Thank you for inviting us both.
Let me start off by saying a bit about Falun Gong.
Falun Gong is a set of exercises with a spiritual foundation, a Chinese equivalent of yoga. It began in 1992 with the teachings of Li Hongzhi. It was initially promoted by the Government of China as beneficial to health. It grew to 70 million to 100 million practitioners by 1999, by the government's own estimates.
The Communist Party then decided to ban the practice for the following reasons. First, it has a large number of practitioners. Second, Falun Gong is not political, but it is also not Communist. Third, Falun Gong is spiritual, and the Communist Party is atheist. Fourth, Falun Gong is not an organization, but, through cellphones and the Internet, it has a mobilizing capacity.
The party began a propaganda and repression campaign against Falun Gong. Practitioners of Falun Gong were arrested in the hundreds of thousands. Those who recanted were released. Those who did not recant were tortured. Those who did not recant after torture were held in indefinite arbitrary detention.
Parallel with the growth of Falun Gong, China developed an organ transplant industry. The first source of organs for transplants was prisoners sentenced to death and then executed. A second source of organs was prisoners of conscience. The earliest of these were Uighurs in Xinjiang province.
A third parallel development was the shift from socialism to capitalism. The shift meant that the Government of China withdrew funding from many public services, including the health sector, and expected these services to raise funding privately. This combination of events—the vilification and mass detention of Falun Gong, the sourcing of organs from prisoners, and the need for funding for hospitals—led, with other factors, to the mass killing of Falun Gong for their organs.
Falun Gong practitioners in prison became a ready, inexhaustible source of organs that could be sold to transplant tourists at exorbitant prices. The fact that this was happening became readily apparent, and we heard from David Kilgour about a number of the evidentiary factors that showed that this was happening.
The official Chinese explanation for sourcing at that time was donations, but China didn't have a donation system or an organ distribution system. China then switched its explanation to say that all organs were coming from prisoners sentenced to death and then executed, but, by law, prisoners sentenced to death had to be executed within seven days of sentence. There's a high rate of hepatitis B in the criminally detained population, making many criminal prisoner organs unusable. The absence of any organ distribution system and the need for blood type, size, and ideally tissue-type compatibility meant that the claim of sourcing from death-penalty prisoners for the high volume of transplants was implausible.
China has now switched back to saying that all organs are coming from donations. They have set up donation centres, but the donation centres, according to our own investigations, are producing tiny, statistically insignificant numbers. China has also set up a purchase-and-sale system, which it calls donations, that buys organs from poor relatives of patients near death in hospitals. This purchase-and-sale system is likely generating numbers to compensate for the fall in the numbers from the death penalty, but no more.
Chinese statistics are propaganda by other means. David Kilgour, Ethan Gutmann, and I originally accepted the Chinese official volume of 10,000 a year and tried to figure out where the 10,000 were coming from. The Chinese, as far as we can tell, produced that 10,000 figure as a form of boasting to show how advanced they were in transplant technology. They realized belatedly they had no explanation for the 10,000, so even though transplant volumes grew considerably since they first generated the 10,000 volume, they stayed with the 10,000 figure.
With our latest update, we decided to look beyond the official statistics and make our own calculations. Again, you heard from David Kilgour on that. There is a lot of detail on that, and I certainly invite you to look at it, but you can see very easily that our high figures have to be right. The Chinese government, after we came out with our report, set up a registration for hospitals. There were originally 1,000 hospitals doing transplants. Eight hundred applied for registration. They registered 146 for liver and kidney and 23 for heart and lung. They had minimum bed requirements and minimum staff requirements for this registration.
If we look just at liver and kidney transplants, and if we look at only the minimum bed requirements and assume a length of stay that is substantially beyond the average stay for transplant patients in hospitals, and if we look at a 100% capacity, because there is tremendous demand, we get a figure of over 60,000 transplants a year in China: 69,300. That's the minimum.
If we look at the staff at the hospitals and if we assume that these hospitals have only one transplant team—and many of them have more—and they're just working days, we get almost 54,000 transplants a year.
Let's look at just a couple of hospitals.
The Tianjin hospital, according to their statistics, is producing 8,000 transplants a year. Beijing No. 309 Hospital is producing 4,000 transplants a year. Just a couple of hospitals get us beyond the 10,000 figure.
Again, we've heard from David Kilgour on recommendations about what should be done, and of course I support them all. I welcome the fact that this committee has already passed a resolution, a motion, on this subject, which was a good one. I would say that we see a lot of interest, a lot of willingness, a lot of activity, and a lot of awareness of this problem in Canada, but I think we have to move beyond that and do something practical to combat this vice. I think the recommendations of David Kilgour, whom you've already heard from, really need to be acted on.
That's what I would say. Thank you very much.