Big Trouble in Big China
Dan Roche
Mass Media
Issue date: 10/16/06 Section: Opinion

It's one of those stories that you don't believe when you hear it, but a terrible twinge in you tells you it's true. I'll give any crazy idea or assertion a hearing. I'll sit for an hour and listen intently to someone ranting in front of the library. The Internet site www.timecube.com is a notoriously cranky one, and I've studied Dr. Gene Ray's theories. I'm finding them wanting for a certain something, but imaginative. I'm an open audience. The Art Bell show is an old favorite. I am looking as I write this at a stack of books from the outer-space New Age cult Unarius.

I also like the tamer fringe-dwellers, the quiet sects that don't show up on the front page. So in the late '90s, when Falun Gong started becoming known in Boston, I wanted to know about them. Their religion is syncretist, largely drawing off of Buddhism and qigong. They have a charismatic leader, Li Hongzhi, but membership is loose and no money is asked for. The Chinese government despises them and claims that they are an end-times cult. They accuse Falun Gong of "Hierarchical Structure, Mind Control, and Secret Association", which, coming from them, is rich. Taken in itself, it would just seem to be another case of a repressive government infringing on people's right to freely profess their credos.

What makes this story different is that China, the Chinese Government, is harvesting Falun Gong organs- livers, kidneys, you name it- and keeping them for transplants. The sources of over 40,000 organ transplants in China over the last few years are undocumented. A former member of Canadian Parliament and Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific David Kilgour said in a report co-written with David Matas, a human-rights attorney: "This is a terrible outrage, a new crime against humanity, and it has to stop". China is rounding up political and religious dissidents, imprisoning them, killing them, and farming their organs out to hospitals for transplants. The going rate for a liver transplant in China is far cheaper and the waiting list far shorter than in the average American hospital.

This is not Falun Gong freaking out and making wild claims, this is an established matter of public record. It has been brought up by the Americans to Chinese emissaries, who responded coldly. They can no longer deny that China has not only harvested organs from live Falun Gong members but from all manner of prisoners, but particularly prisoners of conscience. China has by far the highest capital punishment rate in the world, and international courts have been finding that Chinese prisoners have indeed been accused of and put to death for comparatively harmless- or false!- charges in order that their vital organs be extracted. This has happened by the thousands. China's situation has been described as "capital punishment on an industrial scale".

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