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The Daily Texan: Students protest organ harvesting
April 10, 2006 The Falun Dafa Student Association, which supports a spiritual discipline
based on the principles of "truthfulness, compassion and tolerance,"
held a mock demonstration on Friday on the West Mall covering the alleged
situation in China's internment camps, accusing the Chinese government of
persecuting Falun Dafa practitioners and harvesting their organs for profit. Hongyi Pan, a researcher at UT-San Antonio and Falun practitioner who spoke
during Friday's demonstration, said he and his colleagues have communicated with
the hospitals that supposedly harvest the organs by posing as interested
customers. According to Pan, they called the hospitals expressing concerns about the
organ donors and whether the organs were good. He alleged that hospital workers
responded that the organs were all very good and healthy. "Then we asked them, 'Do you have Falun Gong practitioners' organs?
Because everybody knows that Falun practitioners are very healthy,'" Pan
said. "And they said, 'Yes.' Some said, 'They are all from Falun
practitioners.'" Wang Guoqi, a Chinese doctor, denied the allegations during testimony to U.S.
lawmakers in July 2001 that organ transplants were conducted on prisoners before
they were clinically dead. The issue has only been addressed outside China, Pan said. The government is
afraid of drawing the attention of the Chinese people by discussing the issue
within the country, Pan said. China is expected to implement a law on July 1 that would make the sale of
organs illegal, according to an article on the BBC Web site. Pan said he fears that organ harvesting will be accelerated. When they called
the hospitals, Pan said, they were told to hurry up and get the transplant,
because now was a good time to do it. [...] The U.N. Commission on Human Rights sent rapporteur Manfred Novak to China in
December 2005 to investigate the progress of China's criminal justice system.
Novak reported that the Falun Gong were regularly interned and tortured without
trial, according to The New York Times. "Since the Chinese government knows that people are starting to question
what's going on, they're trying to terminate all the other practitioners that
are still in the camp so they can get rid of the evidence," said James
Hwang, vice president of the student association and an accounting junior. Falun Dafa was introduced in China during the early '90s. The spiritual
belief spread quickly, and in 1999 the Communist Chinese government outlawed
[and persecuted it brutally]. Followers have since been persecuted for their
beliefs and imprisoned in camps. "Back in 1999, there were 100 million practitioners worldwide - Falun
Dafa practitioners - [with] 60 million in China," Hwang said. "There
just happened to be 60 million Chinese Communist members within China as
well." The Falun Dafa, or Falun Gong, have little to do with politics, Hwang said.
Still, the Communist party is afraid of people, especially those with spiritual
beliefs, gathering in large numbers, because it suggests that there is a greater
power than the government, said Hwang. "The Communist party [knows] Falun Gong is good," Pan said.
"It's not that they have a misunderstanding. They know it's good - but it
challenges their ruling nature." Posting date: 4/11/2006
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