Four things have happened. First, the Chinese Communist Party imprisoned Cheng Peiming and performed an operation that removed parts of his lung and liver. Second, he escaped. Third, he told his story to the world. Fourth, the Party slandered and threatened him for speaking out.
Cheng is a practitioner of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice much maligned by the CCP, “which views Falun Gong as a threat to its authoritarian rule…and has systematically persecuted its adherents for decades” (“First Known Survivor of China’s Forced Organ Harvesting Speaks Out,” The Diplomat, August 10, 2024).
First known survivor
In August 2024, Cheng Peiming told his story at a press conference in Washington D.C.
“One day in 2002, I was told to pack up and was suddenly transferred to Harbin Prison and later to Daqing Prison. It was there that I was tortured even more severely.”
Cheng recalled the escalating brutality he faced in detention. In a particularly harrowing episode, he was tortured to the point of losing consciousness. “On November 17, 2004, I was tortured again until I passed out. When I woke up, I found myself tied to a hospital bed.”…
“They said that I had to undergo an operation, but I firmly refused. They gave me an injection, and I quickly lost consciousness,” Cheng recounted. “When I woke up, I was still in the hospital and felt terrible pain in my side. There was a bloody tube connected to me. I was shackled to the bed.”
This was not an isolated incident. Cheng endured repeated procedures, all under the threat of death. “A few days later, they said I had to have another operation. I thought I was going to die,” he said.
During his imprisonment, Cheng was subjected to forced blood tests—an ominous indicator of his organs’ viability for transplantation. “They did blood tests on me many times and subjected me to all kinds of inhumane torture,” he noted.
In 2006, on the verge of being subjected to another operation, he was able to save himself by a lucky chance: a guard fell asleep after forgetting to put Cheng back in shackles. He went down a fire escape, caught a cab, escaped to a refugee camp in Thailand, and evaded the Chinese authorities for years before reaching the United States in 2020.
Transplant specialists have confirmed through recent CT scans that Cheng is missing segments 2 and 3 of his left liver lobe, as well as half of the lower left lobe of his lung. These findings, along with a detailed report on his case, were presented to a panel in Washington D.C.
Evidence and threats
Much of the evidence about China’s state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting, albeit overwhelming, is circumstantial. Surviving the organ harvesting is rare. So Cheng’s testimony and the medical evidence of what happened to him are very important. The Chinese Communist Party thinks so too (“Cheng Peiming: Organ Harvesting Survivor Slandered in China and Threatened in the US,” Bitter Winter, November 8, 2024).
The testimony of Cheng is making inroads in China too through clandestine channels. This led the Chinese Communist Party to mobilize the China Anti-Xie-Jiao Association, which is directly controlled by the Party and claims to be the largest anti-cult organization in the world (the claim is probably true). The Association prepared a report that was shared by the China Court Network, “China Youth Daily,” and other official sources.
Note that these are Chinese websites for domestic Chinese consumption. Very few people read them abroad. The fact that they felt the need to attack Cheng Peiming shows that his story has gained traction in China, managing to break through the censorship. The rebuttal is based on alleged statements by Cheng’s relatives…, doctors, and prison staff…. Under what kind of pressures the victim’s sister and other relatives may have been put in China is also easy to guess.
Cheng has been more directly threatened for giving his testimony in the United States. Early in November 2024, unknown persons broke into his New York home. In two earlier incidents, someone put nails in the tires of his car; he discovered one of these acts of vandalism only after a tire burst while he was driving. No one was hurt.
At National Review, Wesley Smith asks, in a report about Cheng, “At what point does our treatment of China as a normal country become complicity?”
