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What we know about the pillaging of vital organs from still-living prisoners in the People’s Republic of China, and the sale of their livers, lungs, hearts and kidneys, is that it is a widespread, outrageous and lucrative business and that the Chinese government habitually lies through its teeth about it.

What we know about the Chinese government’s paranoia about Falun Gong, a harmless spiritual discipline not unlike a form of contemplative Buddhism, is that the Beijing authorities have jailed, executed or otherwise “disappeared” thousands of its adherents, who numbered perhaps 70 million before the reign of terror against them began in the 1990s.

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We know, too that Falun Gong prisoners have been singled out as sources of raw material for China’s shadowy organ-harvesting industry. We know this thanks largely to the persistent efforts at documentation undertaken by former cabinet minister David Kilgour and B’nai Brith senior legal council David Matas, and also owing to the more recent investigations carried out by the London-based foreign policy analyst and journalist Ethan Guttman. Their books on the subject are banned in China.