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China's disturbing relationship with Falun Gong and Organ Harvesting.
Other | Monday 25th November 2013 | Alex
Chinese politics are a fairly decisive part of Western discussion. We all love Chinese food, pseudo-celebrate Chinese New Year and have a basic knowledge of the growing Chinese influence on the geopolitical scale. However, yesterday, while casually strolling through London’s China town, my girlfriend was handed a leaflet from a man attempting to raise awareness on a subject close to his heart. Upon closer inspection of this piece of literature, we discovered it’s a cause that people need to be made aware of.
The leaflet was raising awareness for a practice in China known as “Falun Gong”. Before yesterday, Falun Gong had never entered my vocabulary nor had my mind once crossed into the horrors that could have befallen the people who follow it.
Created in 1992 by Master Li, Falun Gong is a variation of the Chinese exercise Qigong which focuses on bringing together the breathing, movement and awareness of the individual. So, Qigong, and Falun Gong, can be understood to be spiritual practices which encourage the individual to have a greater understanding of themselves and bring a calm state of relaxation. If we are to take these points as being fact, why then is the Chinese regime interested in harvesting the organs of those who follow Falun Gong and sending them to “reform through labour” camps?
The New Statesman covered this topic in 2008, in Leeshai Lemish’s article on the subject, they say that the ruling communist regime views these practitioners as…
“a superstitious, foreign-driven, tightly organised, dangerous group of meditators”
A dangerous group of meditators? Never has an oxymoron been so ridiculous.
One of the main reasons that Falun Gong could have attracted such disdain from the Chinese government is that, in seven short years, they grew to outnumber party members with upwards of 70 million people now being part of this enourmous movement. The Party may have felt threatened as, with nearly twice the number of people practicing Falun Gong than there are people living in Canada, it would have proven impossible to control such a cognitive group.
There’s no way we can possibly address the situation of Organ Harvesting against anyone who practices Falun Gong without referring to David Matas and David Kilgour’s independent report of January, 2007. They point to the specific example of Gao Zhisheng being detained for 3 years for inviting the pair to visit China and, after them being refused a visa by the Chinese embassy, was detained shortly after. If there was no guilty conscience or any evidence to be hastily covered up, why would the embassy decline their application and Gao be detained? It doesn’t quite sit right.
What makes for uncomfortable reading is that we view the transplantation of organs as a positive thing; to aid those in need of livers, kidneys or any number of vital organs. The consideration of forcibly removing another human’s organs seems restricted to the realm of B-movie horror flicks. China’s death penalty, the report continues, is used…
“…for a large number of offences including strictly political and economic crimes where there is no suggestion that the accused has committed a violent act.”
Indeed, this proves to be one of the most harrowing excerpts from the entire report…
“The Falun Gong constitutes a prison population who the Chinese authorities vilify, dehumanize, depersonalize, marginalize even more than executed prisoners sentenced to death for criminal offences. Indeed, if one considers only the official rhetoric directed against the two populations, it would seem that the Falun Gong would be a target for organ harvesting even before prisoners sentenced to death.”
In a country that constitutes nearly 20% of the world’s aggregate population, how can something like this still be happening? The leaflet compared those who practice Falun Gong to the Jewish holocaust of Nazi Germany, if nothing is done now and no awareness is raised, we could well be talking about this in a similar vein.
Alex Taylor https://twitter.com/alextaylor18
