, you have to realize, I mean, this is the problem with dealing with mass atrocities. We don't live in Canada and the United States surrounded by mass atrocities.

It's not part of our daily lives. It's quite the opposite. If somebody raises their voice, it strikes us as unusual. The problem is that very often people, instead of believing what they're seeing, seeing what they believe. Because people don't believe this could be happening or it's very hard to believe it's happening, they don't see it. I mean, communism isn't just the ideology of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China. The whole country is, from childhood, indoctrinated into communist ideologies. They see the world in a different way. So for what us would seem macabre, unusual, for China, under communism, it has become a matter of daily life.

And yes, this is a mass atrocity, but it's not the first one. a matter of daily life. Yes, this is a mass atrocity, but it's not the first one. There's Tiananmen Square, which didn't just happen at Tiananmen Square. I mean, it was a countrywide repression. There's the mass starvation. There's the Cultural Revolution.

I mean, China has had one series of mass atrocities after another. And cover-up, lying, pretense, immunity, it's just a repetition through which generations of people under communism have lived. And they just develop a different mindset as a result of it. So give me a little bit of background here about your work, how you got into human rights, into this specific discipline that you're involved in looking at mass atrocities. I started out being concerned about the Holocaust. I was born during the Holocaust in Winnipeg. By the time I got old enough to appreciate what had happened, I realized that neither I nor any other Jewish person would be alive today

but for the vagaries of war, the fact that the Allied rather than the Axis powers won World War II. And so my focus was trying to bring Nazi mass murderers to justice. After the war, the Nazi leaders just kind of spread out all over to get immunity, to escape from prosecution. It was easier after World War II for Nazi war criminals to get into Canada, the US and so on, than Jewish refugees to get in.

And the reality is I'm still working on that issue even today. The perpetrators are pretty well much too old now to be prosecuted, the few that are alive and most of them have passed on. But there's still a matter of getting access to the records. The work that I'm doing is trying to get hold of these Nazi war criminal records, not only the ones that were prosecuted, but the ones that never were prosecuted. Because there was maybe a few dozen that were prosecuted, but the number that came to Canada, historians estimate, were in the thousands.

So the question is, what do those records show about them? So that was one stream that got me into what I was doing. And then in my day-to-day refugee practice, I was doing refugee work. And so I became very involved in human rights NGOs, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, International Commission of Jurists, and so on. You were involved in writing the original report assessing this question of whether this forced organ harvesting was a thing in communist China in the first place.

Maybe briefly tell me about that and how that took you to the present day. Well, that all started off, this was 2006, and a woman with the pseudonym Annie made a public statement in Washington, D.C., that her ex-husband had been harvesting corneas from Falun Gong practitioners. Xu Jian Hospital in Shenyang City in Lienang Province, that other doctors at the hospital are harvesting other organs, that the organs were being sold to transplant tourists, that the bodies were cremated. Chinese government almost immediately after Annie said this publicly, denied what she was saying. There was this NGO, Coalition to Investigate Prosecution of Falun Gong, actually came to

David Kilgour, my colleague. They'd worked up a list of 20 people they thought could maybe do an independent research on this issue, and I was on the list. David Kilgour was on the list. And what we're told from the get-go is no victims to interview, no bodies to autopsy, no witnesses, just perpetrators and victims because of the closed surroundings, prisons and hospitals, no documents except government documents of prisons and hospital which they're not going to look at. And so the issue became for me not to establish that this was happening, but simply to determine whether it's true or not. And the coalition that asked us to

do it didn't give us any money, didn't give us any data, didn't give us any direction. They just asked us, as indeed many other human rights victim communities have asked me in the past to do. So what we did is not try to prove it, but either try to prove it or disprove it, rather than just leave it up in the air. And so what we did is we constructed evidentiary trails, both of proof and disprove. I mean, if you're going to disprove it, what would disprove it? If you're going to prove it, what would prove it?

