This article is reprinted from National Review with the permission of the author.

For years, members of the Falun Gong, a new religious movement, have accused China of tissue-typing and organ-harvesting their fellow practitioners to boost the country’s black market and further the Chinese Communist Party’s tyrannical suppression of the FG movement. China has denied the accusation repeatedly, but multiple international studies and exposés have substantiated the brutality with strong circumstantial evidence.

Now, an escaped Falun Gong member has come forward with direct evidence, claiming that part of his own liver and one lung were harvested while he was a political prisoner in 2004. From the Epoch Times story:

A man who had part of his liver forcibly removed in communist China has stepped forward after escaping the country to draw attention to the Chinese regime’s mass killing-for-profit scheme known as forced organ harvesting.

At an Aug. 9 press event, Cheng Peiming, a Falun Gong practitioner who turns 59 this month, recalled six prison guards pinning him down in a Chinese hospital to administer anesthesia against his will, while he was being held in a prison in northeastern China over his faith.

That day was Nov. 16, 2004. When he woke up three days later, he said, his right foot was shackled to a hospital bed. One arm was receiving intravenous therapy, and there were tubes on his feet and chest and into his nose.

He began coughing nonstop and felt pain and numbness around his left ribs.

Only after escaping to the United States in 2020 and undergoing a series of medical tests did he confirm his worst fears: Part of his liver was gone, along with a portion of his lung.

The story includes photos of Cheng’s large surgical scar, which would seem to confirm his story.

China denied the claim but (as reported again by Epoch) admitted that Cheng had been hospitalized for swallowing a nail and a part of a blade as a protest while imprisoned, implicitly adding heft to his allegations.

Some might say that the Epoch Times is closely associated with the Falun Gong and, therefore, not exactly an objective source of news about this issue. So, I contacted Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom — an unimpeachable expert on the Chinese tyranny — to ask what she thought. Here are my questions and her responses (slightly edited for clarity):

Wesley J. Smith: What makes you trust this report?

Nina Shea: There’s no dispute that a Chinese hospital, working in cooperation with the prison system, surgically removed part of his [Cheng’s] organs without his consent. The security police have admitted each element of this — that he was a prisoner who was hospitalized and was operated on without his consent. I believe that he had medically inexplicable excisions of parts of his lung and liver, for testing for future removal and transplantation, or for some other medical experiment. I’ve seen his scar, the scans of his mutilated organs and the evaluation of the Australian doctor who reviewed the scans. I also do not take CCP-government denials of wrongdoing at face value. . . .

Over the past 18 years, I have interviewed many Falun Gong and other Chinese about forced organ-harvesting, and I spoke with independent experts about this victim’s testimony, who corroborated certain key points of his story. Finally, Chinese-government authority and leading transplant surgeon Huang Jiefu admitted that China took organs from prisoners for transplantation before 2015, as the State Department human-rights reports notes.

WJS: How did Cheng escape?

NS: He escaped from the hospital by luck and by dint of his street smarts. He escaped to Thailand and was brought to the U.S. from detention there by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robert Destro, who had learned of his perilous situation — he was facing deportation to China.

WJS: How widespread is the organ-harvesting practice in China. Does it go beyond the FG?

NS: Forced organ-harvesting is a booming business in China, and, according to twelve U.N. experts on human rights and journalist Ethan Gutmann, various religious minorities are targeted for forced organ-harvesting. Partly because large numbers of these groups, such as the Uyghur Muslims, are in indefinite detention without due process in China at any given time and because they are valued for their clean living lifestyles, unlike common criminals.

This is pure evil. Notice that Shea uses the present tense when she describes organ-harvesting as a “booming business.”

And yet, much of the world’s governments’ protests are low-key and sporadic, corporations continue to do business with China, whimsical books such as Larry’s Kidney by Daniel Asa Rose, about his “adventures” buying a kidney there, receive favorable reviews, and we certainly don’t see mass demonstrations and angry calls for divestiture as those that are ongoing against Israel.

Are these relatively mild responses, or nonresponses — given the depravity of the conduct — merely a case of “follow the money,” or just the “wrong” villain? Both, I suspect.

At what point does our treatment of China as a normal country become complicity?

You may also wish to read: Organ transplants: How the internet enables the dark side Euthanasia activists offer to “ease” the donor organ shortage, and so do cartels that exploit the world’s most vulnerable poor. Africans are lured abroad in hopes of a job, maybe in high tech even, and it sometimes turns out that the job is — organ donor.