American Thought Leaders - Why 28- and 29-Year-Olds Are Disappearing From China’s Uyghur Concentration Camps | Ethan Gutmann

Episode Date: April 11, 2026

For two decades, investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann has been researching how the Chinese Communist Party secretly harvests the organs of prisoners of conscience and kills them in the process.He authored the groundbreaking 2014 work “The Slaughter” and, more recently, “The Xinjiang Procedure.”In his latest book, he gathers evidence of how the regime—which has long targeted Falun Gong practitioners for their organs—is now exploiting captive Uyghurs for this same macabre industry.Gutmann traveled to Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkey to interview dozens of Uyghurs and Kazaks who had managed to escape after being imprisoned in camps in Xinjiang, China, also known as East Turkestan. Many spoke to him at great personal risk to themselves and their loved ones.What they revealed to him was nothing short of horrific.A central witness named “Samal” described working in one of four medical labs located several stories below the concentration camp. One of the clinics—the one she worked in—was used for intestinal removal.“The other three clinics were there to remove organs. You couldn’t see them, but occasionally the door would open. You‘d see somebody handling a kidney, a liver, and so forth. Every day that she worked there … there’d be eight or nine bodies. Sometimes it was as many as 20,” Gutmann said.During his research, Gutmann realized a disturbing pattern. Many of those who disappeared in the middle of the night from the camps were typically 28 or 29 years old.He believes the CCP has made this age demographic its primary target for forced organ harvesting.“You are at the peak of your health. At that point, your organs have stopped growing,” Gutmann says.In this episode, he breaks down the devastating evidence he’s uncovered—and the failure of Western institutions to address these crimes.The spread of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) technology—which keeps organs oxygenated and viable for many hours—has made the CCP’s organ trade even more lucrative than before.“Suddenly,” he told me, “you can pull a lot more organs off a single person and get them to distribute them around. And so the profit margin goes way up on a single human being from $100,000 up to almost a million dollars, if they were selling to foreigners.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

A woman named Samar, she describes a series of medical labs below a concentration camp. Four stories down, every day that she worked there, there'd be eight or nine bodies. Sometimes it was as many as 20, almost always young. What this woman described is not an isolated incident, but part of a larger system, according to investigative journalist Ethan Gottman, who has been researching forced organ harvesting in China for nearly two decades. He's the author of The Slaughter, and more recently, the Xinjiang procedure. Gutman says one of the most disturbing patterns he uncovered is the 28 rule. 28-year-olds, 29-year-olds. These are people at the peak of their health.

A system where people are selected, taken, and process. And they disappear in the middle of the night. It's like a car that's about to go off the assembly line. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kelleck. Ethan Gutman, such a pleasure to have you on American. American thought leaders. It's great to be here. In your work on the Xinjiang procedure, on the forced organ harvesting aspect, because you cover a lot of ground in there, what would you say was the single most shocking thing that you came across, that was

most shocking to you in your work? We talk about victims a lot in organ harvesting, and that's appropriate. We should be. But the truth is, the strongest witness that you can come up with is somebody from the medical world who performs some sort of surgery or is in some way tangentially involved in this nexus of organ harvesting. And in this case, the final witness in the sort of central chapter, the sort of beating heart of the book in a way is called the Perfect 28, because 28 is the age they like to organ harvest, the Chinese like to organ harvesting people, is a woman named. Samar and it was an unusual interview because I don't encourage people to emote heavily in my

interviews. In fact, I sort of, I don't, I'm not a TV interview, okay? I'm not putting nothing to do with what you do. But you know the deal. It says you have to get people to emote, they have to express it, you know, they have scars, they show the burn, this is where they burn me with the cigarettes. I'm not doing that. This is writing. This is A book, these people can't even be shown. They're in great danger in Kazakhstan. They usually have a very tenuous situation. This woman comes in, says, I'm going to talk about something that I haven't talked about to anyone.

And then she burst into tears. Great heaving sobs. I'm not just usual tears. Sobs and sobs. And I hand her the tissue box. And after three minutes, she sort of calms down, and then she starts telling this story. And at first, she's telling it in the third person. She describes something, a series of medical labs below a concentration camp.

Four stories down, and there's these, well, three clinics, if you want to talk about it that way. And there's really a fourth one, which is sort of the first one you come to. She describes these, he says, there's no surveillance down there. But there's two guards who stand there. A.Ks at the low ready. Totally masked. We walked between them and then there's the first gurney and that's where she, and I figured it out fairly quickly, she's been there, she's done this. Her job, along with a veterinarian who pulled her in, so, that's a kind of hire, was to remove the intestines. Then normally you wouldn't even care about the intestines.

If you're dealing with a corpse, it's not essential to absolutely go after the intestines first. But if you're four stories down and your ventilation system is not that good, you might want to look into the intestines first, clean them, remove them, get rid of them. And in fact, they had had problems with this before. The other three clinics were there to remove organs. You couldn't see them, but occasionally. the door would open, you'd see somebody handling a kidney, a liver, and so forth. Every day that she worked there, she wasn't in the camp, but every day that she worked

there'd be eight or nine bodies. Sometimes it was as many as 20, sometimes it was three or four, almost always young. To me, she was a central witness in a weird way. She brought it up to speed in a new time. Now, what connects her into the rest of the book is that they also, well, she was working there, at one point the guards got together and gang raped her. What pulls it in again to the whole Uyghur experience of captivity is that the day before she left ran away from this job. Her supervisor put his hand into her pants as if he was assessing a piece of fruit, whether it was ripe or not.

