‘He Was Alive’: Tormented Chinese Doctor Recounts Harvesting Organs in Back of Van
Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times
Dr. Zheng, then a resident doctor at one of China’s largest military hospitals, knew little more than they were on a “secret military mission” near a military prison located around the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian.
A light blue fabric covered the four sides of the vehicle, shielding it from any curious glances.
When the door opened, four burly soldiers carried in a man whose limbs were bound with thin ropes that had cut deeply into his flesh. The man was no more than 18 years old; his organs, the surgical crew had been told the day before, were “healthy, fresh.”
A doctor instructed Dr. Zheng to “step on” the man’s legs and “don’t let him move.” He pressed the man’s legs down with his hands and to his shock, they were warm to the touch. Blood was now flowing from the man’s throat.
He watched a doctor slice open the man’s stomach and two others reach in to remove a kidney each. The man’s legs twitched and his throat moved—although no sound came out.
“Cut his artery and veins, quick!” a doctor told Dr. Zheng. As he did so, so much blood gushed out that it splashed all over Dr. Zheng’s gown and gloves. That was when he got the order to extract the man’s eyes.
Dr. Zheng looked at the man’s face. Staring back at him was a pair of wide-open eyes.
“It was horrifying beyond words. He was looking right at me. His eyelids were moving. He was alive,” Dr. Zheng recounted to The Epoch Times in July, the first time he agreed to use his real name to recount his story.
But, in the van in 1994, little did he know he was party to what would soon become an industrialized killing apparatus set up to extract organs from prisoners of conscience and sell them on demand.
In the van, he told the other doctors, “I can’t do this.” He felt his brain empty out as he sat there, shaky, sweating, and paralyzed.
The doctor across from him immediately pressed the man’s head to the floor of the van. With two fingers pressed on the eyelids and a hemostat in another hand, the doctor clamped out each of the man’s eyes.
The body, now motionless, was placed in a black plastic bag and taken away by soldiers waiting outside. The van sped back to the General Hospital of Shenyang Military Region, where Dr. Zheng did his residency. The nurses quickly gathered up the bloodied medical equipment.
Lights were on in two operation rooms when they reached the hospital. Another team of doctors was waiting to begin the organ transplantations.
Dr. Zheng was too sickened to be useful, even though the department director wanted him to get his hand in at the operating table. He sat watching from a few yards away as the surgery progressed. When the transplant operations were complete, the medical staff went into an upscale restaurant and feasted in silence, although Dr. Zheng said he couldn’t take a bite. After the meal, he took leave, developing a high fever at the same time.
That pair of eyes—desperate, fearful, and pained—has since tormented Dr. Zheng day and night.
“Under the light lay a young life, a fellow human being, whose organs were being harvested while he was alive,” he said.
Billion Dollar Industry
The horror Dr. Zheng witnessed in the van, and afterward at the hospital, took place in 1994, when the Chinese regime’s mass-scale, state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting was still in its infancy.
It soon ballooned into a billion-dollar industry, using prisoners of conscience, particularly adherents of the persecuted faith group Falun Gong, to fuel its rise. In the same city as the hospital was the Sujiatun concentration camp, which multiple whistleblowers revealed as a mass killing ground of imprisoned Falun Gong adherents for their organs since the persecution began in 1999. While the Sujiatun underground facility was abandoned after being exposed internationally, an untold number of other such camps exist in China.
Dr. Zheng is one of several witnesses who have come forward to The Epoch Times since 2006 to expose the regime’s grisly practice.
Since then, a multitude of independent reports have provided information on the severity and scale of the practice.
In 2019, a London-based independent tribunal concluded that China’s ruling regime killed prisoners of conscience for their organs “on a significant scale,” and that Falun Gong practitioners are the primary victims.
