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Hataru Nomura Journalist

Born in 1963, Nomura graduated from Rikkyo University in Tokyo. After serving as editor-in-chief for a magazine aimed at a global readership, he eventually became a freelance journalist. He has numerous publications in Japanese.

Under the Xi Jinping autocracy China has been intensifying persecutions of Christians and ethnic minority groups such as those in Tibet and Xinjiang. Meanwhile, an airport in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has installed an absurd priority lane sign. The photograph to the below shows a priority lane sign marked “Special Passengers, Human Organ Exportation Lane,” that was installed in Kashgar Airport located in Xinjing Uyghur Autonomous Region – an area in the westernmost region of China that lies in a strategically important place along the Silk Road.

A priority lane sign installed in kashgar airport



The sign is written in simplified Chinese and Arabic. “Special Passengers” obviously refers to diplomats, Party officials and state guests; but why does it also have the words “Human Organ Exportation Lane”?

This lane is a lane that must be kept open for the speedy transportation of recently extracted organs for implants. The sign is so explicit that when the photo first went viral, many people thought it was a fake. When Japanese travellers landed in Kashgar Airport in January this year, however, they confirmed that it was real and took photos themselves.

The Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of Uyghurs is getting worse by the day. Since last year many regulations have been imposed to end the religious, traditional and cultural heritage of the Uyghur people: prohibition of schools teaching in the Uyghur language, prohibition of Muslim rites and Koran readings at home and prohibition of under-18s entering Mosques, to name a few.

Even before the “Human Organ” priority lane was installed Beijing authorities mandated a medical examination for all citizens aged between 12 and 65 to collect blood types, DNA, fingerprints, eye colour, and other physiological information.

Investigations by Human Rights Watch last December revealed that the Beijing government has collected the data of 19 million Uyghurs. The government has a database of private information belonging to a total of 40 million people from groups known for their anti-government stance – such as Uyghurs, Tibetan pro-independence minorities, pro-democracy and anti-Establishment groups, detained Qigong and Falun Gong believers and Christians.

Blood type and DNA information is crucial for organ transplants, and the government would harass those refusing to take a medical examination. But why is this colossal database so important?

The Devil’s Business Model

In 2015 China announced that it was abolishing its practice of extracting organs from executed criminals and switching to a fully voluntary organ donor system. In 2018, however, the China Organ Harvest Research Center based in New York published a detailed report showing that China has been lying. The Research Center states that the voluntary organ donor system exists in China, but it exists in name only and is barely operating.

Mystery shopping conducted on the phone over a period ending in June 2017 revealed that most hospitals undertaking transplant operations have not been in contact with the voluntary donor foundations. While China boasts that they will “surpass the U.S. in 2020 to become the world’s greatest transplant nation” (Huang Jiefu, former Vice-Minister of Health), it is clear that the organs they use do not come through the official donor system.

China’s major rise in transplant surgeries, which started in 2000, is unmistakably connected to the Falun Gong persecutions that began the previous year. In April 1999, around 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners who resisted the mass arrests in Tianjin gathered to protest in Zhongnanhai, Beijing. Around the time of this incident Falun Gong practitioners numbered over 70 million, exceeding the number of Communist Party members.

Feeling threatened, the then-General Secretary Jiang Zemin ordered Falun Gong practitioners to be extinguished. Thus Falun Gong persecutions commenced throughout the whole of China. We have no accurate estimate of the number of arrests, but analysts suggest that, at the time, at least 1 million people were arrested of whom several hundred thousand were sent to concentration camps.

Detained Falun Gong practitioners are either sent to Laogai (penal labour farms) or prison, which is operating as the world’s greatest organ harvesting center. The extracted organs – hearts, lungs, livers, kidneys, etc. – are used in transplant operations for the wealthy class. Specialists estimate that these operations number over 100,000 per year, and bring in over $10 billion in profits to the industry.

Given there is this level of profit, it implicitly means that somewhere the government is committing murder, or execution. In other words, the dictatorial communist regime is killing people who hinder their supreme authority, at the same time turning it into a huge profitable business. This is none other than the devil’s business model.

Underground Christians Targeted

The level of profit probably means that the government is unable to balance supply with rapidly expanding market demands and their inventories are emptying out. The above photo signifies that the people targeted for organ harvesting has extended to include the Uyghurs as well.