And we had a whole bunch of them, 15, 20 of these evidentiary trails. And basically, in a nutshell, the evidentiary trails of disproof went nowhere, whereas the evidentiary trails of proof each on its own produced some evidence and put them all together. The answer was pretty clear that this was happening. At this point, it's pretty well established that this is real. There's been the China Tribunal. I think that was very

definitive. Ethan Gutmann and the slaughter. Your original reports were what convinced me back in the day. There's been multiple resolutions on this. There's legislation against it in some countries. And there's a lot of peer-reviewed academic articles that deal with particular aspects. And legally, Kirk Allison, Jay Levy, Matthew Robertson, Wendy Rogers. I mean, there's been a whole slew of academics and researchers writing on this subject. You just reminded me of one thing. You were talking about that the organ extraction is how people are killed, actually.

And there's a paper in the American Journal of Transplantation I was looking at recently where I think it's, they found out of a small sample of Chinese research articles, 72 instances where maybe unbeknownst to the people writing the papers, they were revealing that they had actually killed people through the process of organ extraction. Well, indeed. I mean, the transplantation profession has gotten so used to this that they don't even think of it as wrong.

I mean, Didi Kirsten Tatlow, a former reporter for the New York Times, she's talking to a couple of transplant doctors, Chinese interviewing them in English, and then they start talking to each other in Mandarin, which she knows and they don't know she knows. And one doctor says to the other, we can't talk about prisoners being killed for their organs. And the other doctor says,

are you talking just about prisoners sentenced to death or also prisoners of conscience too? You see, the Chinese government had set up this narrative because there was this huge boom in transplants after the persecution of Falun Gong began. And the original Chinese narrative was everything is coming from donations, even though there wasn't a donation system at the time.

And then with the boom, they realized- And death row prisoners, right? I remember we had some interviews of people who were told that it was a death row prisoner. Well, indeed. So then they switched the narrative from donations to death row prisoners. But basically, as far as I could tell, I mean, there were some, indeed, death row prisoners that were sourced,

but there wasn't a big boom in death row prisoners at the time the persecution of Palin Gong started. Quite the opposite. Numbers were going down because there's a law in China that says you have to execute seven days after sentence. And there was global pressure to cut down on the death penalty, which in fact happened. But the official narrative was death penalty prisoners, they didn't want to let anybody know about prisoners of conscience. Obviously, everybody in the system knew it, but they were expected not to talk about it. And so Didi, Kirsten, Tatlow, here's this conversation, one doctor

telling the other, don't talk about this, because it's not sort of official party propaganda to talk about it. So I mean, it's just you get these occasional leaks that show you what's going on. You've described this as an evil yet to be seen on this planet. You alluded to that idea earlier when we were talking. Where's the outrage? I mean, the problem is, to a certain extent, the newness. I mean, the capacity for good and evil is innate in all of us, but what changes over time is technology. And what made the Holocaust different from anti-semitism before, which had existed for millennia, was not anti-semitism itself, which was not new. It was trains, it was poison gas, it was tanks, it was radio, it was microphones.

I mean, these are the things that made the Holocaust what it was. And what made this a new form of evil was the development of transplant technology. I mean, the Holocaust itself, at the time it happened, people found it hard to believe. I mean, not just itself, at the time it happened, people found it hard to believe. I mean, not just the people on the street, but even very well-informed, articulate Jewish people. There was just Supreme Court of the United States, Frankfurter, who was presented with evidence of Auschwitz, says somebody who's, in fact, a Polish spy, Jan Karski, was telling

Frankfurt about it. He says, I don't believe you. And so the person who introduced Karski to Frankfurt, he said, this man is telling the truth. Frankfurt says, I didn't say he was lying. I just said, I don't believe you. And there's a similar attitude. Hannah Arendt at the time didn't believe it. And there's a similar attitude Hannah Arendt at the time didn't believe it. Raymond Aron didn't believe it. These are important Jewish philosophers. Rudolf Verba escaped from Auschwitz with plans of Auschwitz and was going around telling Jewish communities, look what's happening. Get out. Get away. Some people believed him and left. Other people didn't believe him, stayed, and were killed. And it's just, it seemed so out of sync

with what people had known and seen before that it was just incredible. And I think we see that, I mean, with each new form of technology. Now we're dealing with the internet, social media, artificial intelligence, and that's producing a whole new set of problems because of the same old penchant for doing good and bad that we've always had. One of the things we haven't talked about is the scale of this.