Literally, well, he talked to her. And she said, you can't do that. And he said, oh, you know all the rules, don't you? Oh, you're so up on things. You know everything. You know what? You're a Kazakh. And Kazakhs are a terrorist state.

It's right here on our list. Okay? And we can do anything we want with you at any time. In fact, get here at seven tomorrow because I have something I want to talk to you about. And that night she couldn't sleep. And she made a dash for the border. She left everything. All her bank accounts, everything she had.

She came in with less than $100 in her pocket into Kazakhstan and was able to somehow get her way through the border in the middle of the night. She'd only been there nine months when I got there. You know, the BBC was very interested in pursuing this story. But I have a feeling she just got returned to Kazakhstan anyways. I think the last thing I have is a tape of her voice. That's what we're named. Returned to Kazakhstan or returned to Xinjiang?

Returned to Xinjiang. I mean, that was when COVID hit and it was coming in right at the time we were interviewing, that was used as an excuse to go into people's apartments and take them away and so forth. So this was the Kazakh authoritarian state, it's not a totalitarian state, it's an authoritarian state, it's an authoritarian state exposed itself. And then the Chinese were putting very heavy pressure on this issue. And they were trying to pull in all the Uyghurs and Kazakhs back into the camps. There weren't many Uyghurs, the only Uyghurs were people who were in Tajikistan and so forth

and selling things in the bazaars. They've been there for years. They were all pulled back, 90% of them. Hey everyone, I'm going to be trying to get some more sponsors for American thought leaders. And the reason is I want to try to get it on more of the non-paywall platforms where we'll use the sponsors to kind of support the show. And one of the sponsors that I really appreciate is American Hartford Gold. You know, these are pretty chaotic times. We're not sure where things are going to go.

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They're Better Business Bureau certified, and frankly, really easy to work with. Okay, so you can call them at 855-862-3377. You can text American to 65532, Or as always, click the link in the description below. Let's sort of zoom out a little bit. Okay? And a lot of people won't just be familiar with this whole world that you're describing here, right? We're looking at, you know, a totalitarian level of control.

We're talking about extreme dehumanization of people that allows for this kind of behavior. Frankly, when you're talking about this one, I'm thinking, like, I don't even know if it's appropriate, but I guess we can talk about it as Sundercomando. Right? Like, that's what I'm thinking, someone involved in this, in that way, in the way that she was. Framed for me, first, how Xinjiang is situated in China, how it's viewed, what's happened to the people in terms of dehumanization and so forth. And then why Kazakhstan and how you got in there. This is a, let's start with Xinjiang. Let's start what it is. Who are the people? How are they different? And how does Kazakhstan fit into it? And finally, how is it that you managed to get there

and do these interviews? Okay. The Central Asia has always been sort of at the periphery of the Chinese Empire. Okay. It was something, a desert land out west, and especially in the north. The southern part, the southern western part is Tibet. It's this huge massive plateau, which Tibet consists of. And the Chinese always had a very strong relationship to some extent, maybe a sort of admiration of society, you know, that the emperors would, you know, you go into the tombs, the ancient tombs, and they're all Tibetan Sanskrit is everywhere. I mean, it's, in fact, people have a hard time deciphering it, but that's what they insisted on.

This is not true with the Uyghurs, which are the main people of what used to be called East Turkestan, sometimes Chinese Turkestan. Chinese call it Xinjiang, which means very simply new land or new territory. This is why the Uyghurs are very touchy about that. And even the title of this book, The Shinjiang Procedure, I apologize right in the beginning. I'd say, sorry, this is a user-friendly book. We're not going to control language here. I use Western terms like Western and Eastern. I don't really care if that's sort of, you know,

Eurocentric or something. Look, this is a people who are basically Caucasian. They're part of the Huns, the same. Goes all the way to Hungary, right? And they're part of that culture. They're part of the Central Asian or Turkic culture, really. And they always have. So the differences between them and the Han Chinese is very different in that sense than, say,

the Falun Gong who became the main victims of organ harvesting for so many years, for decades, because Falun Gong is Han Chinese. And so there's... Mostly. Mostly Han Chinese. Yeah. I'm just saying that because I've met Uyghur Falun Gong practitioners over the years as well. But let's not get bogged down.

Yeah, and Bertolti would claim there's a lot of Christians around in the Liger community, too. I don't think there are very many. I mean, they're mainly Muslim, but look, the bottom line is this is a very different kind of culture. And there's always been some kind of conflict between the Han Chinese. There's so much hatred now between the Uyghurs and the Chinese. It's so dramatic. There's so much dehumanization, particularly on the Chinese side, but also the Uyghurs themselves. I mean, the first woman I interview talked about in the book, the first woman I interview, talk about in the book, the first chapter. At one point we were having a very nice Uyghur dinner in Istanbul, and I said, well, how do you really feel about the Chinese? And she said, if they're lower than dogs, you know, it was like this. And it was as if a blast furnace had opened up for a second. I mean, just the rage in her eyes. And there was no escaping it. There was no reason for me to doubt her feelings here. If I may comment, right, the Chinese Communist Party, and this is a topic for a whole other interview I'll do one day.

They've weaponized, you know, essentially racism to, you know, they fan the flays of these kind of racial tension to maintain their power, which is a horrible, horrible thing. And it's way underreported also because we're not kind of not allowed to talk about racism and so forth in the West. But this is part, what you're describing, right, is pitting people against each other, doing horrible things. People want to do horrible things back.

