Since the fall of 1917, when Lenin seized power in Russia, the evils of communism have been exposed by courageous witnesses, some of whom emerged from “penal” and forced labor camps that Alexander Solzhenitsyn described as the essence of communism.
She referred to her camp as a “hellhole of a place where even animals will turn faces away.”
Solzhenitsyn, one of those witnesses, made the word “Gulag” famous. His three-volume literary masterpiece The Gulag Archipelago will forever stand as a searing indictment of communism in power. Now, a witness has emerged from Communist China’s genocidal campaign against its political dissidents — in this case practitioners of Falun Gong.
Cheng Pei Ming, according to an article in The Diplomat, is “the first known survivor of China’s state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting campaign.” His recent testimony at a press conference in Washington, D.C., writes Tasnim Nazeer, “offered a rare and disturbing glimpse into the horrors faced by prisoners of conscience in China.”
Cheng Pei Ming suffered torture at Harbin and Daqing prisons between 1999 and 2004. He described the torture as “very systematic,” part physical and part mental. He was tortured because he refused to renounce Falun Gong, a form of Buddhist spirituality that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) views as a threat to its totalitarian rule.
He also received several medical “operations,” including an open chest surgery that left a 35 centimeter incision on his left side and back. Scheduled for yet another surgery, Cheng escaped and made his way to a United Nations refugee camp in Thailand. Nazeer writes that after nine years of evading Chinese authorities, he made it to the United States in 2020, where medical tests discovered that parts of his liver and lung “had been surgically removed.” He was a victim of China’s organ harvesting program.
Nazeer notes that David Matas, a human rights attorney who has extensively researched this aspect of Chinese communism, estimates that more than 100,000 people per year have been killed via organ harvesting. China’s organ harvesting program has also been used against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang province, according to hearings conducted by the Tom Lantos Human rights Commission.
As long ago as 1995, Amnesty International noted evidence of organ harvesting from prisoners who were subject the the death penalty in China. Nazeer quotes attorney Matas: “forced organ harvesting isn’t just a human rights violation — its a crime against humanity. It’s happening on a scale that is almost unimaginable.”
The CCP Gulag
It has been many years since Harry Wu told the world about the CCP’s forced labor camp system in Laogai: The Chinese Gulag and Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag. Harry Wu was a witness to tell the world that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire did not end communism’s evil.
North Korea, too, has Gulag-like forced labor camps that the United Nations has called a human rights abuse “without any parallel in the contemporary world.” In 2011, Kim Young Soon, a survivor of the North Korean gulag camps, gave her witness in testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights. She was a political prisoner for nine years who saw “many dead bodies” of prisoners who fell short of work goals.
She referred to her camp as a “hellhole of a place where even animals will turn faces away.” For those nine years and afterward, Kim said, she “lived a life of tears of blood and extreme hardship.”
The witness of Cheng Pei Ming is in the tradition of Solzhenitsyn, Armando Vallardes, a survivor of Castro’s political prisons in Cuba, Doan Van Toai, who emerged from the hell of the Vietnamese gulag, and other survivors of communism. There were gulags in communist Romania, communist East Germany, communist Bulgaria, communist Cambodia. Cheng Pei Ming is the latest witness to remind us that communism and evil are synonymous.
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