In May 2006, during a business trip to New York, something caught my attention as I walked back to the office on one side of Zuccotti Park in the financial district. On the other side of Broadway, at the edge of the sidewalk, there was a group of men and women kneeling or sitting in lotus and dressed in white robes with what from a distance seemed to be bloodstains. No one seemed to notice them, and as I crossed the avenue I was overcome with curiosity and went over to see what it was all about. Most of them were Asian and their faces were theatrically made up to simulate bruises and cuts. Further down the street there were three women locked in cages guarded by men dressed in black wearing police caps. The first thing that came to my mind was that this was some kind of art performance, but behind the row of men and women there was a blue banner with large yellow letters that said Falun Dafa under some Chinese characters. It was a protest. A young, Westerner approached me and while he handed me a pamphlet, asked, “do you know of the plight of Falun Dafa practitioners in China?” I shook my head. He continued, “Falun Dafa practitioners are being persecuted by the Government of the People’s Republic of China for their religion and spiritual practices, all the information is in here,” he said, putting a finger on the pamphlet in my hands and approaching the next passerby. The pamphlet remained folded on my backpack for a couple of weeks until I had time to go online and research a bit on the matter.

Falun Dafa—also known as Falun Gong—is a qi, or life energy, cultivation technique that emerged during the so-called qigong boom of the 1980s when there was a massive increase in the popularity of this kind of practices throughout China. The movement, founded by Lin Honghzhi, in the city of Changchun in 1992, spread rapidly throughout the country. In 1998, the national sports commission began an investigation into the movement and estimated that it had between 70 and 100 million practitioners, more members than the Chinese Communist Party. Alarms went off, in China there is no place for alterity. On June 6, 1999, a security agency called 610 Office was created, an extra-judicial organization for the coordination and implementation of a nationwide persecution of the movement. A month later, on July 20, the first arrests were made. As with the Uyghurs (7.28), most Falun Gong practitioners are placed in re-education camps known as laogai (from laodong gaizao, “re-education through labor”) where they are detained without trial for periods of up to four years. While in laogai, Falun Gong followers are subjected to forced labor in mines, brick factories, and farms to “transform their minds.” If these re-education measures are not enough, many of these individuals are sent to an even deeper layer of the extra-judicial system known as “black jails” and “brainwashing centers” where they are subjected to physical and psychological torture such as electroshock therapy, prolonged deprivation of light, food, water, and sleep in order to have them confess and renounce their faith. A United Nations report estimates that Falug Gong practitioners account for 66% of state torture victims in China.

In 2006, the same year that I saw the demonstration in Manhattan, Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas and former Canadian Secretary of State David Kilgour presented a report in which they found that “the source of 41,500 transplants [in China] for the six year period 2000 to 2005 is unexplained” and presented evidence that “the increase in organ transplants in China parallels the increase in persecution of the Falun Gong.”¹ If Matas and Kilgour’s argument is true, we are facing the most widespread system of organ harvesting and extraction in history, an organ “factory” that transfers life from the zoē of the prisoner to the bios of the citizen, thus contributing to the “health of the state.”

This system, it is worth clarifying, would mark the definitive consolidation of the dehumanization of the other that began with the Soviet gulag and the Nazi lager. Beyond Josef Mengele’s “scientific experiments” and the atrocities of Unit 731 during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, the bodies and organs of Falun Gong prisoners of conscience are, in the eyes of the Chinese government, nothing more than a repository of spare parts, replacements for the citizenry.

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1. David Matas and David Kilgour, “Bloddy Harvest: Revised Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China,” http://nereja.free.fr/files/Appendices-200701%5B1%5D.pdf ↩︎