I mean, we've seen this play out so many times in history, but the CCP is just another, you instrumentalized it as yet another tool, right? And this is the context in which, you know, you're writing the Xinjiang procedure. The heat that Fall and Gong and Investigators, okay, like me and Dave Maitis and other people, had brought in on this, and Matt Robertson certainly meant that they had to kind of rationalize the system a bit. and meant moving it out of the public eye more. One of the problems with Falling Gongers is distributed throughout the country.

We're talking about huge numbers here. I mean, I think you used the term 8.9 billion per year. I tend to call it 9 billion per year. I think it's a back of the napkin, I'd say napkin kind of thing. But nonetheless, we don't really know. But we know that the numbers are huge. We know that once you added in things like ECMO, which is oxygenation and perfusion techniques,

that you suddenly take an organ which was only going to last four hours, you can suddenly pull a lot more organs off a single person and get them and distribute them around. And so suddenly the profit margin goes way up on a single human being from, you know, $100,000 or something, if we're selling to foreigners, up to almost a million dollars. If you do it correctly, $750,000 at least. So that is a really, these are huge advances that have been made within the Chinese transplant industry. Now, they had to rationalize a little bit and I started picking up signals that they, that part of this part, and I can't explain the camps completely, but when they

started that construction of the camps in 2015, something was going on and they suddenly had this massive captive population that completely controlled. And that's what I felt I had to follow. The method I looked at It was very few Uyghurs, the Chinese Communist Party learned a lot of things from the conflict with Falun Gong. Okay? One of the things they learned, well, one of the things they learned was stop naming your torture centers, glamorous names.

Dragon Mountain. No, you don't use dragon mountain, you know, all these different terms. Yeah, they get a number. They get a number. Now they just get a number, or not even that sometimes. I mean, so you stop doing that. You've got to keep the hospitals kind of private and don't let them talk. And you've got to keep the victims squared away.

There's always a difficult procedure. The other thing they learned was don't let your victims out. Don't let the friends of the victims out. Don't let the family members out and so forth. A lot of Fall and Gone got out from our perspective. Enough to be able to talk about it. Yes, right. And to do a lot of field work.

I interviewed over 100 practitioners. Fifty of them were directly from labor camps and so forth, or at least very long-term detention centers. Some of them were from black jails. It was the Laugai system, and a lot of them got out. They got out through different means, and there's wonderful things written about those stories, because they're always fascinating. Nobody was getting out.

You had these camps. You had, you know, even the State Department was estimating them. one and a half million to two million at that point. Yet we had ten people, nine people in the West who'd made it over to the U.S. That's nothing. And if I may just comment, right, it's not just the camps because the whole region, it's almost the whole region is a camp in a sense because it's under military control. So there's so many layers of security that you would have to get through to actually get out.

It makes it virtually impossible. That's exactly right. And that's one of the reasons why when you look at something like, you know, we've talked to, I think, in the past about the Chinaman Square South Emulation incident, right? Which looks very phony when you actually start looking at the facts. And it's similar, you know, where you had a car or pier suddenly in Chenamintz Square, ran a bunch of people over. It was driven by a Uyghur mother and so forth.

And had Uighur plates, Xinjiang plates on the car. How is that possible? You couldn't get a car out of Xinjiang and drive it to to Gentleman Square. It's ridiculous. Okay. It's another set of... A lot of staged propaganda. I mean, the regime, I argue that it's perhaps the thing they're actually best out of all, even, never mind the repression, is the propaganda creation. But that's a whole different...

No, it's a fascinating thing. Yes, it is. And it's made for TV. It's fascinating stuff, right? Here's the thing. Nobody can get out. You're absolutely right. And they closed off the passport situation very effectively. They kept people thinking that they had real passports. You would not believe the amount of hours I've wasted listening to people talk about their passport troubles. It's the most dullest part of my interviews is that people have to talk about this, but it's just the most frustrating Kafka-esque bureaucratic procedure you've ever heard of, and nothing ever happens. They also set up certain horror stories. Mothers would go with their children. Okay, we're all going to Istanbul.

We're going to get out. We can do it. At the last minute, as they're getting aboard the plane, they pull the children back. They say, there's problems with the children's passports. Don't worry, they're going to be on the next plane. Please just get on the plane. The mother goes over.

I talked to a room full of these women in Istanbul, all who don't have their children. And the only time they see their children is occasionally when the Chinese deal with sort of a program on these wonderful orphanages they've got. and they see their own kids for a second, looking alive, which is something. Sometimes they see them on TikTok. It's horrifying.

And of course, the unspoken part here is that these children are being indoctrinated as part of the genocidal policy. Some of them will be made into assets, intelligence assets. It's very likely for the smart ones. Okay, but back to our thing. So basically, they're not getting out. And my work revolves around field work, not just by choice, because it's what I prefer, though it is, but it's also true that in this case, there was no information to be gained about organ harvesting on the web.

You could not sit at a computer and ascertain anything. The whole thing's a black box. So let's take two minutes to just explain this, okay? This is incredibly important. And the research started basically on forced organ harvesting at scale part, right, was about 2005, 2006. And every time, explain how this worked, like how we got to the point where there's no more, it's very difficult to find anything online. Well, what happened was there was a group. There were several groups, but I'm just going to name one of them.

And it's a mouthful, a world organization to investigate the persecution of Fallen Gong. I like to call it wipe fake. Yeah. Okay. Okay. It's the most awkward acronym I've ever seen. But the people who were manning it were had mad talent. Okay.

And they did nearly a superhuman effort of going through every hospital website that was potentially doing transplants and seeing what they said about it. But they didn't stop there. They went into dissertations. They went into nurses weekly. They went into all these different sources, and they hacked. They hacked medical files. And we, out of that, this massive amount of information came.