How long has it been going on, and what is, and how many transplants? I mean, and I know the exact numbers are very difficult. The scale, I mean, you don't have exact figures, but you can get some idea. At one time, there used to be four transplant registries in China, heart, liver, lung, and kidney, in different cities in China,

and one of them was in Hong Kong for liver. And then the other three didn't report aggregates publicly, but liver did. And after persecution of Falun Gong began, liver shot way up. The head of the liver transplant registry at the time was Haibo Wang, or Wang Haibo. After our report came out, aggregate figures disappeared. I see Wang Haibo at a conference, transplant conference, because I'm going to them, he's going to them. And I know he's head of the Liver Transplant Registry. I say, why did you cut off public access to aggregates?

He says, we didn't cut them off. You can have them. All you have to do is ask for them. And if you tell us why you want them and how you're going to use them, if you agree the way you're going to use the figures, you can have the figures. That's what he told me. And it's the same with the hospitals. In 2016, we had all the hospital figures.

I mean, on the websites, not that hard to get. I mean, you know, we didn't go to every hospital. There was 1,000 hospitals doing transplants. But there was 167 that were state-approved by that time. So the ones that weren't state-approved started to go underground. But the state-approved were still above ground and posting their figures. And so we just added those up, and we get 100,000. And then, of course, now.

Annually, right? Annually, yeah, 100,000 a year, yeah. And starting at $60,000 and then over the years going up to $100,000. Once we quote the data stream, it disappears. I mean, the same as when... I mean, after all, the selling of organs is a business. And it's hard to run a profitable business without telling people about your product. So they're caught in this kind of

in-between where they want and they're also proud of technological advancement. They like to boast about how they've developed transplantation, how they can offer transplantation and they don't even realize how they're implicating themselves when they do it until we quote them. Then they see it, and they take it away. So, I mean, it becomes over time harder and harder because the data streams disappear, and it's something we realize every time we quote something, we'll never be able to quote it again, so to speak.

We'll never be able to update what we found, because they're just going to stop talking about what we found. So what's problematic is not finding out what happened, but finding out the continuation. Once we publish, we find out what happened, but finding out the continuation once we publish what we find out what happened. So one of the things I keep thinking about, frankly, is this idea of never again. And that's, of course, in response to the Holocaust.

But not dealing with these kinds of issues, and this is my sort of self-reflection over time, not dealing with what we knew was happening, you know, as early as 2006. The effect is that this has spread to other groups. Well, no doubt about it. I mean, the Uyghurs, the big numbers for the Uyghurs didn't start until 2017. That's when the mass detention started. And with the Uyghurs, it was, I mean, partly there's the depletion of Falun Gong population through the mass killings for their organs, but it was also the development technology, the time the organs could survive outside the body. The... ECMO technology, right?

Well, the ECMO, the extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. But it wasn't only that. The refrigeration techniques developed. The liquid immersion techniques developed. So they were basically able to distribute organs throughout China from Xinjiang. What we saw with the Uyghurs is airport lanes in Xinjiang. The lanes had written on them, we could take pictures of them, reserved for transport of organs.

