Sunday, April 30, 2006
Chinese expatriates protested outside the Panoply Arts Festival Saturday, decrying what they claim is organ harvesting from living prisoners by Chinese officials running a booming transplant trade.
Protest organizers decided to rally in Huntsville after the publicity given their cause earlier this month at the White House. A Chinese-American doctor, Dr. Wenyi Wang, interrupted a meeting between President Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao with shouts to stop the organ transplants. She was taken into custody.
"We are asking the international community to help us stop the harvesting of organs," said Wanquing Huang of New York, one of the local protesters.
Huang and others rallying on the steps of the Huntsville Municipal Complex said corrupt Communist Chinese officials are using Falun Gong prisoners to supply organs sold on the Internet to recipients worldwide.
Falun Gong is a system of exercises and meditation banned in China in 1999 just as its practitioners were about to pass the Communist Party in number, according to Sabina Kupershmitt, a Vanderbilt University assistant professor and one of the protesters here.
"It may be that we are unable to do anything about it," Kupershmitt said, "but we can at least speak out."
The protesters say escapees now getting out of China are telling horror stories of secret work camps with hidden hospitals where organs are harvested from living prisoners.
One protester, Xiao Mei of Tennessee, said she was kept in a Chinese labor camp for more than a year. She was denied sleep for weeks at a time and force-fed by guards trying to get her to renounce Falun Gong, she said.
"Two congressmen from Tennessee wrote a letter that got me released," she said through a translator. "Without their help, I wouldn't be here today. I'm so lucky."
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