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.
Watch the video:
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.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
David Matas, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
David Matas:
Glad to be back.
Mr. Jekielek:
David, I would never expect to meet an actual survivor of forced organ harvesting, this barbaric practice perpetrated by the Chinese regime. Please tell us about Mr. Cheng’s case.
Mr. Matas:
In terms of the raw data, I could see there was something there, because he’s obviously a Falun Gong practitioner. He’s obviously been organ harvested, because we have the medical reports and the x-rays don’t lie. I spent a fair amount of time getting down the chronology of the names and the dates. It really is unusual.
One of the problems we dealt with is the lack of media attention commensurate with the gravity of the problem. Nobody can talk about that it’s actually a victim, because all the victims are dead. No bodies are autopsied. The conclusions we reached are the result of putting together a lot of different pieces of evidence. The problem that we faced in communicating the issue is not too little evidence. It’s too much. We’ve got thousands of footnotes, hundreds of pages, which together tell you a story. You can’t pick out a sentence and say, “That’s it.” But with him, it’s very simple. He says, “This happened to me.”
Mr. Jekielek:
On September 4th, survivor Peming Cheng 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.
Peming Cheng:
My name is Peming Cheng. In November 2004, I was forcibly taken from Daqing Prison to the First Hospital of Daqing, 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 while I lie down, and it is truly unbearable.
Mr. Jekielek:
Peming Cheng was able to come to America with the help of former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Robert Destrow.
Secretary Destrow, what did it take to get Mr. Cheng to America, because I understand there was a bounty on his head?
Secretary Destrow:
There was a bounty on his head and he was hiding in Thailand. When I heard about the case, I said, “Let’s get him out.” We had to negotiate with the Thai government because he wasn’t in Thailand legally. 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. 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.
Mr. Jekielek:
Please explain that. How could they have confirmed the details?
Secretary Destrow:
They confirmed that the surgery happened. They confirmed where it happened. They confirmed when it happened. We were able to get Mr. Cheng into the United States, and we were able to get independent experts to look inside and see what’s missing. We confirmed that part.
Mr. Jekielek:
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.
Secretary Destrow:
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.
Mr. Jekielek:
Of course, now you are speaking about the official narrative.
Secretary Destrow:
The official narrative, yes.
Mr. Jekielek:
Is it surprising to you that there was any official narrative at all?
Secretary Destrow:
Yes, I’m amazed that there’s any official narrative at all. They’ve engaged in the conversation. As we lawyers would say, that’s an admission against interest.
Mr. Jekielek:
Among those who are now speaking up for Cheng’s case is international human rights lawyer Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Hudson Institute.
Nina Shea:
It’s immensely important to have an actual survivor come forward and publicly state that he has been a victim of forced torture. It’s really important to have a person who 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. 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 surgery without his consent. It’s damning.
Mr. Jekielek:
How could it be that he is alive? The protocol is basically to get rid of the evidence. He is a living embodiment of the evidence that the Chinese regime never wants to see the light of day.
Mr. Matas:
He was in 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. There are other people who escaped from China and escaped from detention. What’s unusual about him is not so much that he escaped, but that he was only partially organ harvested, and that he survived the organ extraction.
People are basically being systematically killed through organ extraction. That’s what is unusual about him. The Chinese health system was not killing Falun Gong practitioners to silence them. They were killing Falun Gong practitioners to make money off their bodies. Why was the organ harvesting only partially done in this hospital? It’s really up to the Chinese government or the hospital to explain what they were doing. I’m in no position to explain that. All I know for sure is that the organs of a Falun Gong practitioner are missing.
That much is obvious, but one can speculate. Wendy Rogers, who’s chair of the advisory board of this international coalition said that maybe a partial liver extraction was done because it could be used for a child.
Another possibility was that it was just training or research, because this hospital is not a transplant hospital. What happened to him was unusual and unprecedented. Maybe they were just trying to figure out how to do it or trying to develop some techniques.
Mr. Jekielek:
What you are describing is shocking.
Mr. Matas:
You have to realize that this is the problem in dealing with mass atrocities. In Canada and the United States, we don’t live surrounded by mass atrocities. It’s not part of our daily lives, and 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, see 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. Communism isn’t just the ideology of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party. From childhood, the whole country is indoctrinated into communist ideologies. They see the world in a different way.