Well, at one point, they would release it, but nobody would pay very much attention. So at one point, a splinter group from them came and approached us and said, we'll give you all this information. You, the Kilgur and Matus, David Kilgorn, David Matus, and will you write a report? And we said, yeah, we will. it was a lot of information to collate and go through. But the truth is that they had hit on really transplant, Chinese transplant volume in China. Now, they hadn't hit on it perfectly. We didn't cover every hospital.

But a lot of hospitals, the Chinese have a weakness. They brag. They love to brag, especially about production. So it's like in Mao's day, they'd say, you know, this is the best apple harvest ever, you know. We're way above quota. Now they talk about transplants. And what we were able to do was come at it and start getting patterns. And then I kind of personally came up with a number of one a day for each hospital that

was establishing, you know, we knew how many transplant teams they had, three to four per average, okay, and so forth. It's the idea that they're just sitting around, they have 40 beds, you know. The idea they're just sitting around now, one a day. And even right there, it brings you up from not what Chinese were claiming was 10,000 transplants per year, successful transplants. Yeah, just to just, I'll clarify that. The official Chinese position was they were doing for the entire country, 10,000 a year. Now, Matt Robertson, in his study, was a very important part of breaking that because he found one hospital,

Chenjin Central Hospital, which was doing 5,000 per year. which was in fact renting out hotel rooms for the amount of people who are having transplants. And that one caters to foreigners, so it's particularly interesting. So right there, you've got 5,000. You look at Beijing 309, there's a whole series of hospitals, Sun Yotsan Hospital, and the numbers quickly escalate. In fact, so I tend to say it's about 60,000 per year at a minimum, maybe up to 100,000.

I am well aware that the Chinese like to exaggerate a little bit. Okay? It's just something you do in Chinese society and under the CCP. And you know, if the fish was this big, you know, it's like kind of this big. Okay, so you exaggerate it a little bit. I think that's important to acknowledge that, and I kind of took that into my calculations. But honestly, this is a real phenomenon. Now, we'll never be able to do that Chinese transplant study again, because they completely,

completely, even while we were working on the report, the hospital websites started disappearing, just like mushrooms after a spring rain. They were just gone. And now, in most cases, we archived it. Not in all cases. There's always a tragedy. But we did enough of it that it was very, very persuasive, and it was very persuasive to the CCC, for example.

And it was a very important countermeasure at a time when it was very important countermeasure at a time China was announcing that they were moving to just, to voluntary systems only. Right. And we had this evidence saying, uh-uh, not so fast. And it was very hard for people to refute the evidence at that time. But then, since then, the Chinese squeezed it. We had nothing. We had one thing that I knew.

I knew that Kazakhs, ethnic Kazakhs were Chinese citizens, were getting out of Xinjiang. They were bribing their way out. They had connections across the border, that kind of thing. The border was a little porous. And so maybe several thousand had gotten out, and they were hiding out in Kazakh society. We never hear from them. And the reporters who went into Kazakhstan or went touring and Xinjiang never asked the questions. They were completely curious about this whole issue.

And that was the challenge. And so tell me now what you did, just again very briefly, to actually meet these people. Basically what we did was I found the right partner, who was my daughter, who was 24 years old at that time, and said, would you be willing to do this? She's very pretty. She's got blonde hair. And I bought her some beautiful hats in Istanbul. And I said, we're going to take this car.

I approached a wonderful guy, Peter, Ongoan practitioner, and said, can you help me out? And I need a car. And he said, what do you want to do? I said, I want to drive Dalmadi from Germany. You said, okay, what kind of car? And I said, it's got to be less than a 2005. It's got to be older than a 2005.

at 2005. He said, why? I said they had put chips in the car after that. It's really easy to track them. All you do is you can track it anywhere. I said, it's got to be four-wheel drive because there's terrible weather and the road's awful. And he said, okay. He said, came back a couple weeks later, said, I got you the car. He got me a RAV-4, Toyota RAV-4. Now nowadays Toyota RAV-4s are kind of big and nice. Back then they were like boxes, another black box And in fact, it was black. But it worked. And we put skis on top of the car.

And we had a story that we used at every border crossing because there was a lot of border crossings to get over to Kazakhstan, a lot of places. Which developed over time. Basically, I said, which was true. I said, if my daughter, you know, I said if you get honors when you

graduate from college, I'm going to take you on the trip of a lifetime. And here we are, the trip of a lifetime. Okay, here's the skis. You know, we had all this. It was entirely true. It's just not the whole story. We never did ski, actually.

I said we, I was taking to Mongolia. That was the other thing. We said, no, it's not, Amani. We're going to ski in Mongolia for the bragging rights. Now, this is somewhat plausible because occasionally foreigners do appear on this. And the other thing to do was to stay completely away from anything that a journalist would do. So we took the trucker routes. We took trucker routes through Ukraine.

We took the trucker ferry across Black Sea, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and then we took this ferry that doesn't even run on a regular schedule, but it's all truckers again, and we took that across the Caspian. And then here you are on the edge of Kazakhstan, which is a huge country. East West, it's like America. It comes exactly with terrible roads. And then they go crazy on you. They take all these biometric photographs and all the rest of it.

It's all Russian. It's Russian surveillance, so it's good, high quality. But we turned all our devices off. Nobody ever recognized us. Nobody recognized me, which was the big problem, was like, oh, this guy sort of investigate stuff, but they never bothered to check me. We had a bad moment where me and my daughter were separated, but she had all the right answers to all the questions.

