Mr. Gao Zhisheng and Sujiatun Concentration Camp 2006

Attorney Gao Zhisheng and Sujiatun Concentration Camp in China (audio)

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Special Report for NY English SOH Broadcast – March 26, 2006 Hello, this is Drew Carlucci with a special report for March 26, 2006. Today we bring you continuing coverage of Mr. Gao Zhisheng, the attorney who has emerged as one of China’s foremost activists in the struggle for democracy and human rights. We also have continuing coverage of Sujiantun Concentration Camp, where the harvesting of organs from live Falun Gong practitioners is big business for the CCP. Last fall, attorney Gao sent several open letters to CCP leaders Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. Extremely troubling to him was the six-year persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China. In one letter he wrote “This continuous, systematic, large-scale and organized persecution against Chinese people practicing Falun Gong” is a “barbaric atrocity”. Another letter documented accounts of torture experienced by Falun Gong practitioners in secret mountain chambers in northeastern China. Gao’s letters were met with silence and then oppression. His law firm was shut down; then his legal license was revoked. But he kept writing and joined the millions of Chinese who have quit the Chinese Communist Party. His family was placed under 24-hour surveillance by as many as 100 policemen; his 12-year old daughter was followed to school. In an interview with SOH, his wife had this to say:
“We all feel that the oppression is unbelievable. Why is this happening? Each petitioner has their own case, but our governments don’t offer solutions. We’re just trying to help out as individuals. Now the governments don’t even allow us to do that. This is why I feel Gao is in a very difficult situation. Why is it so hard to do anything good or just do our best in this country? Are they not human beings?
Beginning in late October, Gao and our child became the subjects of surveillance by the CCP. I discovered that they started first with our child on October 20th, then they followed us from work and finally from our home. They have continuously increased their efforts to oppress us, and now they even stalk us. One thing worth mentioning is that in the afternoon of the 29th, I had to stay late for work. It was well past five o’clock when they became impatient waiting outside of my office. They were so anxious that they started ringing the doorbell. They pressed so hard on the bell, it was like “Du…..” They were following me and even got very anxious about my getting off work late. They are just like hoodlums and rascals.”

On January 12, Gao was arrested, detained and released on the same day. Five days later he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt when a car tried to run him over. His entire office staff has been arrested. Gao said, “In China today, the CCP’s oppression only leads to people’s awakening.” He says that the 100 days of monitoring him and his family is a failure, and that the CCP has not won anything but HE has gained something. He said that his little daughter has become mature during the savage oppression.

On Feb. 4, Gao launched a relay hunger strike. He started a 48-hour hunger strike and released the following statement, “As a human rights lawyer, I have to use this hunger strike to protest the CCP’s brutality. What a tragedy of this nation and in our time!”

“I feel so sad that many people who are on hunger strike are hungry, because I’m very hungry too. It is a tragedy of our time. When all legal means to protect human rights are prevented, we have to use our body as the last resort to protest the government’s brutality. We want to live with dignity.”
Clive Ansley, a Canadian lawyer who practiced law in China for 14 years, gave the following description of the Chinese Communist regime:

“The government of China today is a Fascist government. The dictionary definition of Fascism is essentially a brutal and absolute dictatorship carried out by an alliance of government, the military and big business. That’s exactly what you have today in China.”


At 6 a.m. Beijing standard time, March 11th, attorney Gao began his fourth turn in the Global Relay Hunger Strike. Since February 18th, Gao has been fasting every Saturday to support the hunger strike for human rights. At the same time on March 11th, people in twenty-seven provinces and cities across China began their own hunger strikes to show support for Gao. He told a reporter that on March 10th, several thousand staff members at a large company in Shanxi Province also participated in the hunger strike. He said the central theme is still to protest against the Chinese Communist Party’s organized criminal activities, the police and their criminal-like violence towards Chinese citizens.

During the days surrounded by plainclothes police, anyone who went to see him was taken away or arrested, including proxy lawyers. More recently, Gao received death threats from policemen.
Gao Zhisheng: At approximately 11 am, my wife shouted up from the entrance to my office, calling me to come downstairs quickly because the secret police downstairs were fighting with lawyer Li Heping. I quickly ran downstairs and saw two husky six-foot-tall fellows shoving lawyer Li Heping around in the foyer and attempting to take him away by force. When I pointed out to the thugs the illegality of their actions, one of them flashed an ID card at attorney Li. On it was written Beijing Police Station Officer Li Liang. Li Liang and his companions wanted to take me away forcefully as well. When I requested him to show me a legal document he looked surprised and answered: “Do you know who you are talking to? Who says we need a warrant? It is not necessary.”