What for us would seem shocking and unusual, in China under communism, has become a fact of daily life. Yes, this is a mass atrocity, but it’s not the first one. There is Tiananmen Square, which didn’t just happen at Tiananmen Square, it was a countrywide repression.
There is the mass starvation. There is the Cultural Revolution. China has had one series of mass atrocities one after another with cover-ups, lying, pretense, and immunity. It’s just a repetition that generations of people under communism have lived under. They develop a different mindset as a result of it.
Mr. Jekielek:
Please give us some background about your work and how you got into the human rights field.
Mr. Matas:
I started out being concerned about the Holocaust. I was born in Winnipeg during the Holocaust. 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, and the fact that the Allied rather than the Axis powers won the world war. My focus was trying to bring Nazi mass murderers to justice.
After the war, the Nazi leaders spread out all over the world to get immunity and to escape from prosecution. After World War II, it was easier for Nazi war criminals to get into Canada and the U.S. than for Jewish refugees to get in. The reality is I’m still working on that issue even today. The perpetrators are pretty much too old now to be prosecuted, the few that are still alive. Most of them have passed on, but there is still the matter of getting access to the records.
The work that I’m doing is trying to find these Nazi war criminal records. Not only the ones that were prosecuted, but the ones that were never prosecuted. There were maybe a few dozen that were prosecuted, but historians estimate the number that came into Canada were in the thousands. The question is, what do those records show about them?
That was one stream that got me into what I was doing. Then I had my day-to-day refugee practice. I was doing refugee work, and so I became very involved in human rights NGOs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Commission of Jurists.
Mr. Jekielek:
You were involved in writing the original report assessing whether forced organ harvesting was happening in communist China. Please tell us about that and how that took you up to the present day.
Mr. Matas:
That all started off in 2006. 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 at Xu Jian Hospital in Shenyang City, Liaoning Province. She also said that other doctors had been harvesting other organs, that the organs were being sold to transplant tourists, and that the bodies were cremated. Almost immediately after Annie said this, the Chinese government publicly denied what she was saying.
There was an NGO, the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong, that came to my colleague, David Kilgour. They had worked up a list of 20 people they thought could maybe do independent research on this issue. I was on the list and David Kilgour was on the list. We were told from the get-go there were no victims to interview, no bodies to autopsy, no witnesses, just perpetrators and victims because of the close surroundings, prisons and hospitals, and no documents, except government documents of prisons and hospitals, which you cannot look at.
For me, the issue became not to establish it was happening, but simply to determine whether or not it was true. The coalition that asked us to do it didn’t give us any money, didn’t give us any data, and 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 things. What we did was to not try and prove it, but try to either prove it or disprove it, rather than just leave it up in the air.
What we did is we constructed evidentiary evidence and evidentiary trails, both of proof and disproof. If you’re going to disprove it, what would disprove it? If you’re going to prove it, what would prove it? We had 15 to 20 of these evidentiary trails. In a nutshell, the evidentiary trails of disproof went nowhere, whereas the evidentiary trails of proof each on its own produced some evidence. We put them all together, the answer was pretty clear that this was happening.
Mr. Jekielek:
At this point, it is well established that this is real. There has been the China Tribunal, which was very definitive. Ethan Gutmann wrote, “The Slaughter.” Your original reports were what convinced me early on. There have been multiple government resolutions on this. There is also legislation against it in some countries.
Mr. Matas:
There have been many peer-reviewed academic articles from Kirk Allison, Jay Lavee, Matthew Robertson, and Wendy Rogers that deal with particular aspects. There has been a whole slew of academics and researchers.
Mr. Jekielek:
Organ extraction is how people are killed, actually. There’s a paper in the American Journal of Transplantation about a small sample of Chinese research articles, where in 72 instances, unbeknownst to the people writing the articles, they were actually revealing that they had killed people through the process of organ extraction.
Mr. Matas:
Indeed. The transplantation profession has gotten so used to this that they don’t even think of it as wrong. Didi Kirsten Tatlow, a former reporter for the New York Times, was interviewing a couple of Chinese transplant doctors in English. Then they start talking to each other in Mandarin, which she speaks, and they don’t know that she understood them.
