China is covering up a genocide
And getting help from the West
Welcome to China Uncensored.
I’m Chris Chappell.
The Chinese Communist Party.
Boy, does it love genocide.
First there was the genocide of the Tibetans,
and the Mongolians.
Today it’s the Uyghurs.
Hong Kong is on its way.
And tomorrow it’s…probably gonna be Taiwan.
But there’s a secret genocide the Chinese Communist Party is waging right now that has
mostly been ignored.
Potentially millions have died—in the most brutal fashion imaginable.
I’ll get to that in a bit.
But first, it’s a big deal to say a sitting government is guilty of genocide.
Kind of makes it uncomfortable to do business with that country.
Not that that has stopped the US from trading with China for decades.
When the US designated the CCP’s persecution of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang as a genocide,
both under the Trump and Biden administrations, it actually caused a lot of controversy.
Some US allies weren’t on board.
For instance New Zealand.
Why couldn’t they call it a genocide?
Is it because they can’t pronounce it in their silly accents?
“Jay-noh-soid.”
Just sounds like a whimsical Taika Waititi character.
I’m sure it was just a coincidence that it was around the same time they signed an
upgraded free trade deal with China.
But it wasn’t just countries that didn’t want to put all that juicy Chinese money at
risk by calling a genocide a genocide.
Or a “Jay-noh-soid.”
The Economist says genocide is the wrong word for the horrors of Xinjiang.
Yeah, it’s just your run of the mill horrors, not a genocide.
Kind of like how four people killed by a gun is a mass shooting, while three is just an
uneventful swap meet in Dallas.
Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs says the Xinjiang genocide allegations are
unjustified.
His argument is the US needs to wait until there’s a proper UN investigation into the
Uyghur persecution before declaring it a genocide.
And since China will never allow a UN investigation, then we’ll never call it genocide.
So it’s like Schrödinger’s genocide.
And you thought the cat experiment was bad.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, by the way, is a popular interviewee on Chinese state-run media.
As I said, acknowledging the CCP’s genocide in Xinjiang really hurts people’s pocket
books.
For instance, Apple was fine having its suppliers use Uyghur slave labor.
But with the genocide label, that becomes a little more difficult to get away with.
And Apple was forced to cut off some of its Chinese suppliers.
Not all of them though.
I mean, just because a few Chinese suppliers are fine using slave labor in a country committing
genocide, that doesn’t mean all Chinese suppliers are bad.
Give them the benefit of the doubt.
Don’t let a few bad genocide eggs spoil the bunch.
Although instead of eggs, I should probably say a few bad Apples.
That expression has never been more perfect.
The US, Canada, the UK, and even the EU imposed sanctions on Chinese officials over Xinjiang.
As well as on many Chinese state-run companies.
So bad for business.
But as much resistance as there’s been toward labeling the persecution of Ugyhurs a genocide,
at least it’s still something the media are talking about.
But there’s one genocide happening to this day that the Communist Party is all but getting
away with.
And practically nobody is covering it.
I’ll tell you more after the break.
Welcome back.
Now one thing you might be wondering is—why is it so hard to call genocide, you know,
a genocide?
That doesn’t seem like something there would really be a debate on.
Here’s how the UN defines genocide.
It includes “killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction,
imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring
children of the group to another group.”
With the intent to destroy a group.
I guess the Chinese Communist Party took it as an instruction manual.
Thanks for the handy resource tool, United Nations!
And there is one group in China whose treatment perfectly fits this definition of genocide,
and yet nobody is talking about it—Falun Gong, a spiritual practice that became popular
in 1992, until a brutal crackdown in 1999.
Of course we have footage of some of that crackdown, but every time we use it, YouTube
age restricts the episode, which effectively means no one sees it.
So I won’t play that this time because the whole point is so people can learn about the
genocide that for some reason, time has forgotten.
Now, according to Chinese government statistics, before 1999 there were 100 million people
practicing Falun Gong.
Here’s a Chinese state run media report from before the persecution.
Early morning today, nearly 10,000 Falun Dafa practitioners gathered at the Shanghai Sports
Center to demonstrate and promote Falun Gong exercises…
About 100 million people around the world are learning Falun Dafa.
100 million people.
That means more people were practicing Falun Gong than were members of the Chinese Communist
Party.
But that was followed by two decades of brutal persecution.
Now the US State Department puts the number of remaining Falun Gong practitioners at just
7 to 20 million.
Even Thanos wasn’t that successful at snapping people out of existence.
What happened to the rest of those people?
Well, in 1999, then Chinese leader Jiang Zemin, launched the campaign to systematically destroy
Falun Gong and anyone who practiced it.
