(LifeSiteNews) — A Chinese-born doctor who later fled the communist country recounted in a new interview his bone-chilling, firsthand experience with the Chinese government’s practice of cutting out the organs of young prisoners while they are still alive, causing their brutal death.
Dr. Zheng Zhi, who was a resident doctor at the General Hospital of Shenyang Military Region in northeast China in the 1990s, recounted his horrific experience with the practice to The Epoch Times in a July video interview.
“It was horrifying beyond words. He was looking right at me. His eyelids were moving. He was alive,” Zheng said in the interview, his first under his true name.
According to Zheng, he was called up to assist surgeons and nurses as they performed a surgery in the back of a van guarded by armed troops.
Zheng would discover that the surgery was being performed on a young man who, bound by ropes, had been hoisted into the back of the van by soldiers.
The Chinese doctor – who fled to Thailand in 2005, obtaining refugee status and ultimately moving to Canada in 2007 – said it became obvious when he was told to hold down the victim’s legs that the young man was still alive. His throat and legs noticeably twitched during the surgery, Zheng said, though he didn’t make a sound.
He said doctors slashed open the teenager’s stomach and took out his kidneys, then ordered Zheng to “cut his artery and veins” and, finally, take out his eyes.
Sickened, looking straight into the eyes for the brutalized victim, he told his fellow doctors he couldn’t do it.
“He felt his brain empty out as he sat there, shaky, sweating, and paralyzed,” The Epoch Times summarized.
Zheng said that when refused to perform the ghoulish operation, another surgeon took the hemostat and extracted the boy’s eyes himself.
“Under the light lay a young life, a fellow human being, whose organs were being harvested while he was alive,” Zheng said.
Though the bloody event took place nearly 30 years ago, in 1994, Zheng, who left the hospital shortly thereafter and became a pediatrician, was visibly distraught and tearful as he described the atrocity to The Epoch Times.
And Zheng’s experience wasn’t an isolated incident of torturous brutality.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is known to engage in the forcible harvesting of the organs of young political dissidents, including Christians, Muslims, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Falun Gong practitioners.
The Epoch Times, founded by members of the Falun Gong Buddhist sect whose members have long faced persecution at the hands of the CCP, has long reported on the communist country’s unthinkable billion-dollar organ-harvesting industry, utilizing “prisoners of conscience, particularly adherents of the persecuted faith group Falun Gong, to fuel its rise.”
Steven Mosher, founder and president of the Population Research Institute and a leading China expert, told LifeSiteNews in 2019 that China’s ghastly practice “began in earnest in the 1990s, when the Buddhist sect known as Falun Gong were being arrested by the hundreds of thousands.”
“We began to get horrific first-person testimony of how some prisoners were being taken out and executed specifically for their organs,” Mosher said.
Subsequently, The Epoch Times noted, witnesses have spoken out about the atrocities and independent reports have backed up their anecdotal stories.
“In the early days, it was done rather crudely,” Mosher said of the practice. “They would force the prisoner to kneel down, shoot them in the back of the head, and then they would have an emergency vehicle right there with an operating table, and they would extract the organs – the heart, the corneas, all of the valuable organs that could be sold for tens of thousands of dollars.”
Now, Mosher said, the harvesting methods have become far more sophisticated. Organ-harvesters paralyze the victim’s muscles and then “extract the organs while the individual is still living – the heart, the liver, the kidneys, anything you can imagine that has monetary value is being taken out.”
The gruesome industry has sparked international and bipartisan outrage.
The independent China Tribunal reported to the United Nations in 2019 that China was killing prisoners “to order,” James S. Robbins pointed out in a USA Today column.
Tribunal chairman Sir Geoffrey Nice described the industry as “a systematic program to kill people” boasting “willing doctors” and “an enormous medical infrastructure,” making up “a very lucrative business.”
In response to the harrowing reports, the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this year passed bill HR 1154, also known as the “Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023,” in an overwhelming 413-2 vote to sanction the CCP for the practice.
READ: US House passes bill to sanction Chinese Communists’ ghoulish industry of live organ harvesting
“Every year, under General Secretary Xi Jinping and his Chinese Communist Party, between 60,000 to 100,000 young victims – average age 28 – are murdered in cold blood to steal their internal organs,” said the bill’s author, Republican Rep. Chris Smith, co-chair of the Congressional Executive Commission on China.
“These crimes against humanity are unimaginable,” Smith said.