One doctor says to the other, “We can’t talk about prisoners being killed for their organs.”
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. The original Chinese narrative was that everything was coming from donations, even though there wasn’t a donation system at the time.
Mr. Jekielek:
As well as from death row prisoners, correct? We had some interviews of people who were told that it was from death row prisoners.
Mr. Matas:
Indeed. Then they switched the narrative from donations to death row prisoners. As far as I could tell, there were indeed death row prisoners that were sourced, but there wasn’t a big boom in death row prisoners at the time the persecution of Falun Gong started. It was quite the opposite. Numbers were going down because there’s a law in China that says you have to execute seven days after sentence. There was global pressure to cut down on the death penalty, which in fact happened.
But the official narrative was death penalty prisoners, and they didn’t want to let anybody know about prisoners of conscience. Obviously, everybody in the system knew it, but they didn’t want to let anybody know about prisoners of conscience. They were expected to not talk about it. Didi Kirsten Tatlow hears this conversation of one doctor telling the other not to talk about this, because it’s not official party propaganda to talk about it. You get these occasional leaks that show you what is going on.
Mr. Jekielek:
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 is the outrage about this?
Mr. Matas:
To a certain extent, the problem is the newness of it. The capacity for good and evil is innate in all of us, but what changes over time is technology. 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. These are the things that made the Holocaust what it was.
What made this a new form of evil was the development of transplant technology. At the time it happened, people found the Holocaust itself hard to believe. It was not just the people on the street, but even very well-informed, articulate Jewish people. There was a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Frankfurter, who was presented with evidence of Auschwitz. A Polish spy, Jan Karski, was telling Frankfurter about it, who says, “I don’t believe you.”
The person who had introduced Karski to Frankfurter said, “This man is telling the truth.” Frankfurter says, “I didn’t say he was lying. I just said that I don’t believe him.” At the time, Hannah Arendt didn’t believe it. Raymond Aron didn’t believe it. These were important Jewish philosophers. Rudolf Vrba escaped from Auschwitz with the 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.
It seemed so out of sync with what people had known and seen before that it was just incredible. I think we see that with each new form of technology. Now, we’re dealing with the Internet, social media, and artificial intelligence. That is producing a whole new set of problems because of the same old penchant for either doing good and bad that we’ve always had.
Mr. Jekielek:
One of the things we haven’t talked about is the scale of this. How long has it been going on and how many transplants? I know the exact numbers are very difficult to determine.
Mr. Matas:
You don’t have exact figures, but you can get some idea of the scale of this. At one time there used to be four transplant registries in China: heart, liver, lung, and kidney, in different cities in China. One of them was in Hong Kong for liver transplants. The other three didn’t report aggregates publicly, but after persecution of Falun Gong began, liver transplants shot way up. The head of the liver transplant registry at the time was Wang Haibo. After the report came out, aggregate figures disappeared. I saw Wang Haibo at a transplant conference, because I’m going to them and he’s going to them. I know he’s head of the liver transplant registry. I ask, “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. If you tell us why you want them and how you’re going to use them, if we agree to the way you’re going to use the figures, then you can have the figures.” That’s what he told me. It’s the same with the hospitals.
In 2016, we had all the hospital figures. They’re on the websites and not that hard to get. We didn’t go to every hospital, because there were 100o hospitals doing transplants. By that time, there were 167 that were state-approved, so the ones that weren’t state-approved started to go underground. But the state-approved ones were still above ground and posting their figures. We just added those up and we got to 100,000 transplants.
Mr. Jekielek:
Do you mean annually?
Mr. Matas:
Yes, annually. It started at 60,000 and then over the years went up to 100,000. Once we quoted the data stream, it disappeared. But after all, the selling of organs is a business, and it’s hard to run a profitable business without telling people about your product. They’re caught in this kind of in-between place.
They’re also proud of their technological advancement. They like to boast about how they’ve developed transplantation, and how they can offer transplantation. They don’t even realize how they are implicating themselves until we quote them, then they see that and they take it down. Over time, it becomes harder and harder because the data streams disappear.
That’s something we realize every time we quote something, that 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. The problem is not finding out what happened, but finding out the continuation, once we publish our findings.
Mr. Jekielek:
There was this idea of, “never again,” in response to the Holocaust.
