By Matthew Robertson
Epoch Times Staff
Epoch Times Staff
Clamps, scissors and other surgical instruments used in the operating room during a kidney transplant. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
An atrocity haunts China. Precisely how and when this atrocity will be widely exposed, and the effect it will have on the polity when that happens, is not yet clear. But as in other historical cases in Chinese communist history, it will probably be an inflection point—and it will certainly be the last great atrocity of the Chinese Communist Party.
It is the crime of organ harvesting, of course. Since 2000, the state security apparatus and military hospitals have been killing prisoners of conscience for their organs—or rather, harvesting the organs from these people, who die as a result. The prisoners are predominantly practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice that originated in China.
To understand the significance of this crime, it is necessary to examine Falun Gong, what happened to it in China, and what its relation is to the political struggle that is currently taking place inside the CCP. Then we can consider the possible outcomes of the organ harvesting revelations and how they will help destroy any final shreds of legitimacy the Party may have.
Falun Gong
Falun Gong is a type of cultivation practice, or a mind-body discipline that is part of traditional Chinese culture. The concept of cultivation practice is well summarized on a Falun Gong website as “the idea … that a human being can, through disciplined spiritual practice, transcend this ordinary existence.”
It’s an old idea in Chinese culture that has been called “biospiritual cultivation” by some Western scholars. Falun Gong is thus a combination of physical exercises and moral discipline. The moral virtues fostered by Falun Gong are truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. There are five meditative, physical exercises as well.
The practice became extremely popular after it was introduced to the public in China in 1992. There were 70 million people practicing it, according to a figure from China’s Sports Administration in 1998. Falun Gong estimates put the number at 100 million.
The practice was a refreshing change from the cynicism and corruption that characterized China, where people only sought wealth and, broadly speaking, had cast aside any cohesive moral philosophy.
There were no fees, no leadership, no hierarchy, and no organizational structure, just a set of free teachings and the moral principles. Many practitioners called it a “pure land.”
Persecution
From 1996 to 1999, a struggle was underway inside the Party between hardliners and supporters of the practice. In July 1999, the guillotine was dropped, and a campaign to eradicate Falun Gong began.
It was the largest security mobilization since the Maoist era, directly affecting up to 100 million people who practiced Falun Gong plus their friends and family. Moreover, Falun Gong’s traditionalist philosophy was ideologically opposite to the dialectical materialism of communist ideology. So the hardliners in the Party vowed to crush the practice. These were mainstream people: cadres, scientists, scholars, farmers, students—a cross-strata of society.
In assessing the significance of the campaign, it is necessary to realize a few things. Firstly, Falun Gong has put up unprecedented resistance in terms of intensity, scope, geographical distribution, and international reach.
Secondly, the CCP has put an enormous priority on pursuing the campaign, in ways that to outsiders can often seem ridiculous or bizarre. Thirdly, the campaign was ultimately led by one man: Jiang Zemin.
Faction
And this is the first link with the current leadership crisis.
Jiang Zemin pushed through a number of important personnel, institutional, and political changes meant to ensure that his campaign would continue after he was out of office.
First of all, it was necessary to build a faction.
In 2002, for example, he expanded the Politburo Standing Committee from seven to nine people, and installed two of his cronies in it—Luo Gan and Li Changchun. They were in charge of security and propaganda respectively: the two most important organs for the campaign to suppress a popular belief system.
Most of the other members of the Standing Committee were also his supporters. Jiang used his influence to ensure that the strongman model of leadership, as practiced by Mao, Deng, and Jiang, was softened to more of a “consensus” oriented approach.
Hu Jintao became head of the Party in 2002 but had far less personal power than Jiang had wielded. Broader factors contributed to this shift, of course, but the weakening of the Party head’s authority was a vital part of Jiang’s scheme.
Jiang’s faction included Bo Xilai, the disgraced official, and Zhou Yongkang, Bo’s patron and the current security chief. This was known but burst into the open when Wang Lijun, Bo Xilai’s right-hand man, fled to the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu in February.
National security reporter Bill Gertz soon reported that, according to U.S. sources, Zhou and Bo were plotting to thwart Xi Jinping’s rise to power and install Bo as head of the Party. Wang Lijun was the henchman carrying out wiretapping for this plan.
Bo Xilai owed his career to Jiang, who rewarded him for his enthusiasm in carrying out the persecution of Falun Gong. Bo went from mayor of Dalian to minister of Commerce in four short years.
