For over a decade,
the Chinese Communist Party has been butchering
thousands of prisoners of conscience for their organs.
One of the most horrific genocides in modern history.
Doctors schedule an exact day
that foreign patients get an organ,
whereas in the U.S. it usually takes around two years to find a match.
INVESTIGATIONS AND REPORTS (PART 1/4)
Welcome to The Coalition Roundtable,
I'm your host Chris Chappell.
The Chinese Communist Party has been harvesting the organs of its citizens
prisoners of conscience.
This has been a watershed year for the story
thanks in part to those who are joining me today.
Let's talk a bit about the investigative process,
how do we know this is happening?
So are these live organ harvests?
Yeah. Always.
Yeah.
I mean organ transplantation in China
is different from everywhere else in the world
Because everywhere else in the world
you're dealing either with live donors
who after the donation are still alive,
brain-dead donors who are obviously brain-dead after the transplants as well.
In China you get people killed through the organ extraction,
and that's only in China.
How is getting an organ
in China different from anywhere else in the world?
Nowhere else in the world, to my knowledge,
is the donor killed in the process.
If you get a kidney from x-country,
you're probably getting one kidney
and somebody's being paid a certain amount of money,
it's not good for their health of course.
But in China a donor is dead
and the bodies burned,
and that's something that people find very hard to accept.
From the patient's experience,
there's a couple ways it's different.
One is militarization,
I mean you don't normally have military personnel
operating on you for transplant elsewhere but that's in China.
Another is, they send you to the courts to figure out where to get the organ from,
or the courts don't normally service organ distribution centers anywhere else,
but they certainly do in China.
And another is the form of payment.
It's often these red envelopes, you know,
there's a lot of cash being thrown around, high amounts.
It just reeks of corruption and undercover activities.
Don't we estimate that it's about eight or nine billion dollars a year
they're getting now out of their industrial scale?
That's a lot of people, a lot of salaries.
Let's talk about theamount of time it takes
to get an organ in the U.S. versus in China.
In China,
you show up, you tell them when you're coming in advance
and say "I want to get an organ"
and you can you can book in advance,
months in advance if you want
a heart transplant or a liver transplant,
whatever, a lung transplant,
organs where obviously somebody has to be close for the ordinance
because you know that a donor can't live without the heart.
So, you can book for somebody else to be killed months in advance,
and that doesn't happen anywhere else in the world.
You did the "Bloody Harvest", you did "The Slaughter",
why did you make an update?
What we did for "Bloody Harvest" and "The Slaughter"
is we just took the Communist Party Chinese
statements of volumes at face value.
They said ten thousand a year,
so we started saying,
"okay where does this come from?" ten thousand a year.
But at some point we realized,
"Well and they lie about everything else,
why would they be telling the truth about this?"
So we decided we check that figure as well.
It was checkable, because we could go to the individual hospitals
and the individual hospitals
were telling how many transplants they were doing.
There were newsletters or research reports,
we had bed counts, we had staff capacities, we had budget,
so we had a lot of different figures to cross-check volumes.
And we were able to see
whether the ten thousand was real or not.
Obviously it's a lot of work
because there was a thousand hospitals in China doing transplants.
169 of them were
eventually a registered officially it's being allowed to do it,
but there was a and maybe 800 plus others
that were also doing it.
What we did obviously with researchers, and a lot of them,
is go through all this hospital data
to get real volume figures
rather than just communist party volume figures.
I think,
you know the person who I thought explained all this best
with the various research methods that were coming out there
is Matt Robertson,
because he really went through in a one article
he did called "A hospital built for murder",
he went through comprehensively all the different approaches
or what he called guerrilla numbers
to establishing transplants.
Brilliant article Matt!
Yeah and that was on one Hospital.
I'm glad you brought that up. Matt! Tell us about the Tianjin hospital.
I think our challenge all along has been to convince
the die-hard skeptics.
The original thought behind that was
to try to bring this issue into one tangible thing
that you can hold in your hand and kind of move around.
So you feel a lot of the information
in "Bloody Harvest" and "The Slaughter"
was not enough to convince the skeptics?
Cause it sounds like there's a lot of information out there
that was just on the table.
First of all they didn't read the stuff.
I mean so that already makes it very difficult.
Very difficult indeed.
I'll just throw this away now.
These die-hard skeptics they would just not read the stuff and then dismiss it.
I've met with some former senior people
at major human rights organizations
and they don't know that it's for real,
or they don't think it's for real.
They're like, oh yeah, that issue…
"Yeah, but I thought it's a bit you know thrown together."
Theydon't have this idea that it's totally for real.
So where's that gap coming from?
Because it is such a difficult issue to study.
If you look at any other major human rights issue
in China over the last 20 years or so,
you know for others you've got some document,
for example,
looking at orphanages in China that
just kill babies.
They let them starve to death in the cold.
In that case there was someone who came out,
a doctor who escaped with a duffel bag of documents,
and so that makes that one bulletproof.
That was something that happened?
Yeah, I mean it's totally extraordinary.
This was like the biggest China human rights story.
