WHEN Cheng Peiming was dragged from his cell, hauled to a hospital, and pinned down to have organs forcibly removed, he had no idea he would one day count himself lucky.
Brave Cheng is the first known survivor of a brutal organ harvesting scheme, with victims killed to order, as those paying for a swift transplant turn a blind eye to where their new body parts are truly coming from.
The Chinese government has long insisted it relies on voluntary donations to serve its thriving organ donation market – but harrowing accounts paint a far more sinister picture of an orchestrated campaign of non-consensual harvesting.
Up to 100,000 organ transplants are estimated to be carried out in China every year, and extremely low voluntary donation rates ring alarm bells.
Researchers, human rights activists, lawyers, ethicists and medical professionals all agree China has been harvesting organs on a significant scale for decades.
Hidden under the guise of a regular hospital, insiders say surgeons are made to perform dodgy transplants for the regime’s black market.
China’s organ trade is already estimated to have a market value of $1 billion per year.
Chilling testimonies reveal cases of surgeons forced to operate on living prisoners to extract organs from victims who writhed in agony while strapped to surgical tables.
Cheng is just one of those who says that, while imprisoned, he was taken to hospital against his will before waking up with oxygen tubes up his nose, and a fresh 35cm cut on the left side of his chest.
It was later discovered that parts of his lung and liver were missing.
Beijing has also been accused of targeting persecuted minorities, with the main victims of forced organ removal including followers of the Buddhist qigong and meditation movement Falun Gong.
Falun Gong is a religious movement founded in the early 1990s in China. It was banned in 1999 by the Chinese Communist Government, which called it an ‘evil cult’.
As they are viewed as a threat to the government, practitioners face harassment, arrest and detention, and prisoners are then often subject to torture in attempts to renounce their beliefs.
Distinguished Professor Wendy Rogers, Chair of International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China’s (ETAC) International Advisory Board, told the Sun: “What began as a systematic campaign of forced organ extraction from detained Falun Gong practitioners has expanded to include Uyghurs.
“There is credible testimony of forced organ scans in detention revealing a clear and disturbing parallel.
“China’s transplant system remains opaque, with no verifiable transparency in organ sourcing – unlike ethical transplant systems worldwide.
“Until China meets basic standards of transparency and releases all prisoners of conscience, the global medical community must refuse partnerships in transplant medicine, research, training, or data exchange.
“The risks of complicity in aiding and abetting these crimes are profound and cannot be ignored.”
China has also been accused of committing serious human rights violations – and possibly genocide – against Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities in the autonomous region of Xinjiang.
Human rights groups also believe the Chinese government has detained more than a million Uyghurs since 2022 and sent them to ‘re-education camps’.
I was injected with something. The next thing I remember is being in a hospital bed with tubes in my nose, and I was going in and out of consciousness.
Cheng Peiming
Prisoners locked up purely because of their beliefs are killed specifically for the extraction of their organs, with sick measures put in place to prepare them to be exploited, experts told The Sun.
A spokesman from ETAC said: “Individuals are blood-tested and organ-scanned in advance to enable rapid matching when a person requests an organ transplant,
“Long-term banking is not feasible as even with the latest technology, organs cannot be preserved outside the body for more than a few hours.”
Cheng, the first known survivor of the barbaric campaign, was thrown in jail in 2002 after advocating for an end to the persecution of Falun Gong by the government.
He said he was taken to the hospital against his will one day and was held down by six guards after refusing to sign consent forms for an operation.
Cheng previously recounted: “I was injected with something. The next thing I remember is being in a hospital bed with tubes in my nose, and I was going in and out of consciousness.
“There was a tube with bloody liquid coming from under the bandaging that was on my side.”
He woke up shackled to the hospital bed.
‘I thought they were going to kill me’
Oxygen tubes were up his nose, and a fresh 35cm cut on the left side of his chest had appeared, with a drainage tube coming out of it.
Two years later, he was still in prison and was again booked in for forced surgery.
“When they took me to the hospital again and said I had to have another operation, I thought for sure they were going to kill me,” he said.
But this time, Cheng said he managed to escape after a guard forgot to lock him to the bed and fell asleep.
Cheng evaded the Chinese authorities as a refugee in Thailand for several years before moving to the United States in 2020.
Transplant experts have since confirmed scans show parts of his left liver and left lung are missing.
Harrowing threats have been made against Cheng, with leaked insider information revealing that China’s security services and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are plotting to try to discredit or even kill him.
The CCP has said to “kill him directly and make it look like a suicide” if needed, according to bombshell information from an internal source.
Cheng has faced several suspicious threats to his physical safety, including an early hours break-in of his home in New York in late 2024.
The survivor previously told The Sun: “The CCP is extremely evil, and it will not succeed.
“I have suffered such inhuman persecution from the CCP; they have harvested parts of my organs. I am not afraid of the CCP.”
Whistleblowers have also faced unprecedented tirades of threats of abuse as the CCP unleashes a crusade against critics in a bid to silence them.
