A Chinese doctor has come forward publicly to discuss the way the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) turns surgeons into executioners who harvest organs, sometimes from people who are still alive, to prop up the country's organ harvesting industry.

Dr, Zheng Zhi, previously a resident physician at one of China's largest military hospitals, recently discussed how he witnessed one man's kidneys and eyes being harvested for transplant while he was still alive back in 1994.  

Zheng recounted that he stepped into a van with five other surgeons and nurses and was guarded by armed soldiers. These guards brought in a man whose limbs were tightly bound with ropes. Zheng remarked that the man was likely no more than 18 years old. He and the other surgeons were told right before he was brought in that the man's organs were "healthy, fresh."

One of the doctors instructed Zheng to "step on" the man's legs and "don't let him move." He was then ordered to continue restraining the man as one of the surgeons sliced open the man's abdomen and two others reached in to remove the man's kidneys. Following this horrific sight, Zheng was then ordered to take the man's eyeballs.

"The nurse handed me a hemostat. I really couldn't stand it, and I said 'I can't do it, I can't,'" said Zheng. "It was horrifying beyond words. He was looking right at me. His eyelids were moving. He was alive."

Because of Zheng's refusal, other doctors in the van did the eye removal procedure. One doctor pressed open the man's eyelids and another doctor clamped out both eyes. Nurses then placed both kidneys and eyes into temperature-controlled boxes.

By this time, the body, now motionless, was placed in a black plastic bag and taken away by guards waiting outside the van. Once the necessary organs were harvested, the van sped back to the military hospital where Zheng worked in the Shenyang Military Region in China's far northeast.

Once at the hospital, the organs were quickly delivered to two operating rooms where other teams of doctors and nurses were waiting to conduct the transplants.

The incident has haunted Zheng since. He noted remembering how the man in the van looked at him with "desperate, fearful and pained" eyes.

"Under the light lay a young life, a fellow human being, whose organs were being harvested while he was alive," he remarked.

China has turned organ harvesting into a billion-dollar industry

In the decades since the incident that Zheng recounted, the massive and state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting industry has ballooned, bringing in billions of dollars each year to the communist regime in Beijing.

The most common victims of the CCP's organ harvesting business are prisoners, notably the adherents of the persecuted Falun Gong religious organization, regarded by the international community as prisoners of conscience due to being oppressed for their particular faith.

Zheng noted that in the same city in Shenyang, there is an infamous concentration camp wherein multiple whistleblowers revealed that imprisoned Falun Gong adherents were being killed en mass for their organs since 1999.

In 2020, the non-governmental body known as the China Tribunal concluded its inquiry into organ harvesting in the communist nation, noting that the regime killed prisoners of conscience for their organs "on a significant scale" and that "Falun Gong practitioners have been one – and probably the main – source of organ supply."

"They don't consent. They don't even know what's happening," said David Matas, an international human rights lawyer and one of the world's leading researchers into forced organ harvesting in China. "We call it a 'cold genocide' in the sense that it's not happening all at once, it's happening slowly over time."

Matas added that the killing of prisoners of conscience for their organs is still ongoing, and the industry has been sustained by people from all over the world – including the United States – coming to China to engage in "transplant tourism."

"They're continuing to advertise transplant tourism, and the institutions are still functioning," said Matas. "They haven't closed on these transplant hospitals."