And, you know, basically, we got out of there. They had dogs sniffing through the car or everything. We got out of there, and none of our devices were turned on, and they were all in Faraday cages. They're soft, Faraday cage things now. There was no way to trace this. We weren't using any electronics at all. So we had to rely on a map. I had a German map of Kazakhstan.

She couldn't drive. My daughter couldn't drive, but she's a good map reader. Okay, very good. And so we made our way. We got lost a couple of times. But there's a road, there aren't that many roads, you can't get that lost. But we had a very difficult time getting through. We had very, very bad weather.

But the bottom line was, and we got stopped by the police again and again, and I had to bribe my way out of that every time. Because I didn't want them to take me down the station. And all they were interested in was money, really, you know. And there was this whole business, a routine of sort of, you'd be doing. give them the dough that they wanted. You have to pass it underneath their internal camera. And then we both put our hands in our hearts to represent how touch we were by each other's

position and some friends shake hands. I hated that stuff. Oh my God. I was seething inside, but I couldn't do anything. I didn't want to blow the investigation. I'd set up two fixers ahead of time in Almadi. I knew they'd be a little competitive with each other. That's a good thing.

To help deliver witnesses. Yes, exactly. And to be translators as well. They both had different qualities, both had different strengths. And we arrived in Almadi. They got us a safe apartment. One of them had some real estate deals. They done some real estate deals.

They got us a place that our names were never on it. I just paid some cash. We'd sewn the cash into my jeans across these borders. You cannot use a credit card. You cannot use a... The only device you can ever use is a burner phone. Use it once, throw it away. Use it once, throw it away.

So we had a box of burner phones. We were asked about them at one of the boarders, and I just said, oh, well, that's, you know, they're gifts for people because they've got this funny sound. It would play a funny song when you opened it up. Okay, so we're doing it. That was the idea. The idea was to make it look fun. That was the innovation, if you like, because a lot of people talk about doing this stuff,

they do do it. And there's a lot of different ways to do it. I'm not claiming ours was the only way. It's very amateur. But I think ours was clever because of the fun part. We always looked like we were having a good time. We didn't try to blend in. We looked totally like foreigners, you know, kind of stupid, you know, naive foreigners.

And we had this very cute girl who if things got hairy at the border, she'd suddenly say I have to use the toilet. And then they'd have to get a woman, you know, Erla Kleb type woman. dressed in these old Soviet kind of outfits and take her to the bathroom, whatever bathroom they had. She was very good about that. She created diversions like you wouldn't believe. Daddy, Daddy, I think they can help us. So that was sort of the fun part.

And then we got into the interviews. We did those for about two and a half months. And how many people did you manage to change? Really only 20, and I didn't throw out any of the cases, even the ones who didn't see anything that I wanted because the study is a study. I wanted a very clear, we're not doing cutting room floor here. But that's why I'm kind of confident in the numbers, because even in the four cases where people didn't see anything or couldn't say they saw somebody disappear, I was able to at least

explain where they were coming from. One guy was one of these consummate survivors who could survive in any camp because he just There's no sound of play by the rules. I mean, if I were in Auschwitz with him, I'd try to be his wingman, okay? You know, the off chance that I could survive, just hanging around with this guy. So he doesn't see things. He doesn't want to see things, right? That's often, that can be a really good survival technique.

Another woman said, I didn't see anything, but then all these women kept disappearing because they had medical troubles. When I asked her by the medical troubles, oh, that's a high blood pressure. Oh, I think this woman was a druggie. Oh, she got pregnant. I went, well, how does she get pregnant? There's no, it's a woman's camp, right? There's only male on Chinese cards, right?

Oh, I don't know. Her husband came back at that point. So we never got into that. But you see, when every time you had somebody like her, you all said other people could absolutely sort of say, well, it was about 5% per year. Or we'd figure it out. But it had to be firsthand. I didn't want numbers they'd heard from anybody else.

I didn't even want to talk about organ harvesting. I just had disappearances. How old were they? Did you have a blood test? This kind of thing. You know, the thing that I love about the conversation that we're having right now is I think you're highlighting the difficulty of doing all this kind of work. You're always dealing when you're dealing with these sort of extreme atrocity type situations,

whether it's Falun Gong practitioners or Uyghurs. You just don't have a lot of people to work with. You have to figure out there's a lot of inference based on information. It's just, uh... Well, I think there was one advantage with the Kazakhs, I must say here, okay? I mean, this was always a problem with Falun Gong or Uyghurs, is they're right in the middle of this. They're the targets.

The Kazakhs have always been sort of incidental here. They're just like, well, you look like Uyghurs and you talk kind of like Uyghurs, so we're going to put you in, too. Now, I'm not saying they haven't suffered. They've suffered horribly, but the point is they don't have quite the same relationship to the CCP, to the Chinese Communist Party, that, that, that, that, you know, that, you know, The Uyghurs do and then the Uyghurs, I mean, it is a little bit like what I was saying, you know, they're lower than dogs.

I mean, there's a kind of a very strong emotion that's produced within the Uyghur community. Within Falun Gong, there's, you know, the CCP has been the dead set enemy against Falun Gong. They've done horrible things to these people and their families and the rest of it. I mean, just unbelievable. Well, how can a mother talk about her daughter, you know, who's dead now and not talk about this without some emotion, without wanting to tell me a story that they think will move me, right? That's all fine and good, and that's a different problem. But this problem, in this

case, I didn't have to think about this as much, because in a sense, they're sort of talking about the Uyghurs are kind of like their cousins or something, and they don't like the Chinese Communist Party, but they don't feel quite as involved in the struggle. So it made it a little easier to feel like, well, this is fairly objective material. Again, I can work around non-objective material. I'm not against passion. I don't refuse people to talk about what's important to them. That's not at all my strategy.