Anyone practicing Falun Gong became social outcasts, they couldn’t get jobs, they couldn’t
go to school, and many were imprisoned, or worse.
According to China researcher Ethan Gutmann from 2000 to 2008, there were about 450,000
to a million Falun Gong practitioners detained in forced labor camps at any given time.
In 2006, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture reported that “Falun Gong practitioners
accounted for 66 percent of victims of alleged torture while in government custody.”
That would mean Falun Gong practitioners were the vast majority of detainees in China’s
labor camps.
In 2015, human rights watchdog Freedom House released this special report
It says, “Hundreds of thousands of [Falun Gong practitioners] were sentenced to labor
camps and prison terms, making them the largest contingent of prisoners of conscience in the
country.”
And of course that’s not all.
In addition to the mass internment, disappearance and torture, “The CCP has targeted Falun
Gong detainees for involuntary organ harvesting…This means that victims are either killed while
or shortly before their hearts, livers, lungs, and kidneys are surgically excised to be sold
in what Beijing boasts is the world’s largest organ-transplant market.”
That market is even more dangerous than a Dallas swap meet.
It's obviously hard to get exact numbers on this.
The Chinese Communist Party considers all statistics about Falun Gong to be state secrets.
But in a 2016 report called Bloody Harvest-slash-The Slaughter,
leading researchers estimated that the number of transplants happening in China each year
is 100 thousand.
While according to official Chinese statistics, there are officially only about 5,000 eligible
organ donors a year.
So where are they getting those extra 95,000 organs?
Are they plant-based?
I had no idea they were making Impossible Kidneys.
In 2019, an independent China Tribunal in London looked at the evidence of forced organ
harvesting.
It was chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice , who once led the prosecution of Yugoslavian leader
Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes.
The China Tribunal’s final judgment was that, “Forced organ harvesting has been
committed for years throughout China on a significant scale and that Falun Gong practitioners
have been one—and probably the main—source of organ supply.”
And that it continues to this day.
So if you go by the UN definition of genocide, the Chinese Communist Party has pretty much
used it as a checklist for persecuting of Falun Gong.
It’s also a spoiler alert for what the CCP plans to do next.
That’s why there are people calling for an official declaration of genocide.
For example, Nina Shea, the director of Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom.
She’s called on Secretary of State Blinken to label the crimes against Falun Gong a genocide.
It’s like that old saying: if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and systematically
wipes out a group of people like a duck… it’s probably genocide.
But why hasn’t Antony Blinken labeled it a genocide?
Why hasn’t *any* US administration labeled the persecution of Falun Gong a genocide?
For that matter, why has the media been so silent about Falun Gong?
I’ll tell you the reason, after the break.
You’re not going to like it.
Welcome back.
So it’s pretty clear at a casual glance that the Chinese Communist Party’s actions
against Falun Gong meets the definition of genocide.
So how come no government has officially decladed it a genocide?
And why aren’t media reporting on it the same way as the Uyghur genocide?
Well, for one, Jiang Zemin launched the persecution at a really bad time.
Or good time, depending on whether you’re pro- or anti-genocide.
It started in 1999.
That was when President Bill Clinton was pushing very hard to normalize trade with China.
There was a lot of money to be made, you see.
China also already had a lot of influence over the UN and the World Health Organization.
Francis Delmonico , a Harvard surgeon and former president of The Transplantation Society,
was also the head of the WHO anti-organ trafficking task force.
He has appeared multiple times on Chinese state run media to praise China’s organ
transplant system.
Which is kind of like praising Jeffrey Epstein for being such a great babysitter.
By the way, you know who’s idea it was to set up that WHO organ trafficking task force?
Huang Jiefu, the guy in charge of China’s organ transplantation system.
That’d be like an HR department designed to stop sexual harassment set up by Harvey
Weinstein.
As for the Transplantation Society, which Delmonico was president of—turns out two
of its other presidents had undisclosed ties with a shady Chinese hospital.
So it’s no wonder that “WHO and [Transplantation Society] officials have dismissed concerns
about extrajudicial executions while emphasizing the primacy of China’s official narrative.”
Scholarly research into Falun Gong is also next to impossible.
The Chinese Communist Party can cut off China scholars’ access to the country.
And so two decades of scholarship about the genocide of Falun Gong has simply never been
produced.
Arthur Waldron , a professor of Chinese history at the University of Pennsylvania says, “Falun
Gong is not simply on Beijing’s blacklist.
Its name is recorded in the blackest of black letters, for the Chinese authorities have
undertaken to crush it.”