But Wen Jiabao put a roadblock on Bo’s ascent. After Wen objected that Bo could not represent the Party on the international stage due to his having been sued in 13 countries by Falun Gong practitioners, Bo was relegated to Chongqing.
Organ Harvesting
Wang Lijun was knee-deep in the persecution of Falun Gong in Liaoning, where he also worked under Bo. In an award speech that The Epoch Times has archived, he admits to conducting thousands of on-site organ transplantations.
Experts said those organs were most probably from living people and most probably from practitioners of Falun Gong. That judgment was based on the location of the activities, the number of executions, the research Wang was involved in, the availability of organs, and Wang’s known role in the anti-Falun Gong campaign.
And Bo Xilai certainly knew about his subordinate Wang’s activities.
Researchers pretending to be communist officials confirmed that high-level Party officials knew about the organ harvesting. Li Changchun, for instance, was asked about using “Bo Xilai’s involvement in murdering and removing organs from Falun Gong practitioners to convict Bo, right at this time.”
Li said: “Zhou Yongkang is in charge of this specifically. He knows it.”
Of course, Zhou’s being in charge of investigating his ally’s fate is what Bo would want.
This year, after Wang Lijun’s Feb. 6 defection attempt, a few funny things happened.
In March, Huang Jiefu, the vice minister of Health, announced that China would stop using organs from inmates within five years. Similar pronouncements had been made before, but the timing in this case raised eyebrows.
According to Ethan Gutmann, a researcher who has followed the story closely, it was an attempt to effectively slink away from the Falun Gong mass murder by slowly adopting Western ethical standards of organ sourcing.
Around the same time, Internet searches for highly sensitive terms related to this scandal were allowed. For example, it was possible to search on Baidu for “live harvest,” “bloody harvest” and “Wang Lijun live harvest.” Prominent results popped up and those pages were not blocked by the Great Firewall.
The Chinese regime is infamous for its hermetic censorship, and the above terms are among the most sensitive in the political lexicon. To many observers, the idea that they were unblocked—at the height of a factional struggle in the Party about how to deal with Bo Xilai and Wang Lijun—by anything other than design is inconceivable.
Revelation
At this point, we must assess what we have and what conclusions can be drawn.
Most obviously, we have a large pile of bodies. At least 60,000 Falun Gong practitioners were killed for their organs between 2000 and 2008, researchers estimate. The real figure is not known.
The Falun Dafa Information Center has confirmed that over 3,500 practitioners were killed by torture and abuse although the real number is probably far higher—the Information Center suggests it is in the tens of thousands. Millions have been sent to labor camps and prisons. A generation of orphans has been created, along with broken families.
We have proof that the persecution of Falun Gong and Falun Gong’s response is significant to the CCP. Witness the arc of Bo Xilai’s political career, which was essentially wed to his involvement in the campaign; the lengths the CCP has gone to persecute Falun Gong; and the fact that the organ harvesting crimes became a club used by one faction to strike another earlier this year. Members of a hard-line faction that includes Jiang Zemin, Zhou Yongkang, and Bo Xilai are all deeply involved.
Eventually the truth of the whole affair will come out. The question that faces observers is, what will happen then? How will this affect China and the future course of the Party?
There is a possible historical precedent, first drawn by Gutmann.
In 1940, Soviet secret police murdered over 20,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest in Russia. Stalin blamed it on the Nazis, and the Soviet regime maintained that lie for the next 50 years.
In 1989, the truth emerged, and in 1990, Gorbachev admitted what happened. The massacre was used in the power struggle between Yeltsin and Gorbachev. The disclosure strengthened the Polish resistance and crushed the moral authority of the remaining Soviet hardliners.
The impact of these revelations on the CCP may be similar.
Gutmann writes: “This is China’s Katyn Forest moment—the moment when Wen, like Gorbachev, blurts out the first words of confession to a historical crime so great, a lie so immense, that the Party will have no retreat from the juggernaut that must certainly follow.”
The great denouement of the CCP will play out soon, and the revelation of these atrocities will help shove the regime over the precipice. Its legitimacy will be shattered, not to be restored.
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大家都来看”九评共产党” ( VCD, 书)!
Let’s find “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party”(VCD, books)!
快上大纪元声明退出共产党和共产党其它组织(/团/队)，抹去邪恶的印记!
Quit the Evil Chinese Communist Party or its affiliated organizations today!
