The first survivor of China’s forced organ harvesting campaign against clergy says she is now ready to speak out and expose the “evil” of the Chinese Communist Party.
Speaking publicly for the first time in Washington on Friday, Cheng Pei Ming, 58, described how she still feels “extreme pain” 20 years after her lung and liver were forcibly removed.
“I believed they were going to kill me. I’m not sure they thought I would survive, but I did,” Mr Cheng told The Telegraph, as he took off his shirt to reveal a scar that ran from his chest to his back.
Mr Cheng says he was detained and tortured by the Chinese state for years because he practised Falun Gong, a spiritual movement founded in the early 1990s.
The movement spread nationwide, but was banned in 1999 and subsequently brutally suppressed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which described it as an “evil cult” and a threat to the state.
Beijing has long viewed religious groups as a threat to social order and the party’s ideological hold on power.
In the decades after Falun Gong was banned and its followers persecuted, China’s organ transplant industry boomed, with vital organs becoming readily available in government hospitals within days – a timeframe no other national transplant system in the world has achieved.
In 2019, an independent court in London ruled that the Chinese government continues to commit crimes against humanity by targeting minorities, including the Falun Gong movement, for organ harvesting.
The CCP has denied allegations of organ harvesting and repeatedly denied allegations that Falun Gong practitioners are killed for their organs.
But in 2021, UN human rights experts reported that Falun Gong practitioners, as well as other minorities detained in China, including Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims and Christians, were also being targeted.
Mr Cheng said he could not understand why they would oppress a religion that promotes peace.
“Falun Gong teaches people to be good and to have compassion and empathy for all people. We do not want to harm society, and we should never have been persecuted,” he said.
Mr Cheng arrived in the US in July 2020 after evading Chinese authorities for 14 years, including five years spent in Thailand, where he received UN refugee status.
Mr Cheng was first arrested in September 1999. He said he was tortured and told to renounce his faith, and when he refused he and his family were kicked out of their home in the eastern province of Shandong.
He said he was abducted five times by the CCP in the following years and was subjected to “unbearable” torture each time.
“I remember asking: ‘Why don’t you kill me?’ And they said: ‘It’s very easy, we take great pleasure in torturing you,'” Mr. Cheng said.
He was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2002. He recalled seeing other Falun Gong detainees 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 to a hospital where agents from the CCP’s notorious 610 office – also known as “China’s gestapo” – tried to make him sign consent forms. When he refused, they laid him on the floor and put him to sleep.
His family was told he underwent surgery and had a 20 percent chance of survival.
Mr Cheng woke up three days later in terror, chained to a bed and with a 35cm incision across his chest. Transplant experts have since confirmed that scans showed Mr Cheng’s liver and left lung had been surgically removed.
Two years later, prison guards took him back to the hospital. “There was no reason for them to operate, so I knew I was going to be killed. My family was told I had swallowed a knife and my chances of survival were slim.”
But an unexpected escape opportunity presented itself. His guard had fallen asleep, so Mr. Cheng tried to escape.
“For nine years, I lived a life of escape and hiding under false names,” he said, adding that the CCP “wanted to find people and kill me to cover up what they had done.”
He eventually fled to Thailand, where, Mr. Cheng said, “I felt like I could be killed at any moment.” When he reached U.S. soil in 2020, he felt safe.
In June, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Falun Gong Protection Act, which aims to end the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong and forced organ harvesting from captured Falun Gong practitioners.
Mr Cheng, whose family mostly lives in China, still cannot feel parts of his chest and struggles with daily jolts of pain.
But now he is ready to tell his story. “I want the world to know how evil the CCP is. It aims to harm not only people in China, but also the world. I must expose what is happening to Falun Gong.”
Dr Charles Lee, a leading advocate of the Falun Gong movement who was himself arrested and tortured by the CCP for his beliefs in 2003, told The Telegraph that the importance of Mr Cheng’s testimony could not be overemphasized.
“For decades, we have heard reports of the extremely inhumane treatment of Falun Gong, of those tortured to death, their bodies cut up, and organs missing. But now we have our first living witness.”
“This should be an alarm to people and governments around the world that the CCP does not care about human life,” he added.