My strategy is to come in and let them vent as much as possible and just be willing to take my time. But basically in this situation, this is what you could do, and the side benefit was that this emotional involvement wasn't as deep. That's right. Not quite as deep, just a little bit removed. And so that made it a little simpler to do, and sometimes the interviews could be a little shorter.

I wouldn't have to wear them down for nine hours like a psychiatrist. The patient keeps trying to end the appointment in your stomach, I'm still here listening, you know, which is a normal trick that I do, because I've seen psychiatrists do it, actually. Ethan, you have an unbelievable commitment to discerning truth. No, I'm just stubborn. I'm just like following going on the Uyghurs. I'm just stubborn. I don't want to be told, though.

No, but that's, I mean, this is something also, I keep thinking about, you know, you're, you're not going in with a preconceived notion. You're going in actually trying to figure out what's going on. Look, I was very worried about that I was... It's rare. It's rare these days. Okay, okay. Fair enough. I mean, look, I was genuine, I will be honest here.

I was on the way to Kazakhstan, and I didn't let my daughter know about this because I think it would have upset her. A lot of things were upsetting her on the way. It was a tough trip. But, you know, I was thinking, what is this, you know, what if I get to Almaty and there's no pot of gold here? What if I'm just wrong? You know, I doubted it, but she asked me about that. She said, what are you going to do? How are you going to do this? And I said, you're looking for one weird trick, like they say on the internet. What's the one weird trick that I'm going to use? And I said, well, this 28 thing. So excellent. Let's talk about that. That's, that's, I mean, I think it's a center, as you actually mentioned at the beginning of the interview,

it's sort of the centerpiece of the book, and actually very important, and it almost bridges this, you know, kind of the early stages of this organ harvesting to the current stage. But maybe just talk about that. Well, it does because this was a discovery really by Charles Lee, Dr. Charles Lee. It was a discovery by these practitioners who kind of, I'm not sure if it was how they got a hold of those files, but they got a hold of these files. And what they were were basically doctors case files. And there was case for case of transplants happening.

And they'd say something about the person who was often male, not always female, but usually male. And the ischemia time, that is the time of transplant is very short, very, very short. So clearly you've got the two people. Side by side. Side by side. The person is going to receive the organ. Or maybe just in the next room. But the point is that the age after age, after age, would come up and it was 28.

Sometimes 29. Actually, Charles argues that it's not really 29. I'm wrong. It's 28. The spider difference on it. But the point is that you are at the peak of your health at that point, and your organs have stopped growing. So it's natural they'd pick that.

The other thing was that it always said heart failure. Oh, so this patient died of heart failure. Do you know what the stats are for heart failure at age 28? Low. About as low as you are ever going to have them in your lifetime. I mean, it's just one of these extremely unlikely things, unless you're like me and almost eat too much hot pot in Taipei, and to the point where you shouldn't lose.

Bad joke from the book, but yeah, let's not get into that. But no, but here's the thing. So that's the 28 thing was established through that. As I say, Charles Lee looks at it as 29. And that's what I told her. I said, you know, if we, there are certain things we know about disappearances. If they had a blood test and a DNA test, because now it's blood and DNA, it used to be, it used to be just blood test, within 10 days before, and they're 28 years old, and they

disappeared in the middle of the night. It's very different from the other groups that leave. So there's a lot of times younger women, Uyghur women, would leave, and it would be announced at lunch. They'd say, these 10 girls are all leaving, and they're going to work at this wonderful factory. Sometimes they'd even, you know, a little bit of applause for them. Okay, they're often, you know, those women will work there

until over there about 45 or 50 when they can no longer produce children, and then they'll be sent back. But, again, that was done in the open. This is different. It happens in the middle of the night. Literally, I have a case where a woman was used to spoon with another woman just to keep warm, terribly cold. And they were very close.

And she only noticed that she'd gone missing because the bed was cold. And then the toothbrush was still there the next morning. Clearly you weren't supposed to talk about these people. Even the guards would look through you if you tried to. And by 10.30 in the morning, the toothbrush was gone too. That was it. Okay, so we have so many cases like that. But again, the 28 thing was a real tip-off.

So I said that, you know, I'm going to look for this. And then one of our very first case, our first case actually was a 28. The woman said, well, this woman went missing. And the reason why we do this 10-day blood testing, that appears to be a kind of final health check before you do the transplant. It's, but it's there for two reasons. It's not just there to make sure they're still healthy. It's also there to make sure there's been no mix-up, okay?

This is a huge system, as you've established, you know, this is a massive transplant industry, a system. And yes, it's all computerized, but people aren't really, you know, they don't have chips in their skin. So you really want to make sure you get the right person every time. And this is that final check. It's like a car that's about to go off the assembly line. So I think that was very important. That was a big tip off.

and it's a small thing in a way. It is a weird trick, but it's, nonetheless, you can generate numbers looking at that. And sometimes they're 29, sometimes they're 30, sometimes they're 27. But within that group is where you see a cluster. And there we have a, you know, I have a chart and it sort of shows it. And to some people who look at that chart and say, well, it's all over the place. I don't really think it's all over the place. I think it's phenomenally given people's memories and their own personal experiences, the fact

that we have any continuity in that chart at all is a kind of me. miracle, or at least it was to me. So I think it's respectable, although one of my best witnesses says the disappearance rate was actually 7.5% every year, not 2.5%. And that is, and he's here in America, because I got him and his family out, okay? But, and he's Christian, by the way, and caregivers. But here's the point. We have to do something to generate numbers.