But this one is so crazy,
you have to go about it systematically,
because you have to whack three four or five moles at once.
Because people always have these different objections to like,
"Well, how do you know it's not death row?
How do you really know it's not death row?
How do you really really know its' not death row?"
Anyway the Tianjin,
the whole point of that was to
eliminate objections
just going by that one hospital.
If at least you can show
that in this hospital there's something really screwy going on…
First of all that there's way more transplants
than can be explained by the official explanation…
How many transplants?
Tianjin, we have figures on Tianjin.
Its about four thousand a year.
Look we don't know. We can we can say how many transplants.
You can say, "Look probably this many."
It's completely estimates.
You say you can't know how many transplants this one hospital is doing,
how do we know that there are more than 10,000?
Because you get a really good idea.
Because here's what you can do, you can be like,
okay, so in 2006 they built a new building with 500 beds, 17 stories,
it was funded by the Tianjin government.
2006 - the next year
they moved death-row approval to the Supreme People's Court
and they severely drop the number of people on death row.
So the first thing is you show the numbers are really big.
So for example you've got 500 beds
and then the occupancy of those beds for kidney and liver transplants is 90%.
On their website,
they say their average waiting time is 3 to 4 weeks,
and so if you say you know you've got beds occupied to, like, you know,
350 beds occupied at any one time
and you can also cross-reference it with the surgeons they have there.
They've got a massive surgical team,
60 70 surgeons. They've got thick bios.
Because it's not easy to be a transplant doctor,
there's a lot of, I mean it's a lot of work.
It's a very specialized field of medicine.
So I mean you just put all this together
and the first thing you establish is that the volume is simply huge.
So any skeptics out there, who are watching this,
they have to explain who else is being killed.
So they didn't think like. "Falun Gong, this is too crazy."
Okay, so who?
And officially China admitted to
using executed prisoners.
Well they flipped around on that,
originally they said it was all donations,
then they said it was almost all executed prisoners,
and now they are back to saying it's all donations.
And it's not possible that
donations?
They've implemented a donation system and that's why?
Yeah, I mean, that's of January 2015.
Everything about this is very hard to study.
For example we know after 2015 that
this persisted because, for example, you've got people making phone calls
and they're able to nail down,
you know they've got people saying, "Yeah, we've got a week."
And some could be lying
but when you do that to 20 hospitals
and they're all saying, you know, we've got organs,
then you know that it's still going on.
We had callers call and donation centers
and the donation centers say "We don't have any donations!"
They would also say they sometimes they
they would the phone would actually ring for a month,
a month and a half, they call every day,
finally somebody answered the phone,
and they'd ask "Well, how many donations have you done?"
and they said "…five."
We went to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Human Rights in China
almost in 2006.
Matas and I both have been involved with Amnesty International in Canada
and they basically took a seven-year hold on this,
they wouldn't agree that this was happening
and one of them told me privately is that
they thought that if they raised this issue
they would lose all ability to lobby
to get rid of the death penalty in China.
So basically for seven years,
the head office for Amnesty then was in London,
we were not allowed to get anywhere with Amnesty on this issue.
We now have the Amnesty fully on side with us
as of about a year ago.
I think Human Rights Watch…
I'm not quite sure where Human Rights Watch is,
but they have come around eventually.
One thing that Matt said that
I would like to follow up on is about waiting times.
There are not waiting times for organs but there are waiting times for beds.
Because these hospitals are operating at capacity,
there aren't enough doctors, there aren't enough beds,
there aren't enough hospitals,
there has been this huge building boom of transplant hospitals,
and Tianjin is one example of it.
And how can they be building all this capital
unless they're sure that
not only there's a huge supply of organs now
but there's an endless supply of organs into the future?
That is one of the most striking things
that while all this suppose a debate has been going on
there's been all this hurly-burly and their political play
and statements from the Chinese
about all their reforms and so forth
and we see it not there's nothing reflected
in the actual hospital rapid,
there's nothing but construction,
nothing but an endless construction
and no signs to receive within the actual literature
of a lack of confidence in the future.
The most, just creepiest thing
is this sense that we're just going to have organs
going into the future.
Ask David about Huang Jiefu.
Well so!… Huang Jiefu!
The person… how would I describe him…
he's the person in charge of the…
Chief Liar! Chief Liar! Chief Liar!
So he gives the number of 10,000 transplants a year,
how many organ transplants a year did you find in the update?
Well, what we did is we didn't have a specific figure,
we did a range
between 60,000 and 100,000 a year.
So he is saying 10,000
and you're saying 60,000 and 100,000 a year.
And it's increasing over time
because of the increasing capacity.
So the earlier years maybe is closer to 60,000
and later years closer to 100,000.
Huang Jiefu, at one time was Deputy Minister of Health.
He is the vice chair of the Health Care Committee for the Communist Party.
That's very important!
He is in charge of the health of the top party leaders,
he's a liver surgeon.
So we'll try not to say anything bad.
The function we see him performing is basically he's the public face
of the Chinese Communist Party on this issue,
and he's constantly making statements about it.
And if you track his statements over time,
he contradicts himself all the time.
I mean, you can point to one thing about it,
he says it's true or is it not,
but if you look at a bunch of things he says
he's just contradicting himself,
so it's it's just pointless even talking about what he says.
Matt, I believe you have a story about Huang Jiefu
and a liver surgery he did.
I think Huang Jiefu is great
in what he shows us about the system.
He did a this fancy liver transplant in 2005
in which he ordered two additional livers
to be delivered to him personally.
That I mean must have been removed
like within 12 or 16 hours of him making the phone call.
So he went to Xin Jiang
he did a demonstration of a removal of a liver cancer,
he found that
the operation was possible
to perform an autologous transplant
where he removes the liver, removes the cancer, and puts it back.
Iin order to do so, he ordered two spare livers.
So he called the 3rd Military Medical University in Chongqing
and then his alma mater in Guangzhou
and got two extra livers flown on plane to him.
How did you find out about this story?
It's all in Chinese media,
there are four articles all about it.
Why isn't it possible for a surgeon in the U.S. to order two livers?
Well who are you going to kill?
I mean is that the only way to have a liver?
Can't they have a stock pile?
Yeah either someone is brain dead in a hospital.
Then there is a period and that liver is allocated,
but in that situation…
If you control the twilight zone,
you could do that, you could arrange the car wrecks perfectly timed
and maybe tissue matched ahead of time,
and you can pull this off.
So someone has to die for there to be an organ?
It's not just part of the liver is the full liver.
Yeah it is a full liver transplant.
What are the numbers these hospitals are saying they are performing every year?
If you add them up you're getting your figures….
These are estimates.
They're not one hospital by one hospital, we have the numbers.
Let me give you a fairly simple way
of explaining this it's not a perfectly accurate way, it's a kind of cartoon,
but we actually use a more complex method in "The Update"
but there's a number.
Give you a number, 146 hospitals who do kidney and liver transplants,
and that's not even a perfect number
but these are the ones who sort of… Registered and approved.
Registered and approved by the Ministry of Health.
There are others but for the sake of argument…
For the sake of argument, and for the sake of fairly low numbers
these are just the high-volume places,
because it makes it simpler, we're not doing hearts and we're just doing kidneys and livers.
Those hospitals tend to have…
and you start to see a pattern after looking at this data,
and I've been looking at it for quite some time now,
you see a pattern of at least two to three or four transplant teams
actually twenty to thirty transplant beds at least, at least…
we will get to the minimum requirements in a minute,
but we don't even have to use those you can just see this pattern.
And a twenty to thirty day stay,
and you tend to see 80 to 100 percent occupancy rates.
What do you pull out of that?
well one way is to say is,
is it possible that the average transplant center in China ministry approved,
is doing one transplant a day?
Just one,
With all these staff.
Now, with all that staff, two to three transplants a day,
and some of them are just sitting around twiddling their thumbs,
and not doing anything every day.
But let's say they do one transplant a day.
Well that gives you a very simple number 365 times 146
that's 52,000 transplants a year,
So we're already at 52,000.
Now the fact is
the Ministry of Health actually demands they have far more beds than that
and a far larger staff than that.
Quota too.
Yea they actually quotas,
but the key thing is that they're asking for a lot more facilities than that.
Well now fair enough!
Me, David Kilgour and David Matas are not walking around China
with clipboards making sure that
the Ministry of Health is getting their money's worth here.
We're not doing that.
So we can't say that that's right.
But if it were true,
if these hospitals are following the directives of the Ministry of Health
that allow them to get that license,
they would have to be doing about 80,000 to 90,000 transplants per year.
Yeah that's the minimum!
That's the minimum.
And now we haven't even gone into Matt's Tianjin Central Hospital.
Military backed.
At approximately 4,000 to 5,000.
We haven't talked about Beijing 309 military hospital.
The massive hospital.
Yeah which are way beyond a minimum.
Now we're talking 3,000 or 4,000…
these are easily… you start coming to these figures.
I really wish we brought "The Update"
because it's 700 pages, 2,300 footnotes,
And, you know it's just massive.
And most of it is on these extraordinary hospitals.
It is mainly about hospitals
which do a thousand transplants or over every year.
And we can just you keep naming them off,
it's kind of mind-numbing actually to look at it.
So how is it possible that
Huang Jiefu is saying 10,000 a year,
and you are the only people researching
what seems to be obvious.
It is an awful lot of work to go through all these individual hospitals
and put together this information sort of bit by bit.
With a story like this, why isn't everyone rushing to cover it?
Oh it had a huge coverage,
if you look on our website,
you'll see that we've had we've had four stories in the New York Times.
The Times wouldn't touch this story for about what?
Six years?
Well, that's the thing! This story has been out since 2006!
Ten years later,
New York Times finally writes four articles.
What happened?
I think the answer is partly that it's a complex story,
that it involves a lot of different pieces of evidence,
it's not,
like some of the examples might get sort of one thing you can point to.
There's of course all the contrary communist propaganda,
there's censorship in China,
people are more concerned about what happens to them in their own neighborhood.
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét