You’re listening to part two of A Barefoot Lawyer Reports on China interview with Peiming Cheng, a man who claims to have survived a forced organ harvesting surgery by the Chinese Communist Party. In this episode, Mr. Cheng continues telling his story as translated by Dr. Sen Niah, fellow at the Catholic University of America’s Center for Human Rights.

 

Peiming Cheng: In May 2002, I was arrested again. Some of the illnesses that I had, heart problems, and other complications had disappeared when I practiced Falun Gong. As a practitioner, I also benefited in gaining a new understanding of life, a meaningful life. As one of the beneficiaries, I needed to tell the governments the crackdowns were unjust. I needed to tell them the true story of the practitioners, of peaceful and good people.

 

After the crackdown in 1999, I was arrested in my hometown in the Heilongjiang Province. I was tortured continuously for 36 hours and it was very painful. At the detention center, I was tortured particularly by electrical shock caused by this high voltage electric baton. They did that to me seven times, each time for hours until those electric batons ran out the electricity of the batteries. It was very, very painful. In December 2001, I was sentenced in a secret court to eight years in jail in the name of interference of the public security order. After the sentence, I was sent to the President’s number one prison. The story of torture was published many times in mingquay.net, which is official Falun Gong website during that period of time. In May of 2004, in this number one prison, I was with another practitioner Wang Da Yuan, who was tortured to death at that time. The disclosure of this tortured death at that time raised international concern, so the CCP became under pressure. They transferred 30 practitioners of Falun Gong, including me, to Ta Ching Prison. We were continually tortured and seriously persecuted in the prison. On November 16, 2004, I was tortured in a dark cell with a special torture apparatus is called Big Stretch. My fore limbs were stretched tight on the apparatus for six long hours. It was very very painful.

 

After six hours of stretching four limbs, I accidentally slid off of one my left hand from the cuff. That allowed me to untie all other shackles, getting me out of the big stretch apparatus. Taking a very brief break in the dark cell, I saw a rusty nail and a blond paper cutter about two inches long on the windowsill. The guards found me off the big stretch, so I swallowed the nail and the blunt blade as a protest to them. Noticing my escape via the security camera, the prison guard came to the cell to catch me. In the process, I hit my head very hard at the door, on a metal door knob. Leaving a four inch long cut on my head with blood running all over my face. They took me to the clinic of the prison, and the staff just stitched the wound on my head. Later, they took me to the hospital. My family members were called to the hospital. They forced me to sign the agreements for surgery; I refused. I also told my family members not to sign the agreement of operation. They said that I would die if I didn’t get the operation. I heard the surgery has an 80% chance of death, with only a 20% chance of survival. I still refused to do this operation.

 

The prison pushed my family members out of the room and forced me to sign. If I didn’t sign, my family would be harmed, I was told. There were six policemen who knocked me down, restrained me, and injected some unknown substance to my body. I lost my consciousness, and when I regained consciousness, two and a half days passed. It was November 19th, 2004. I found myself shackled to the patient’s bed, my two feet shackled to the bedpost, with IV tubes connected to my feet. I also had bloody tubes coming from my chest. There was oxygen running to my nose. It was very painful. I realized that I had long incisions cut on my chest. After I regained consciousness, I was so hungry. They provide me with some steaming egg and some canned fruit. Then on November 23rd, 2004, which was about a week from the first day I came to the hospital, I was sent back to the prison. On December 2nd, 2004, the stitches were taken off by the clinic, and after resting for a few months, I was able to go out in the outdoors with other prisoners. This would have been March 2005. Many of the prisoners just point me that say this Falun Gong had his organs transplanted. I heard most of them say that for almost a year in prison. Everybody knew. The hearsay in the prison was that I was the organ donor for one of the prison guards, the armed prison guard in the surgery room with me on that day. One of the senior nurses told me that. In the many years of her nursing career, it was her first time doing organ transplantations. 

 

The prison guard just spread the message to the prison in the sense of making a joke of me. “Everybody knows Falun Gong was organ-transplanted”. However, I didn’t understand what that meant at that time. Even though everybody pointed at me and said I was organ transplanted, but I didn’t understand. The only things I knew was the pain in my chest made it difficult to breathe, and this pain made me no longer strong. I was 39 years old at that time. I was very strong, but after the surgery I became weak. It took me close to two years of rest and recovery. On March 2nd, 2006, they forced me to the hospital again; this time, a more modern hospital. My younger sister was called to the hospital, and they told her that I swallowed the nail again and needed an operation. I actually didn’t swallow anything this time, and I didn’t want to do the surgery. I had a feeling that this time they were probably going to kill me. My younger sister asked me what do I wanted to eat. It felt more like a last meal. I requested canned pears and peaches. So my younger sister bought me four cans of fruit. After my younger sister left, medical people with green shirts with masked faces arrived and checked me out. The man who just checked my abdomen said that he would be doing the surgery on me tomorrow. I had a very bad feeling.

 

After the doctors left, there was a nurse who tried to inject some protein into me. I refused that with both of my hands. The nurse said “Why is this Falun Gong practitioner not locked to the bedpost? All the Falun Gong practitioners brought to this room were shackled to the bed. Why is he not?” Then I had a feeling that they were going to kill me. Around 2:00 am in the morning on March 3rd, 2006, there were two armed police in the room with me. Both of them fell asleep; I woke one of them up, claiming I needed to go to the men’s room. The guard unshackled me and took me to the other end of the hallway of the restroom. In the hallway, I saw the fire escape ladder. It was on the fifth floor of the hospital building.  Then after returning from the restrooms, the other guard was very sleepy. So the first one slept, and the other one just fell asleep on the bed without shackling me. I took the chance to take this canned fruit and snuck out of the rooms, went down the hospital through the fire escape to the front of the entrance of the hospital, and got the taxi to ride off. Since then, he has been living a refugee life for nine years, running from place to place in China.

 

The Catholic University of America’s Center for Human Rights has published a documentary on the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights. The documentary features world class human rights experts from former State Department officials to ambassadors and human rights activists. It can be found on our website at humanrights.catholic.edu