People have a right for these to have numbers. They have a right to have some kind of scale on these things. We ask them to care about a problem. And part of our problem is, of course, yes, this whole thing, the whole response to the organ harvesting has been a case study in American failure on many, many levels, ranging from the doctors who assumed we'll just go in and take over this, you know, engage with our counterparts in China, ranging from the press, who's shown an incredible lack of interest and bought everything the Chinese Communist Party said about Falun Gong.

And to some extent, even to some extent the Uyghurs got a lot of the shade too, not as much, but they did get some shade. The politicians, obviously there are huge exceptions, like Congressman Smith and so forth, but, you know, to a great extent did very little, or were cautious to do anything. The human rights organizations have been a disaster, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch interpreted the fact that people were getting DNA tests as a kind of surveillance tool, that it was just a surveillance tool. It's an invasion of privacy, and it's not an invasion of privacy to have somebody looking you over about to take your organs and kill you while you're alive.

That's a very different kind of crime. And so that, I did put some things in the book about that and I did, maybe I'm sure I won't be popular with some people afterwards because I'm very candid about this. For every group that I mentioned, there is an exception in there. For the press, there's D.D. Curson Tattle, the New York Times, who lost her job by reporting on this and was told basically by the New York Times to do some, do articles on this, but use no evidence. It's a phenomenal thing.

Incredible for a paper of record. What a disaster we've had on this in those respects. Every time we move into the issue again, everything's got to be retought from scratch. So, Ethan, you mentioned the numbers, and I still remember, you know, I think it was in 2016. You testified under oath to the 60 to 100,000 transplants per year, sort of very wide-bound numbers. Now, I always tell people that that boundary itself is a very, very conservative estimate because you were trying to be very, very careful. The Chinese medical establishment commonly claims that China performs 10,000 transplants

per year, yet imagine a typical state licensed transplant center in China. Three or four transplant teams, 30 or 40 beds for transplant patients, a 20-to-30-day recovery period. Patient demand 300 Chinese waitlisted for organs not counting foreign organ tourists. Would it be plausible to suggest that such a facility might do one transplant a day? 146 transplant facilities, ministry approved, meet that general description. That yields a back of the envelope answer. You can do it right here, not 10,000, but over 50,000 transplants per year. Suppose we actually hold those same hospitals and transplant centers to the actual

state minimum requirement of transplant activity, beds, surgical staff, and so on. 80 to 90,000 transplants per year. Yet how should we account for the emergence of Chenjin, first central hospital, easily capable of 5,000 transplants per year? PLA, 309 military hospital in Beijing, similar. Jong-Shan Hospital. The list is extraordinary. A detailed examination yields an average of up to two transplants per day, over 100,000 transplants per year.

Now, the figures I have given you are based on Chinese numbers, not from official statements, but sources like nurses weekly. So, you know, as you've pointed out, this is a very large-scale enterprise, and I really do think, based on your explanation,

that is a very conservative estimate. Yes, and even then it was a misinterpreted at times because people would say, oh, well, that's the number of people dying per year. It's not, actually. you know, we have six organs. I mean, I don't have a spleen, but you know, you have one of those. All of those. I mean, the Chinese are selling. And there was this mass influx of the portable ECMO machines, which would facilitate many organs being transplanted from a single body.

Yeah, I mean, it's macabre to talk about these things in this way, but it's just the reality. They've gotten more efficient. And then we have this whole situation where everything has kind of become this black box. because every time we found any information, they would take away the sources of that information. Exactly, but we still have things that we can go on. So we have the 25 to 50,000 per year that are being harvested from Xinjiang.

Right. Okay, so that's 25,000 people. 25,000 people. Just to be clear, that's your estimate for Xinjiang that you've come up in this book. How did you come up with that similar way? Basically, 2.5% to 5% go missing. That's very clear in the book from the witnesses.

And that, if you assume a million people in the camps, that works out to 25,000 to 50,000. It's a very straightforward number. Now, I think it's probably closer to the 50,000 or 35,000 mark. But that's enough. If you're 35,000 people and you get three organs out of them, you're up to your 100,000. It's okay. You can meet all the transplant needs of China from a single population. I don't believe that's done that way because I believe that there is a competitiveness

within the medical system within China. And there's no question that they're still using Falun Gong, and they may be branching out to other groups. But I think that's a little less clear. I don't believe every 28-year-old who goes missing in China runs away from home. The thing that I've noticed is the uptick and dehumanizing rhetoric against Christians, and that's what has me very concerned. And this is same with Bob Fu, who I know you've worked with a lot in the past as well. He's seen similar, more systematically than I have. I just saw it anecdotally.

And that may well be true. But what you're saying is, yes, the repetitiveness of this is very disturbing. And I agree with that sentiment very strongly that they, you know, we start to uncrack something. Well, you can't go and interview those Kazakh witnesses anymore. They're all gone. Believe me, China's gotten rid of them. I'm left with these little tapes, you know, their voices. Who knows what's happening?

Very likely they're dead. So these one weird trick, yes. On the other hand, that's my interest. I'm not going to be here forever, okay? And I see a young crop of young journalists. A lot of them are from the Epic Times. Some of them are Uyghurs. I love the opportunity to train them in fieldwork

because it's the one thing. I'm good at it. I like doing it. My enthusiasm is a little infectious, and they have no choice because AI is going to make them all redundant, except for one thing, is fieldwork business.

