Zheng Qiaozhi — we will call him George — still has nightmares. He was interning at China’s Shenyang Army General Hospital when he was drafted to be part of an organ-harvesting team.

The prisoner was brought in, tied hand and foot, but very much alive. The army doctor in charge sliced him open from chest to belly button and exposed his two kidneys. “Cut the veins and arteries,” he told his shocked intern. George did as he was told. Blood spurted everywhere.

The kidneys were placed in an organ-transplant container.

Then the doctor ordered George to remove the man’s eyeballs. Hearing that, the dying prisoner gave him a look of sheer terror, and George froze. “I can’t do it,” he told the doctor, who then quickly scooped out the man’s eyeballs himself.

George was so unnerved by what he had seen that he soon quit his job at the hospital and returned home. Later, afraid that he might be the next victim of China’s forced organ-transplant business, he fled to Canada and assumed a new identity.

First-person accounts like George’s are understandably rare. The “transplant tourists” who come to China are naturally told nothing about the “donors” of their new heart, liver or kidney. And those who are executed for their organs tell no tales.

Experts estimate that between 60,000 and 100,000 organs are transplanted annually in China. Multiply that number times the cost of a liver transplant ($170,000) or a kidney transplant ($130,000), and the result is an eye-popping $10 billion to 20 billion.

And where do these hundreds of thousands of organs come from? George was told nothing about the background of the young man whose kidneys he fatally removed except that he was “under 18 and in good health.”

‘The world is beginning to wake up to the fact that virtually every organ transplant in China costs the life of an innocent human being’

But experts like Ethan Gutmann, author of several books on the subject, believe that the vast majority are obtained by executing prisoners of conscience.

One particularly rich source of fresh organs for China’s transplant industry in recent years has been the Falun Gong, which was declared a heretical Buddhist sect in 1999 by then-Party Secretary Jiang Zemin. Hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — of the group’s followers have been arrested and disappeared into a vast network of secret prisons, many never to reemerge — at least in one piece.

The Muslim minorities of China’s far west are apparently next in line. Over the past couple of years, between one to three million Uighur and Kazakh men have been arrested and sent to concentration camps — Beijing calls them “vocational training centers” — in the region.

Tellingly, all these prisoners of conscience not only had their blood drawn upon entry but also had their organs examined, presumably so they could be more quickly matched with those willing to pay for them. Even more ominously, dedicated organ-transplant lanes have been opened at airports in the region, while crematoria are being built nearby.

All this suggests that assembly-line harvesting of Uighur, Kazakh and Tibetan organs is already getting underway. China is not just ridding itself of troublesome minorities, it is profiting mightily in the process.

Despite China’s claims to the contrary, its transplant business is booming. And, thanks to a Western technology called ECMO — extracorporeal membrane oxygenation — it has become much, much more lucrative.

Twenty years ago, it was only possible to successfully harvest an organ or two — two kidneys, say, or a heart — from a transplant victim. The other organs, such as the lungs and liver, had to be discarded because they had been deprived of oxygen too long to be usable.

Now, the victims are put on an ECMO machine, which serves as an artificial heart and lung and keeps every last organ fresh enough to be harvested. Before ECMO, a victim’s few salvageable organs were worth maybe $250,000. Now, with ECMO, every organ can be harvested — even the skin — and the victim is easily worth two or three times as much. ECMO, which has saved countless lives in the West, has had the opposite effect in China: It has accelerated the killing of innocent people.

In recent years, China has gone to ever greater lengths to cover up these crimes from international scrutiny. In January 2015, the government announced that it would only use organs from voluntary civilian organ donors and that the use of organs from executed prisoners would be banned.

As proof, they even published statistics. These showed a straight-line increase in “voluntary” organ donations so picture-perfect it could only be fabricated. And China’s “official” number of voluntary donors had only risen to 6,000 by 2018, a number far too small to supply the many tens of thousands of organs actually transplanted that year.

Proof that the slaughter of “donors” continues is revealed by the country’s amazingly short wait times for organs. In normal countries, sick people can wait for many months or years for an organ to become available. The wait time in the UK is three years. The wait time in Canada is double that. Only in China do organ tourists receive a kidney, heart or liver transplant within days or weeks of arriving. In fact, in some cases patients have reported that their transplant surgeries were scheduled before they even arrived in China — something that could only happen as a result of forced organ harvesting.

The world is beginning to wake up to the fact that virtually every organ transplant in China costs the life of an innocent human being. That’s why countries like Israel, Spain, Italy and Taiwan have already banned transplant tourism.

In the past, primitive peoples often practiced human sacrifice in order to propitiate the gods.

But China’s officially atheistic Communist Party couldn’t care less about pleasing or displeasing a higher being. It has resurrected the practice of human sacrifice for two very practical reasons: to rid itself of troublesome minorities and to turn a huge profit.

China’s organ-transplant assembly line is not only murder for hire but may turn out to be a kind of genocide as well.

Steven W. Mosher is the president of the Population Research Institute and the author of “Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order,” out now.