Blackest of black letters?
On a blacklist?
No wonder there’s no documentation.
No one could read it!
Then there’s the fact the CCP makes it very hard to do any reporting.
Here’s what happened to BBC reporters who tried to go to Xinjiang recently.
“We were turned back at checkpoints, stopped from filming, questioned, and followed.”
It’s the same for Falun Gong.
Journalists attempting to report on it inside China are harassed by state agents, or threatened
with the loss of their visas.
Entire media organizations run the risk of getting shut out of China.
For example, in 2001, Time magazine was pulled from every shelf in China after an article
about Falun Gong in Hong Kong.
Which is sad, because it means the people of China might not know that
I was once Time’s Person of the Year.
In 2007, Canada’s national public broadcaster canceled a documentary about Falun Gong after
pressure from the Chinese embassy.
CBC had the broadcasting rights to the 2008 Beijing Olympics and they didn't want to lose
that.
There was a lot of money to be made, you see.
Turns out the lack of documentation isn’t because of this paper, it’s because of this
paper.
In 2010, the Washington Post was set to run a feature article on Falun Gong.
According to the author, “Immediately after the Chinese embassy became aware of it, the
story was killed.”
Coincidentally, I’m sure, it was around the same time the Washington Post was struggling
to get the Chinese Communist Party to renew the journalist visa for its China correspondent.
At one point the Washington Post even got Henry Kissinger to help them.
I mean you’ve got to have your China team.
How else are you going to report on China?
Sure, if you want to report from inside China, you can’t report on what’s *really happening*
in China.
But there was a lot of money to be made, you see.
In 2014, the Australian edition of Reader’s Digest censored a story where a secondary
character was going to be a Falun Gong refugee.
They censored it “to maintain a cheap publishing deal with a Chinese printing firm.”
There was a lot of money to…well you get the idea.
Perhaps the most egregious case though is the New York Times.
In August 2001, they landed an exclusive interview with Jiang Zemin,
“the same month that The New York Times’s senior editorial staff convened a meeting
with the Communist Party leader, where they negotiated the unblocking of the newspaper’s
website in China.”
In the first half of 2001, before the interview, the New York Times ran 17 articles about Falun
Gong.
In the second half, just 7.
And the tone changed.
A lot.
This article from November 2001 mentions how former Falun Gong practitioners benefited
from their time at the reeducation camps.
''The re-education center is more comfortable than my home'' and that ''police in the center
are very polite and kind.''
Many Chinese prison guards actually use rape as a form of torture, but sure.
The New York Times ran five more of those kinds of articles about Falun Gong in 2002,
and the last time I counted, by 2021,18 years later, they had only run five more.
If the most influential American newspaper is doing such a sloppy job covering Falun
Gong, there’s not much hope of that persecution being labeled a genocide.
And as I’m sure you can imagine, making a show like this and getting this information
out there isn’t easy.
YouTube frequently demonetizes us or suppresses our views or even secretly unsubscribes people.
But we still want to cover topics like this.
That’s why we rely on viewer support to keep making this show.
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And as a thank you to these supporters, who I call the China Uncensored 50 Cent Army,
I answer their questions at the end of episodes.
Today’s question comes from Hari Neelakantan on Patreon.
“Apart from the import of oil and minerals from Russia there isn't much news about what
kind of support China is providing to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
I am sure they are doing everything to undermine international sanctions to enable their arms
industry and the military to keep the collective western democracies bogged down in this war.”
Now that is the million dollar question, Hari.
We know Russia is getting around Western Sanctions by boosting trade with China.
And as you say, it isn’t just oil and minerals.
It’s also war tech.
“Moscow boosted imports of technologies critical to its war in Ukraine including semiconductors
and microchips from China.”
According to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, China is considering providing lethal support
to Russia’s invasion.
But, here’s where a bit of my cynicism kicks in.
I’m still a little salty over that whole, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq thing.
The US government said they had proof of WMDs.
And it turns out that was a lie used to justify a war that killed a lot of people, while making
the military-industrial complex very wealthy.
The Chinese Communist Party absolutely wants to support Russia against the West.
But they also aren’t stupid.
There’s a line they don’t want to cross.
So I’ll be skeptical about Blinken’s claims until I see a little more evidence.
But we’ll continue to follow this closely on China Uncensored, as well as our other
channel America Uncovered.
Thanks for your question and your support, Hari.
And thank you for watching.
If you want to join the China Uncensored 50 Cent army, head over to patreon.com/chinauncensored.
Help us keep up the fight against the Chinese Communist Party.
Once again I’m Chris Chappell, see you next time.