During the whole time, Li Liang and his anonymous partner, who was over six feet tall, approached me closely. While Li Liang was wrestling with Li Heping, this other, with his face inches away from mine, threatened me many times. Then he said the following, which I found most interesting:”Gao, you must remember what I say today; you cannot remain this arrogant for long. In a few days we will bring you somewhere to talk and I will make you suffer horribly, so you must remember my words today!” From the way he gritted his teeth while he spoke those words, one could tell that here guarded me completely as his personal enemy although this was our first meeting, making me wonder whether to laugh or cry! Another plainclothes policeman came in right up to my face and said, “Let me tell you clearly, you will not remain arrogant for long. In a few days time when we meet alone somewhere, we will definitely treat you nicely.” Yet another secret police who was also well-built came rushing in. This fellow had a fat head with a thick face and wore a thick chain on his neck. He pushed his fat face close to mine and said to me fiercely, “Gao Zhisheng, you are going to die soon! Mark my words, you are nearing death! Who do you think you are? Even those on top have to listen to us; even Hu Jintao does as we tell him. We can create enough evidence in a day to arrest you a hundred times. Just wait and see. Very soon we will let you know who we are! Let me warn you one last time: you will die soon.”


Yet, despite these threats to his life, he continues to fight for justice. On March 18th, Gao wrote in his hunger strike diary – urging the UN and international organizations to investigate Sujiatun Concentration Camp, which was reported by the Epochtimes newspaper.
Sujiantun Concentration Camp
On March 9, 2006, the Epoch Times reported that a former Chinese journalist working at the Chinese embassy in Japan, revealed the existence of a concentration camp called “Sujiatun” in Shenyang city, Liaoning province, in northeastern China. He said “Falun Gong practitioners have been killed for their organs, which are sent off to various medical facilities…organ sales are now a highly profitable business in China.” The concentration camp is underneath what used to be a hospital, and employs an "unusually large number of doctors" where Falun Gong practitioners have been detained, tortured, and harvested for their organs since 2001.
According to a recent article published by the Washington Times, the journalist, who goes by the pseudonym Jin Zhong to protect his identity, said he first learned of the harvesting operation between October and December and that the prisoners were Falun Gong practitioners.He said, "This is murder, and murder sponsored by a state. It must be stopped."The Washington Times also reported that while researching the Chinese government's response to SARS, Mr. Jin discovered the underground detention center where he said thousands of Falun Gong practitioners were being imprisoned. Mr. Jin stated that bodies of the prisoners were incinerated in the boiler room of the hospital and that boiler room workers had taken valuables from the dead and sold them. He said he has provided information about the Sujiatun organ harvesting operation to U.S. government officials, including members of Congress.
Mr. Jin held that his identity must be kept anonymous, after being threatened by Chinese government agents. He recently fled to the United States, where he hopes to seek political asylum.
The Chinese government has declined comment while Falun Gong practitioners have requested governments worldwide to begin an investigation. The subject of organ sales caught mainstream media’s attention last year when China officially admitted that organs for transplantation were from executed prisoners.
In a recent interview with Sound of Hope reporters, attorney Gao Zhisheng said, “Sujiatun concentration camp is reminiscent of a Nazi death camp. It is a must to conduct an investigation. The United Nations and international communities must take responsibility and must be sensitive to this issue. It is well known that the CCP is most capable of committing crimes and destroying evidence effectively. If it is delayed, the evidence will be destroyed, the CCP will do whatever it can to destroy the evidence; this would put more people at risk. This is a crime against humanity. All my three open letters can be counted as evidence. Any international organization can investigate this. I’m willing to lead them to the site for investigation.”
Since China’s illegal organ trade has been exposed in recent years, the United States Congress has held numerous hearings. According to transcripts dated June 27, 2001, from a State Department hearing entitled Sale of Human Organs in China, knowledge of the sale of human organs from executed prisoners in China has been reported by Hong Kong and London media as early as the mid-1980s. “We repeatedly raised this issue with high-level Chinese officials throughout the 1990s, pressing for changes in Chinese policy and practice, and urging changes in China’s legal and medical systems to ensure the protection of individual rights and the guarantee of due process. We consider organ harvesting from executed prisoners, without permission from family members, to be an egregious human rights abuse that violates not only international human rights law, but also international medical ethical standards.” (For more information, visit www.state.gov.)

