How The West Enabled China Organ Harvesting Expansion

Gutmann credits the lack of action, partly due to “religious bigotry” against Falun Gong practitioners, on the part of the international community for allowing the practice to continue.

“The world really allowed China to go ahead with this persecution of Falun Gong. It opened the way for the persecution of the Uighurs,” he said.

“People are suddenly acting like they knew all along about Falun Gong – certainly people may have heard of it, but if you really look at what the Western world did for up to about 2016, [it] was a massive case of denial. It’s bigotry – religious bigotry – condemning a victim group based on style. Seriously, on style, on the fact that they act Chinese … this drove people crazy, it hasn’t gone away.”

The Falun Gong movement is a Buddhism-based spirituality and lifestyle movement that promotes its three key virtues – truthfulness, compassion, forbearance – in part through meditation and exercise. Their penchant for living healthy, conservative lifestyles and being ethnically compatible with the national majority made them attractive organ sources. In China, its practitioners are largely Han Chinese and span “from illiterate peasants to university professors to Communist Party cadres to soldiers,” Gutmann noted, terrifying the Party.

“I have to make it very clear the Falun Gong is an evil cult,” then-Chinese President Jiang Zemin, the architect of the Tiananmen Square massacre, said in 2001.

The shift away from using Falun Gong organs to, potentially, Uighur Muslims, may attract greater attention, but “anyone who has a beef with style here and is sort of relieved that it’s switched onto the Uighurs now … should be ashamed for thinking such a thing,” Gutmann says. He also warns against “mak[ing] a point in the West about how we’re not Islamophobic” by defending the Uighurs, because “this persecution of the Uighurs isn’t about their religion, it’s really about race.” The silence in the face of the Uighur camps – and, in some cases, open support for them – appear to confirm that, at least for many in the Muslim world, this is the case.

The Chinese Communist Party has largely ignored criticism from Western human rights groups about the Uighur camps.

“They really have assessed us just as really being weak and that we’ll sort of do anything even to get a contact high from their power and their money as long as Beijing can give us a story so that we can believe we’re somehow on the right side of history for helping to build a better China,” Gutmann added. He lamented the frustration even in the highest halls of power that little can be done to stop the repression of dissidents and minorities the Chinese Communist Party deems undesirable.

“I’ve had a State Department official confidently say to me, ‘They could kill them all and there’s nothing we can do,’ ok? And that you can quote,” he said.

Gutmann did, however, propose action that could isolate China’s medical industry and pressure it into change.

“The one thing we can do in the West, though, is if we were to wash our hands, if we were to do what we did with the Soviet psychiatrists during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s,” Gutmann said, “which was … once we found out that the Soviets were torturing dissidents in their mental hospitals, we denounced – the American Psychiatric Association did, the World Psychiatric Association did – and we didn’t allow them to come to any of our conferences. We didn’t allow them to publish in psychiatric journals; there were no joint efforts towards making psychoactive drugs.”

“Today, we haven’t done any of that,” he noted. “We didn’t even use the precedent. They’ve been publishing in our journals, they’ve been attending our conferences, they’ve been using our conferences to make propaganda points, including inside the Vatican.”

“The collapse of Western values on this has been absolutely remarkable,” Gutmann added.

Gutmann also posited that the ongoing trade dispute between China and the United States may trigger a change in government in China that would lessen the scale of mass imprisonment and organ harvesting.

“If [President Donald] Trump stays with the trade war, if he does not give in, if he keeps up 25 percent tariffs and it really does what I think it might do to the Chinese economy, that is, bring it down by 2 or 3 GDP points, if it brings that growth down to 4 percent, it is very possible that [Communist Party leader] Xi Jinping will fall, he will be deposed,” Gutmann suggested. “And I’m sure it’s just in favor of some communist bureaucrats … I could imagine a scenario where when they came in and Xi Jinping had fallen and they blame everything on him … you’d start seeing releases from the camps.”

Xi has “clearly amassed too much power,” Gutmann added. “He is driving the country to the brink the Soviet way through the Belt and Road Initiative.”

Making a difference in China’s behavior, however, is at best a farfetched goal for Gutmann.

“For me, I am no longer – maybe I never have been – in this field because I think I can save lives, I don’t think I can,” he said. “I think it’s way too late for that. I am in this field because every people deserves a history, especially a people that are being destroyed. This is the most important thing. There is no meaning otherwise to this.”

Story cited here.

Share this article:

Facebook

Twitter