You know, it's the same phenomenon. The Chinese started boasting about this as technological advancement, that we're able to fly organs from Xinjiang throughout China until we noticed it, so they stopped talking about it. And that would not have happened if the Falun Gong abuse had been stopped. And there was a conference in Busan in South Korea

where there was talk about developing within Asia a transplantation system like in Europe. Within the European Union, you can get the organs moving around. And the Chinese were basically trying to promote that within Asia, which would mean, of course, prisoners of conscience organs going into South Korea and Japan, because there's a lot of transplant tourists now that go from Japan and South Korea to China. I've been going fairly regularly to Asia to talk about these issues. And now what I see is, well, of course, the Falun Gong show up,

the Uyghur show up, and the house Christians and the Tibetans. But what I've been seeing also now is that the Mongolians, which, you know, I mean, they're repressed, but I haven't seen evidence

of being killed for their organs, but they figure they're next. So this machine is eating up the Chinese population sort of group by group. In prison, we made a pact amongst us prisoners. Whoever survives must tell the world the truth about the persecution we endured. Today, I'm here not just to speak up for myself.

Many of the people who were with me in prison have died and can no longer speak up. Former Congressman Frank Wolf, a fierce defender of human rights in his three decades in Congress, says evidence of the Chinese regime killing prisoners for their organs has been known since as early as 1997. Yet Western leaders turned a blind eye. Harry Wu, who you may or may not remember, Harry came to me in 1997 to tell me and show me pictures what they were doing.

The Chinese government was going in and taking the blood type of prisoners and then people would fly in from the West and they would execute. Harry showed me pictures of the execution and they would give the transplant. And now it's increased and nobody's doing anything about it. And there are indications that they say that there are some American institutions involved. This has to stop. What do you think can be done about it right now? Well, you could get a trial firm, a trial law firm, or one of the human rights groups to bring suit against any American institution.

If there are any American institutions, they should be told to stop. And if they do not stop, then there ought to be litigation against them. You're killing people. There's legislation that's been passed in a number of countries. Actually, very, you mentioned Jacob Levy earlier, and he was instrumental in passing legislation that would prevent the social safety net for paying for organ transplants in China and Israel very early on. I forget what year it was. I think it was 2008 or 2009. He was the first. Recently, something very similar to that has been passed in three U.S. states that I'm

aware of. I think it was vetoed in Arizona. Now there's something in this realm that's actually been passed by the House called the Falun Gong Protection Act by voice vote, and now it's gone to the Senate. This is the first federal law around this issue that I'm aware of. I think that's right. There's a Stop Organ Harvesting Act, which also is passed the House of Representatives and before the Senate, but it's not enacted. It's still kicking around.

Indeed, I think Texas has passed an insurance law, and it's China-specific. I mean, Israeli law says you can't pay insurance if the person goes to a country and gets a transplant, and their laws are not comparable to Israeli laws. So China, although the target isn't specifically mentioned, but Texas actually mentions China and says you can't insure transplants in China. I think Utah has one like that, too. What is the value of passing such legislation? The federal legislation is more about sanctions against people

who will do it, at least the one that's kind of on the table right now. But what is the value of that? Yeah, the U.S. law is sanctions, immigration, and reporting. Increasing awareness, because I would say that most, well, most patients are not aware that somebody's being killed for their organs, and it may be wishful thinking, it may be willful blindness, but some of them, perhaps most of them,

genuinely believe that whatever fabricated story the Chinese communists come up with. It's not going to stop the system within China, but it would disincentivize people to go over to China for transplants. What's your hope for the exposure of this story now and this increased from before media attention, this legislation that's in Congress now? Just putting all those things together, what can be done with this, I guess, is my question. The wheels of justice and the wheels of human rights, they grind slowly, but they grind inexorably. And eventually, the system will catch up with the party.

Because the victimization will catch up with the party. Because ultimately, and you see this, I mean, it's not just communist China. It's victimization everywhere. I mean, basically what you're dealing with, with a repressive system is insiders and outsiders, and the insiders repress the outsiders, but nobody lasts forever.

Eventually, the outsiders become the insiders because they're the only ones left, and they don't want to continue with it anymore because they've seen the victimization, and it'll just collapse under the weight of its own harm. You ask what I hope happened. My own view is don't hope, don't predict, don't sit back and think about what the future will be. Make the future. Well, David Matis, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again.

Pleasure to talk to you. Thank you very much. Thank you all for joining David Matys and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.