In 2001, Harry Wu and Dr. Tom Diflo, experts on illegal organ transplants in China, both testified before U.S. Congress about such illegal practices in state-owned Chinese hospitals.
Wu, founder of the Laogai Research Foundation, has tracked media reports of people from all over Asia, traveling to China to take advantage of the abundant supply of organs from executed prisoners. In 2002, after more than 10 years investigation, he hosted and compiled 'An Investigative Report on China's Harvesting of Executed Prisoners' Organ'."
In an interview with NTDTV, Harry Wu was asked to comment on the widespread practice of organ harvesting in China. Wu believes the gruesome practice is allowed to proliferate in China because it is a behavior organized by the Chinese Communist Regime. He explains:
"On October 9, 1984, the Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuratorate, the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Public Health, and the Ministry of Civil Affairs stipulated that executed prisoners' corpses and organs may be supplied for use under these 3 conditions:
1. No family members or anyone else takes back the corpse.
2. Prior personal agreement by the executed prisoner
3. Agreement by family members.
Any one of these 3 requirements is enough for the government. In practice, this means no matter what tactics the government uses, in the end it is enough to meet any of the 3 criteria.
In order to demonstrate prisoner agreement, if a prisoner presses his finger on an execution document during torture before the police, this constitutes an agreement. If family members must be paid off afterwards, this constitutes a 'family agreement'.
The first, most convenient condition is even more ridiculous. What does 'no one takes back the corpse' mean? For example, a certain laborer will be executed in Shenzhen, but his hometown is in Sichuan Province or this laborer is executed in Shanghai, and his hometown is in Hunan Province. His family members do not have enough time to rush there by train, so how could they take back the corpse? The government does not notify them either. This is called 'nobody takes the corpse.' This is easily orchestrated."
This investigative reporter listed many gruesome examples organ removal from still-living victims. But many Chinese medical personnel and even many ordinary people regard this as common practice. Harry Wu indicates it is all because the Chinese mentality has been twisted under the education of the Chinese Communist Party's brutal totalitarian rule into a special kind of thinking and culture."

Harry Wu spent 19 years in a Chinese labor camp. He says the common practice is to execute the prisoner with a shot to the back of the head, remove his organs, and transport them to nearby hospitals.
Dr. Tom Diflo, director of kidney transplantation at New York University Medical Center, has researched illegal organ transplants in China. His findings confirm those of Wu.
In an interview with SOH, Dr. Diflo recounted his story:
I had encountered some Chinese patients who had gone to China, and they came back with kidneys. And when I asked where they came from, they said, “oh, my cousin”, or something like that. But some of them told me they had bought the kidneys from executed prisoners. So, that got my interest. And I started investigating it. So it was my interests in that and my investigating, that I eventually met Harry Wu, from the Laogai Research Foundation, and he got me to testify in front of Congress on that day in 2001 about this practice and what I thought about it.
The problem was, these organs were being taken from prisoners who were executed and they were taken from the prisoners right after execution and transplanted. Although the government said this was something they got consent for, that the prisoners agreed to it beforehand, or the families consented, the evidence was overwhelming that there wasn’t any consent involved. Certainly the execution dates are scheduled around the time of when people are wanting to get their transplants and things like that. My opinion is that it’s terrible. That it’s ethically and morally reprehensible. They’re taking the organs from the prisoners without their consent, without the consent of the families, they’re violating their bodies. And this is all a purely a cash business. It’s meant to raise money for the hospitals, for the doctors, and for the system.
When asked about the Sujiatun Concentration Camp, and on the recent discovery of Falun Gong practitioners having their organs removed while they are still alive, Dr.Diflo had this to say:
”If in fact they’re taking organs out of living people, purely for the purpose of transplantation without consent, that’s even more of a human rights horror than the prisoner situation. The non-consensual taking of organs out of people is perhaps the great violation of their human rights that I can think of”.
And finally, when asked whether he believed that the Chinese Communist Regime was suppressing information on the widespread practice of organ selling in China, Dr. Diflo commented:
“It certainly appears to me that any information like that, the government likes to keep under wraps, like the AIDS epidemic that happened in China because of the pooling of blood, they really minimized that for years and it blew up in their face. But it would not surprise me, knowing what I know about the Chinese government, it would not surprise me if they were suppressing that information, and if they're pulling organs out of people. I'm sure they don't want anyone to know about it”.
In an article dated March 15th, the Epoch Times reported, “The lack of transparency in the Chinese Communist regime’s criminal justice system, the secrecy that surrounds prison executions and the removal of organs make actual documentation of the practice difficult.” However, several eyewitnesses have reported on this human rights violation. The article further reports, “in June 2001, Wang Guoqi, a Chinese former military physician, offered chilling evidence to the US Congress of how he had to harvest organs of more than 100 executed prisoners. In one case he had to skin a shot victim’s body while the man was still alive. Skin is particularly “valuable” for its use in burns victims. Dr. Wang, who at the time was seeking asylum in the U.S., alleged that corneas and other body tissues were removed for transplants, and said his hospital, the Tianjin Paramilitary Police General Brigade Hospital, sold body parts for profit, reported the Guardian.”
Confirming earlier reports on the existence of the Sujiatun Concentration Camp, on March 17th, 2006, the Epoch Times reported that a former employee of the Liaoning Provincial Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine revealed that “the Sujiantun Concentration Camp in China was indeed part of a hospital. The concentration camp has engaged in taking organs from Falun Gong practitioners when they were still alive and selling the organs. Since 2001, the concentration camp has secretly detained approximately 6,000 Falun Gong practitioners, and removed kidneys, livers, and corneas. After the organ removal, the practitioners were thrown into an incinerator, which was converted from a boiler. Their ashes were dumped together with burned charcoal. No Falun Gong practitioners have ever left the camp alive.”
Subjects of live cornea removal are mainly the elderly or children.
The witness further explained that many of the victims were illegally detained with neither an arrest warrant nor identification as to who these people actually were. “About three-quarters of the 6,000 people died after their hearts, kidneys, corneas, or skin was removed; their bodies were then burned. This witness, whose family member participated in the removal of Falun Gong practitioners’ organs, said that approximately 2,000 Falun Gong practitioners remain in the hospital. She was afraid that the authorities would kill all of them to destroy evidence.”
Also coming forward, according to NTDTV, a former CCP spy-turned-informant substantiated reports that the Sujiatun labor camp is kept completely sealed from the public and under tight security. He concur ed that thousands of Falun Gong practitioners known to be detained there are being kept for their organs. The agent also validated earlier reports of detained Falun Gong practitioners being shipped to Sujiatun from other camps in China. The agent wishes to remain anonymous for security purposes.

A representative for a U.S. based human rights group called The World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) had this to say on Sujiatun:

In our initial investigation, there truly exists a large "organ market" in Sujiatun, Shenyang City, Liaoning Province, China. It is a systematic procedural practice, which includes building the death camp, detaining the "suppliers," (living Falun Gong practitioners,) matching Falun Gong practitioners' organs with people who need them, surgically removing the organs, eliminating the victims' bodies, and setting up the hospitals that use these stolen organs.


And in one of the grizzliest stories to surface, from the website, Clearwisdom.net, it was reported that a few doctors conducted live experiments on the prisoners, and some high-ranking CCP officials requested to have the prisoners’ brain matter sent to them as nutritional supplements.Regarding the horrific Chinese organ harvesting trade, Canadian attorney, Clive Ansley, who spent 14 years practicing law in China, gives his opinion of the communist government’s policy towards human rights and rule of law.

“One of the most fundamental goals of Chinese government policy today is specifically to prevent the slightest improvement in human rights or in the rule of law because the rule of law means the end of the rule of communist party. The two can’t coexist. So every organ, every agency and every organization in China is simply a puppet for public display controlled by a puppeteer from behind and out of sight. A hundred percent of media, all the formal institutes of government, the police, the courts, so called labour unions, so called chamber of commerce, the arm forces, and then extra-legal groups such as the 610 office in charge of persecution of Falun Gong no legal bases at all dictating government’s policy. There is no doubt at all that history will condemn this government’s murderous record.”


Believing that the crimes committed by the Chinese communist regime will eventually be brought to justice, Attorney Gao Zhisheng had this to say, "The CCP is doomed to lose this battle of good against evil. Why? Because the weapons that determine the success of this combat are morality and righteousness. Evil and violence cannot exterminate righteousness."
This was a special report for Sound of Hope Radio. I’m Drew Carlucci.