The fact that an airport frequented by foreign travellers is blatantly using a priority sign for human organs tells us that the authorities have no conscience. Not all Uyghurs are Muslims. According to New York-based Christian human rights organization China Aid, the 120 million Christians in China are now having to endure fierce harassment from Chinese police. 200,000 Christians were persecuted in last year alone, of whom 3700 were arrested.

Persecutions are especially intense towards members of the House Church, an underground church that operates without government permission. There are currently around 2000 such House Churches with 90 million believers. Among them the greatest damage has been done to members of the Church of Almighty God, a Christian new religious movement known for their strong critical stance against the government.

Many members have sought political asylum for fear of their lives, to the extent that in Japan the number of residents increased ten-fold in the past year from 30 to over 300. Many of them have therefore become refugees.

It is easy to guess that these 90 million underground Christians are the Beijing government’s third target for organ harvesting, after the Falun Gong and Uyghur people. In addition to these horrors, however, China seems to be trying to export their devil’s business model to the world as the “China standard”.

Last November, the China Organ Transplant Development Foundation (COTDF) signed an agreement on organ distribution with Macau’s health bureau. Since January, Macau has been importing organs from China and has even been recruiting transplant staff to comply with the China model. Hong Kong has also joined the COTDF agreement.

But China’s ambitions don’t just stop here. At the organ donation and transplant conference held in Kunming last year, former Chinese Vice Minister of health Huang Jiefu announced organ exportation as a part of the “One Belt, One Road” strategy. In other words, they have a frightening blueprint of the future where the devil’s business model will spread throughout Eurasia, Africa, and Oceania as the world standard.

The U.S.-China “Human Rights War” Has Begun

With his recently unwavering hardline stance against China, U.S. President Donald Trump has commenced another attack, this time in the area of human rights. Vice President Mike Pence said in Washington on July 26th that, “Beijing is holding hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of Uyghur Muslims in so-called “re-education camps,” where they’re forced to endure around-the-clock political indoctrination and to denounce their religious beliefs and their cultural identity as the goal.”

The previous day, U.S. Representative to the Economic and Social Council of the UN, Kelley E. Currie, spoke at the hearing: “Since April 2017 the Xi Jinping leadership, under the guise of fighting ‘terrorism,’ ‘secession,’ and ‘religious extremism,’ has greatly intensified the Chinese Communist Party’s long-standing repressive policies against mainstream, non-violent Muslim cultural and religious practices in Xinjiang.”

She expressed her concern that “over the past year, hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Uyghur citizens of China – men, women and even children – have disappeared into state custody, with barely any notice from the international community.”

China responded immediately in a press conference the next day with the Press Secretary demanding that the U.S. stop using religion as an opportunity to intervene in China’s domestic issues. Already we can see that a human rights war is about to follow the recent commencement of a trade war.

While China speaks of intervention in domestic affairs, the international community does not consider intervention in matters of human rights to be equated with intervention in domestic affairs.

If anything, it is the international community’s duty to intervene when a dictatorial regime causes human rights concerns through inhumane actions.

“All human rights and basic freedoms are universal values,” says Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the issue of human rights diplomacy and intervention in domestic affairs. “The situation on human rights in each country is a matter of concern for the whole international community, and must not be regarded as intervention in domestic affairs”. (From Ministry of Foreign Affairs website.)

If this is so, the Japanese government must speak out against China’s oppression of the Uyghur minority, and their international organ harvesting crimes targeting Uyghurs and Falun Gong practitioners.

China’s Explanation Specialists’ Inspection Results Number of Transplants Until 2000s: Under 10,000 / year

Until 2010s: 10,000-15,000 / year 60,000-100,000/year Organ Sources Until 2015: Executed criminals

2013 onwards: National donor system

2015: 100% donors At most, 5000 executions/year

→does not match no. of transplants

Donor system would only provide under 100 donors/year with their current members (37,000 in 2017) Hospitals That Conduct Transplants 2007: 164 hospitals officially permitted

2017: increased permits to 173 hospitals (plans to increase to 300 by 2020) Over 1000 hospitals were conducting transplant operations Transplant Methods 2017: 70% from brain dead patients, 30% from post-brain dead patients 90% of China’s doctors do not acknowledge the criteria for brain death. →

abuse of brain death criteria is spreading

based on data published by the China Organ Harvest Research Center