With forced organ harvesting, we did not deal with what was happening in 2006. The result is that this crime has now spread to other groups.
Mr. Matas:
No doubt about it. The big numbers for the Uyghurs didn’t start until 2017 when their mass detention started. It happened to the Uyghurs partly because of a depletion of the Falun Gong population through the mass killings for their organs. But it was also the development of technology increasing the time the organs could survive outside the body.
Mr. Jekielek:
It was the ECMO technology, correct?
Mr. Matas:
Yes, it was the ECMO [Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation] technology. But it wasn’t only that. The refrigeration techniques developed and the liquid immersion techniques developed. They were basically able to distribute organs throughout China from Xinjiang. We saw airport lanes in Xinjiang with signs that said, “Reserved for transport of organs,” and we took pictures of them.” It’s the same phenomenon. The Chinese started boasting about this as a technological advancement, that they were able to fly organs from Xinjiang throughout China, until we noticed it. Then they stopped talking about it. That would not have happened if the Falun Gong abuse had been stopped.
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. The Chinese were basically trying to promote that within Asia. That would mean prisoner of conscience organs going into South Korea and Japan, because there are 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. When I do, Falun Gong shows up. The Uyghurs show up. The house Christians and the Tibetans show up. But what I’ve also been seeing now is that the Mongolians show up. They are repressed, but I haven’t seen evidence of them being killed for their organs. But they figure they are the next group. This machine is eating up the Chinese population sort of group by group.
Peiming Cheng:
In prison, we made a pact among us prisoners that 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.
Mr. Jekielek:
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.
Congressman Wolf:
Harry Wu, who you may or may not remember, came to me in 1997 to tell me about this and showed me pictures. What they were doing was the Chinese government was going in and taking the blood type of prisoners. When people would fly in from the West, they would execute them. Harry showed me pictures of the execution and then they would do the transplant. Now, it has increased and nobody is doing anything about it. There are indications that there are some American institutions involved. This has to stop.
Mr. Jekielek:
What do you think can be done about it right now?
Congressman Wolf:
You could get a trial law firm or one of the human rights groups to bring suit against any American institution. If there are any American institutions participating in this, they should be told to stop. If they do not stop, then there ought to be litigation against them. You’re killing people.
Mr. Jekielek:
There has been legislation passed in a number of countries. Actually, you mentioned Jacob Lavee earlier. Very early on, he was instrumental in getting legislation passed that would prevent the social safety net in Israel from paying for organ transplants in China.
Mr. Matas:
That was in 2008 or 2009, and he was the first to do so.
Mr. Jekielek:
Recently, something very similar has been passed in three U.S. states. The Falun Gong Protection Act was passed by the House by voice vote, and now it’s gone on to the Senate. This is the first federal law around this issue.
Mr. Matas:
There is also the Stop Organ Harvesting Act, which also has passed the House of Representatives and is before the Senate. But it’s not enacted and it’s still kicking around. I think Texas has passed an insurance law which is China-specific. Israeli law now says you can’t pay insurance if the person goes to a country and gets a transplant. In Israeli law, the target country isn’t specifically mentioned. But Texas actually mentions China, saying that you can’t insure transplants in China. I believe Utah has a law like that as well.
Mr. Jekielek:
What is the value of passing legislation with sanctions against people who will do this, which is on the table right now?
Mr. Matas:
Yes, the U.S. law is about sanctions, immigration, and reporting. It is about increasing awareness, because I would say that most patients are not aware that somebody is being killed for their organs. 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.
Mr. Jekielek:
What’s your hope for the exposure of this story, the media attention, and the legislation before Congress now?
Mr. Matas:
The wheels of justice and the wheels of human rights grind slowly, but they grind inexorably. Eventually, the system will catch up with the party, because the victimization will catch up with the party. Ultimately, it’s not just communist China, it’s victimization everywhere. Basically, what you’re dealing with in a repressive system is insiders and outsiders. The insiders repress the outsiders, but nobody lasts forever.
Eventually, the outsiders become the insiders, because they’re the only ones left. They don’t want to continue with it anymore because they’ve seen the victimization. It will just collapse under the weight of its own harm. You asked what I hope will happen. 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.
Mr. Jekielek:
David Matas, such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Matas:
It was a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you very much.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
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