I Escaped Having My Organs Harvested While I Was Imprisoned in China for Practicing Falun Gong

(Minghui.org) My name is Bao Xuezhen. I was born in Shanghai on January 18, 1950. I have a college degree. I worked as an engineer at a state-own enterprise, but I was fired from my job after the persecution of Falun Gong started in 1999. I now reside in Denmark.

I used to have many ailments and almost became incapacitated, but I recovered after I began practicing Falun Gong in May 1995. Because I refused to renounce my faith, I was sentenced to 3.5 years on June 1, 2001. I served time at the Shanghai Women’s Prison and was released at the end of 2004.

In early 2003, the prison conducted comprehensive physical examinations of all Falun Gong practitioners detained there. Years later, when I learned of the forced organ harvesting from living practitioners, I realized the checkups we had in 2003 were to see if any of us would be a good match for organ harvesting.

There were over 100 practitioners detained in the prison. I saw four buses parked outside of the entrance. All of them were equipped with advanced medical devices.

The Shanghai Women’s Prison had five wards and we lined up by the wards. Guards watched us while we waited and after we got on the buses one by one, to be examined. They examined us from head to toe, including our eyes, heart, liver, lungs, and kidneys. Samples of our blood and urine were collected. The blood draw tubes were really large. The doctors also did ultrasounds and gynecological exams on us.

While doing an ultrasound on me, the doctor appeared to be surprised. He called in several other doctors and guards to discuss my case. I heard one of them say, “It [referring to one of my organs] is useless. It’s full of stones, useless.” Then they asked me, “How do you feel in this area?” I didn’t respond. They looked at each other and didn’t say anything else.

It took them a few days to finish examining all the practitioners in the prison. Guard Shi Lei told us, “See how well the government treats you [Falun Gong practitioners] and offers such comprehensive examinations. Only you [Falun Gong practitioners] have such a ‘privilege.’ No one else has it, not even us prison guards.”

Back then, the horrific organ harvesting hadn’t been reported. But I noticed that shortly after the physical examinations, some practitioners who came from out of town but were arrested in Shanghai disappeared. These out-of-towners refused to reveal their names and were referred to by numbers. I thought they were transferred to other places, but now I realize that they may have been murdered for their organs.

A few days after the examination, the guards informed me that they needed to check my eyes again. I was puzzled as I didn’t have any problem with my eyes. They lied to my face, “Didn’t you ask to check your eyes?” I said, “When did I say that? My eyes are fine. Why do I want to have them checked?” The guards remained silent and dragged me to the prison entrance, waiting for a car to pick me up.

The car didn’t come. I kept asking why my eyes had to be re-examined but they didn’t answer. After waiting for about 20 minutes, the car still hadn’t arrived, so they took me back to the cell.

After I was released, I managed to flee to Denmark. In 2015, I did some investigation myself by calling Chinese hospitals. I said I was the family member of a patient who needed a transplant and I asked where the organs came from.

During a call I made to the Taizhou Hospital in Zhejiang Province in the first half of 2015, I was referred to doctor Wu Songjiang, a transplant expert. The person who answered the phone also suggested that I could go to Shanghai or contact the Zhejiang University School of Medicine for transplant, as both places had plenty of organs. They admitted that the organs were from Falun Gong practitioners and they could quickly match my blood type and schedule the transplant surgery.