When a young tech wiz discovers that the heart transplant he got in China was taken from a prisoner in a forced organ “donation,” he risks his life to save the next victims of China’s organ harvesting program. [ The Bleeding Edge credits: Dir: Leon Lee/ Jay Clift, Anastasia Lin, Tony Bai, James Yi / 90 min/ Thriller/ Government as Torturer, Democide]

The Bleeding Edge is the story of two people whose disparate lives are accidentally intertwined by fate in a spiral of events – horrifying events that ultimately reveal a terrible secret.

A young tech entrepreneur, James (Jay Clift), is in China to sell the Chinese government a cutting-edge software that will help improve its Orwellian monitoring of the population. He’s a naïve and cynical person, just interested in getting a pile of money, without much concern about how he accomplishes that end. Meanwhile, unknown to James and just miles from him also in Shanghai, Jing (Anastasia Lin), a faithful believer of the Falun Gong religion, is caught distributing religious material. She and her husband are arrested and separated in prison. Conditions in prison are brutal, and gradually escalate in brutality, even to torture, as the two refuse to publicly reject their faith, a condition of their release.

What brings these two stories together is the Chinese government’s policy of selling prisoner organs via forced organ transplants. After James wins the tech contract he so desperately wants, he has a heart attack. When he wakes up in the hospital, he is surprised to find that he has received a heart transplant, even more so to learn that he is in a hospital where Westerners are generally receiving transplants on demand, while organs in the West typically involve very long waiting lists. He is told cheerily that he is very valuable to the Chinese government because it wants that improved monitoring ability his technology promises and they “take care of their own.”

Concerned about where his new heart may have come from, James does a little detective work and soon learns that his heart is that of Jing’s executed husband. In an agony of guilt, he decides he must save her, against all odds and whatever the risk.

This is a powerful premise, and it’s played out to good effect, as the film alternates between the lives of these two people, in a steady and effective escalation of suspense.

It’s all the more moving when you realize that although the specific characters are fictional (at least to my knowledge), the basis of the story is true. Western technology companies did indeed cynically help the Chinese government build its “Golden Shield Project,” through which it has been able to successfully monitor the online conversations of its large population, and arrest with who knows what consequences those who speak out against it. Even “don’t be evil” Google caved to the rich prospect of the Chinese market. And, with regard to forced organ harvesting in China, there are now four films on the subject and entire international organizations dedicated to stopping it. The film ends, powerfully, with audio from a few Chinese who have witnessed live forced organ transplants telling what they saw.

You could use many words to describe The Bleeding Edge: chilling, disturbing, powerful, courageous, moving. It’s a film that stays with you after the end, not only because it’s a story well told, but because the horrors it describes are happening right now. Normally we learn about such atrocities well after socialist governments collapse, when the hidden truth is finally revealed in a giant pit of emaciated bodies or when some death camp survivor writes a best-selling book. This time it’s real-time.

It must be added that in relation to the making of this film there has been heroism off screen as well. Lead actress Anastasia Lin, a Chinese immigrant to Canada who won the Miss World Canada title in 2015, has used her newfound prominence to promote human rights in China, The Bleeding Edge being a part of that effort. Director Leon Lee earlier made the documentary Human Harvest on this same subject of forced organ harvesting in China. Given the long memory and long arm of the Chinese government, these two and for that matter the whole cast of this film, have taken on some risk in its telling.

One caveat: you can’t make a film about something this horrible without showing some of that horror, so as one might expect there are a few graphic scenes. I confess at these times I looked away, but get through them as you have to. The film is worth watching to the end.

External Reviews



“The Bleeding Edge is a deeply emotional and powerful film that borders somewhere between a thriller and a piece of investigative journalism.”

—Tuidang

“Jing’s give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death resistance, here through the lens of two mothers’ depthless despair, makes for an unforgettable cinematic moment in The Bleeding Edge. In the abstract, she’s a martyr to the democratic ideal. But we know that she will eventually die for her daughter.”

–The Weekly Standard

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Related Film: Forced Organ Harvesting in China: Four Films

More Films About: Democide

More Films About: Government as Torturer

Book: State Organs: Transplant Abuse in China

Book: Bloody Harvest: Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China

Book: The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret…

Wikipedia: Organ transplantation in China

Facebook: Stop Organ Harvesting in China

“Doctors and medical students working in state-run civilian and military hospitals take up to 11,000 organs a year from donors under no anesthetic to supply China’s lucrative ‘organs on-demand’ transplant program, say a network of investigators comprised of international researchers, doctors and human rights lawyers attempting to end the macabre abuses.”

The Sydney Morning Herald: China’s gruesome live organ harvest exposed in documentary

“In an effort to increase the chances of successful transplant, Gutmann writes, the organs are often taken from prisoners while they are still alive. Gutmann estimates that to date, more than 64,000 Falun Gong practitioners have suffered this fate, with more being added to the count every day.”

NY Post: China’s long history of harvesting organs from living political foes

“Phone interviews by David Kilgour and David Matas revealed that in 17 locations in China, organs were procured from detained Falun Gong practitioners. This suggests that organ harvesting in China is a widespread, systematic, state-sanctioned atrocity.”

–DAFOH: Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting

“One doctor, who spoke anonymously because he still practices in China, vividly described a scene in 1992…his surgical task, to remove the liver and the kidneys from a man who had just been executed by a shot through the heart, was technically simple but emotionally complicated by the mark of a wire around the man’s neck, indicating that the police had forcibly prevented this particular man from speaking up in court.”

–World Affairs: Bitter Harvest: China’s ‘Organ Donation’ Nightmare