The human beings, we cannot completely control individuals. They're the hardest thing in the world to control. They're like the wind. This is what every totalitarian regime doesn't understand. But yes. So I think this is the, I'm hoping that that is kind of a key. I want to be realistic about this thing. It is going to take, I mean, it would be wonderful if it were to move ahead and stop tomorrow,

but most likely even if we got a minimal traction in Washington and so forth, enough to get this at least to cut off our relations, our medical relations with China. It would be a huge thing, but there's still the minimum. And the problem is this is until the Chinese really feel quite enough heat and they feel that they can somehow cover up this crime without killing more people, we're going to be on this roller coaster for a while. That's my feeling. But we have to chip away at it.

I mean, the point is if you don't start, it just goes on forever, right? I mean, it's part of their elite longevity project. This is what I've been talking about. Absolutely. Over many months. It keeps accelerating it in new ways. And I believe there is a kind of disrespect of the we saw with Xi Jinping and Putin talking about this.

They knew they're being covered. They're talking about their Muslim bodies. So this is funny because this is a, this is a, discussion, right? Like, my tendency is to think it was a real hot mic moment, but many Chinese don't believe that. I can see you obviously don't believe that. But, well, and there's good, and there's good reason to not believe it. No, because they are, after all, you know, obscenely controlling about such things. Yeah. And it's just hard to imagine how it would happen, but, look, I could be persuaded either way. And that, honestly, I really could. But I do think it

does show either way, it shows the kind of, I mean, let them eat cake kind of, It's literally like they're talking about their Maseranis. Or what some people, you know, the more conspiracy-minded few people that I've talked to, among the Chinese, or know that that was actually advertising. Right. So anyway, we don't know. We don't know. And this is a...

I think actually I kind of agree with the advertising point. That's a phenomenal way of looking at it. Sure. That makes some sense. Look, we don't absolutely know a lot of these things. We're not there with a clipboard. Yeah. We can't see into people's hearts or their minds.

But there is a generation coming in, which was very motivated to do something about that. That's the most reassuring thing I've seen. I've seen a new maturity within the Falling Gone community. I've seen a new maturity within the Uyghur community. OK. So I do feel surprisingly hopeful about this. The big thing that I've seen really

is a shift from talking about this. because I've talked with people for a very long time at great length about this issue for about 20 years, okay. But thanks in part to some of the amazing work you did, frankly, you've done, and of course some of the others we've mentioned. But it really has shifted from this sort of an ability to understand, to conceive it, like literally people leaving mid-conversation mentally. I know you've encountered this. I think we've talked about this in the past. And then to a point where most people today that I talked to were to say, wow, that's really horrible. You know?

And that, like to me, if anything, that's the most hopeful part because I feel like we're ready as a society to say, yes, this is real. Now let's actually think about how to deal with it, not try to convince people that it's real. As we finish up, as we have to now, as much as I would love to talk for a lot longer. What's your hope here at this moment briefly? briefly? Well, my hope is that the Chinese are going to do another one weird trick, which gives us some purchase on this. But my real hope is that somebody else will jump in at this point. You know, I've been talking about writing some ghost stories of skiing, skiing ghost stories for years now. I mean, if we can move on, that's great. If we can't, that's okay too. But

I would like to see a very active press community. And I think, again, I'd like to also use this as a time to examine, if we're successful, we need to use this as a time to examine all the failures that took place here. And I don't mean on, the tendency has been to blame it on, oh, well, you know, you had following gone, people coming over China, they didn't know the system that well here in America and so forth. And, you know, the Uyghurs, they don't know the system either. It's like, no, we failed. I mean, sector after sector after sector of American society

did not do what it was supposed to do. And, you know, when people talk about, oh, well, you know, for example, the Trump administration doesn't care very much about human rights. It's like, heal thyself. Go in and look at these human rights organizations that have been created.

Go look at the madness that they've inculcated, you know, over the Gaza issue. I mean, the look at that, let me give an example of that, direct example. I've got a whole chapter here on Tajikistan and how the Chinese have gone into Tajikistan and basically pulled all the Uyghurs who've been there for years out of the markets and back to the camps. Okay. Why did we do this?

Because the international criminal court wanted this and said, we can do a study on China itself if they interfere with a signatory to the ICC, to the Tajikistan likes to join things as a very isolated country. They are a signatory. I wouldn't risk my life, Bavi, my researcher's life, out in that country. No, we had an interesting time and there was great food and all that, but it was, I mean, it was a really difficult operation. We came back with results.

We came back with interviews and results saying this has happened, we've got the numbers for you. replicated in Kyrgyzstan. What did they do? They went off and said, oh, you know, let's investigate Netanyahu, let's investigate Trump, or let's investigate, you know, and it was just the usual thing. They just went for something shiny, and they dropped this completely. And, you know, I never would have put Bobby, a guy like him who was really under risk,

not me. I mean, they're, I might work me up a little bit, you know, working around. But a Uyghur? He could have been killed. He could have been tortured and killed in this situation. I put him in this risk for these posers from Europe, going around looking for shiny things. Now the guy's got a couple of sexual harassment cases and they sound pretty plausible to me. And they're biting him in the butt right now.

Look, this is not a, this, we need to heal this stuff, okay? We don't need this kind of decadence in the human rights world. You and I know this, lots of people know it, but you and I sitting in this room, we know this. We know this is a huge problem. And we've always been reluctant to take, we don't want to lose friends, we don't want to alienate people, but at some point we're going to have to face up to this. This is a major, major problem going forward. Well, Ethan Gutman, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.

Thanks. Thank you all for joining Ethan Gutman and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellick.