Cheng Peiming, a 58-year-old Chinese man from Northeast China, is regarded as the first known survivor of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) program of forced live organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience. On August 9, at a forum in Washington, D.C., he publicly shared his experience in which the Chinese authorities forcibly removed his organs twenty years ago.
Cheng stated that he was repeatedly detained and tortured by the CCP for practicing Falun Gong. In 2002 he was sentenced to eight years in prison. In July 2004, in a state of good health, he was dragged from prison to a hospital where guards tried to make him sign a form of consent for surgery. When he refused to sign, the guards knocked him down and anesthetized him. When he woke up three days later, Cheng found himself handcuffed to a bed with a 35-centimeter-long incision on his chest. In 2006, prison guards again took Cheng to a hospital. He said, “They had no reason for any surgery, so I knew I would be killed.” He managed to escape while the guards were sleeping. Cheng spent the next nine years hiding in China and managed to flee to Thailand in 2015. Four years ago, with assistance from the U.S. government, he came to America through the United Nations refugee program.
When media reports on China’s forced organ harvesting practices first emerged in 2006, Cheng realized that this was what had happened to him. It was only after arriving in the U.S. that transplant specialists confirmed through scans that part of his liver and left lung had been removed. Cheng said that he still cannot feel certain parts of his chest and struggles daily with severe pain throughout his body.
In 2019 an independent tribunal in London (“The China Tribunal”) ruled that the CCP has committed crimes against humanity through its continuous harvesting of organs from minority groups, including Falun Gong practitioners. Two years later, a United Nations human rights expert reported that, in addition to Falun Gong practitioners, other minorities, including Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims, and Christians detained in China, had also become targets of forced organ harvesting. In June of this year the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Falun Gong Protection Act, aimed at compelling the CCP to end its persecution of Falun Gong and the forced harvesting of organs from detained practitioners.
Source: Radio Free Asia, August 9, 2024
https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/renquanfazhi/kw8-forced-organ-harvesting-08092024135324.html