by The first known survivor of China’s forced organ harvesting campaign against religious prisoners said he was now ready to speak out and expose the “evil” of the Chinese Communist Party.
Cheng Pei Ming, 58, who will speak publicly for the first time in Washington on Friday, described how he still feels “tremendous pain” 20 years after parts of his lung and liver were forcibly removed.
“I believed they would kill me. I’m not sure they thought I could survive, but I did,” Mr Cheng told The Telegraph as he took off his shirt to reveal a scar that ran around his chest all the way to his back.
Mr Cheng says he was detained and tortured for years by the Chinese state for practicing Falun Gong, a spiritual movement founded in the early 1990s.
The movement swept across the country, but was banned in 1999 and then brutally suppressed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which declared it an “evil culture” and a threat to the state.
Beijing has long viewed religious groups as a threat to social order and the party’s ideological grip on power.
In the years following the banning of Falun Gong and the persecution of its followers, China’s organ transplant industry exploded. Vital organs became readily available within days in state hospitals – a time frame that no national transplant system anywhere else in the world could achieve.
In 2019, an independent tribunal in London ruled that the Chinese government continued to commit crimes against humanity by targeting minorities, including the Falun Gong movement, for organ harvesting.
The CCP has denied accusations of organ harvesting and has repeatedly denied that Falun Gong practitioners are killed for their organs.
But in 2021, United Nations human rights experts, along with Falun Gong practitioners, reported targeting other minorities, including Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims and Christians detained in China.
Mr. Cheng said he could not understand why they would crack down on a religion that promoted peace.
“Falun Gong teaches people to be good and have compassion and empathy for everyone. We do not mean any harm to society, the persecution against us should never have happened,” he said.
After 14 years of evading Chinese authorities, including five years in Thailand where he was granted UN refugee status, Mr Cheng arrived in the US in July 2020.
Mr. Cheng was first arrested in September 1999. He said he was tortured and told to renounce his faith and when he refused he was deported along with his family from his home in the eastern province of Shandong.
In the years that followed, he was “kidnapped by the CCP” five times, each time suffering “unbearable” torture, he said.
“I remembered asking him: ‘Why don’t you kill me instead?’ And they said: ‘It’s too easy, we enjoy torturing you’,” said Mr Cheng.
In 2002, he was sentenced to eight years in prison. He remembered seeing other Falun Gong residents disappear. Some were sent to so-called “re-education” labor camps; others were tortured to death.
In July 2004, Mr Cheng said he was dragged into a hospital where agents from the CCP’s infamous 610 office – known as the “Chinese Gestapo” – tried to get him to sign consent forms. When he refused, they laid him down and put him to sleep.
His family were told he was undergoing surgery and had a 20 percent chance of survival.
Mr. Cheng woke up three days later, scared, shackled to a bed, and with a 35cm incision across his chest. Transplant experts have since confirmed that scans show that parts of Mr Cheng’s liver and left lung were surgically removed.
Two years later, the prison guards brought him back to the hospital. “They had no reason to work, so I figured I’d be killed. My family were told I had swallowed knives and was unlikely to survive.”
But an opportunity for escape came unexpectedly. His guard fell asleep, so Mr. Cheng ran for him.
For nine years, “I lived a life of escape and hiding under false names”, he said, adding that the CCP “wanted to find men and kill me to cover up what they had done”.
He eventually escaped to Thailand where “I felt I could be killed at any time”, Mr Cheng said. He only felt safe when he reached US soil in 2020.
In June, the US House passed the Falun Gong Protection Act, which aims to end the persecution of Falun Gong by the CCP as well as the forced organ harvesting of arrested practitioners of the religion.
Mr Cheng, whose family is still mostly in China, cannot feel parts of his chest, and struggles daily with shocks of pain that run through his body.
But now he is ready to tell his story. “I want the world to know how bad the CCP is. He tries not only to harm people in China, but the world. I have to reveal what happened to Falun Gong.”
Dr Charles Lee, a leading advocate for the Falun Gong movement, who was himself arrested and tortured for his beliefs by the CCP in 2003, told the Telegraph that the importance of Mr Cheng’s testimony cannot be overstated. .
“We have heard reports for years about the extremely inhumane treatment of Falun Gong, those tortured to death, their bodies cut open and organs missing. But now we have the first living witness.”
He added: “This should be a cause for concern for people and governments around the world that the CCP does not care about human life.”