Threats have been aimed at Falun Gong members – including warnings of bombings, shootings and sexual violence.
A whistleblower living in the UK is also facing suspicious threats after sounding the alarm in parliamentary sessions.
No more detail can be given for security reasons, with the Parliament calling for evidence on how transnational repression affects the human rights of people living in the UK.
Alarming emails sent to members shared with The Sun expose the callous intimidation campaign.
The risks of complicity in aiding and abetting these crimes are profound and cannot be ignored
Wendy Rogers
One with the subject “You will meet God” has images of shotgun shells and a loaded gun – telling the receiver they and family members “will be killed in the near future”.
The email – sent to Levi Browde, executive director of the Falun
Dafa Information Center – adds: “I’m not kidding you!”.
Another distressing message claimed 5kg of explosives had been put on the Dragon Springs campus in New York used by Shen Yun Performing Arts, founded by Falun Gong practitioners.
Professor Yuan Hongbing, who has exposed details of the abused, described the CCP as a “political mafia group”.
A liver transplant, for example, can cost around £118,000 ($160k) in China – but with a much shorter waiting time compared to the rest of the world.
This draws in not only recipients from inside the sprawling nation, but also some unsuspecting international visitors who travel there for a transplant.
Experts say, however, it’s more likely people are purposely overlooking the source of organs.
Surgeon forced to remove organs from live patients
WHAT was supposed to be an innocent hospital trip for budding young surgeon Enver Tohti turned out to be a nightmare when he was forced to operate on living prisoners.
Tohti, 58, was a cancer surgeon in Xinjiang region in the 1990s but was forced to flee his beloved home country after threats from Chinese communist state.
He was just 32 that fateful day back in August 1995 when he was hauled in front to his chief surgeon and asked if he wanted to “do something wild”.
Dr Tohti ended up being bundled into a minivan and taken to a secret location where he was forced to remove the liver and kidneys of a patient as he struggled and fought for his life.
And the medic is just one of thousands of Chinese doctors forced against their will to operate on prisoners.
Dr Tohti told The Sun he will never forget that horrific day as he was forced to perform the sickening surgery.
He hopped onto a mini-van with seven others and started off towards the Western Mountain’s region but when the vehicle made a turn for an unknown gravel road, Enver began to panic.
Two hours later the team of medics arrived at Ürümqi execution grounds and were met by Enver chief surgeon who them to wait and come around once they heard gunshots.
The team waited – often chain-smoking and pacing around to keep calm until they heard the sound of multiple gunshots pierce through the miserable silence.
“Then we started hearing sounds from the other side of the hill of people shouting and truck engines and whistles then gunshots,” the dad-of-three said.
“That gunshot wasn’t like a machine gun shooting, it was like many rifles shooting at the same time.”
The team jumped into the van and made their way around where there was “at least 10 corpses… lying down on the slope, around two to three metres apart in prisoner uniforms”.
Enver said: “These bodies were shaved and part of the head was blown away because the bullet entered from the back of the head.
“We were just looking at the bodies with no emotions then there was a police officer shouting at us, telling us to go to the far right.
“The chief surgeon was there and there was a body lying down there. This body was wearing civilian clothes and with long hair – a man – and his head was intact because the gunshot was to his right chest.
“While they put this body into the van, my chief surgeon called me over and briefed me. He told me to remove his liver and kidneys as quickly as possible.
“I then turned into a robot… When I tried to cut, the man was struggling.
“His body was struggling against me so I assumed he was alive because obviously feeling the pain and when I cut through I saw there was bleeding, which means the heart was still pumping blood.”
When the operation ended, Enver handed the organs to his chief surgeon and was told to “go back to the hospital and remember, today never happened”.
“Everybody living in China knows what that means and we said yes. We never talked about it,” the surgeon turned Uber driver who now lives in London said.
“It always is in my head. I tried to forget about it, but I couldn’t.”
“Awareness varies, but complete ignorance is increasingly implausible,” ETAC said.
“Organs must come from human donors, and the stark contrast between multi-year waitlists in most countries and near-immediate availability in China raises obvious ethical questions.
“At a minimum, many recipients choose not to probe the source too closely.”
But rather than operating under cloak and dagger like most black market stunts, the regime brazenly allows its dirty work to operate in public areas.
“This is not a typical black-market operation,” the spokesman added.
“The system operates within state-regulated hospitals and administrative structures.
“Expansion occurs through official approval of new transplant centres, additional surgical capacity, and authorisation of more transplant types, rather than through clandestine clinics.”
The Sun previously revealed how China is significantly expanding the warped scheme in a bid to rake in more money.
Six new sites in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are plotted to open by 2030 – despite staggeringly low donation rates in the region.
Xinjiang is understood to have an organ donation rate of just 0.69 per cent per million people – significantly below the national average of 4.66 per cent.
Experts fear it could be part of a sickening plot to use detained Uyghurs as a living organ “donation” ban.
New facilities – which will triple the number in the region from three to nine – will offer heart, lung, liver, kidney and pancreas/ small intestine transplants.
