Organ harvest victim woke up chained to bed to find parts of liver and lungs stolen

THE first known survivor of China’s forced organ harvesting campaign against religious prisoners said he was now ready to speak out and expose the “evil” of the Chinese Communist Party.

Cheng Pei Ming, 58, described how he still feels “extreme pain” 20 years after parts of his lung and liver were forcibly removed. “I believed they would kill me. I’m not sure they thought I could survive, but I did,” Mr Cheng told

The Telegraph as he took off his shirt to expose a scar that wraps around his chest all the way to his back.

Mr Cheng said he was detained and tortured for years by the Chinese state for practising Falun Gong, a spiritual movement founded in the early 1990s.

The movement swept across the country, but was outlawed in 1999 and brutally suppressed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who branded it an “evil cult” and a threat to the state.

In the decades after the Falun Gong was banned and its followers persecuted, China’s organ transplantation industry exploded. Vital organs became readily available within a matter of days in state-run hospitals – a time frame no national transplantation system elsewhere in the world has ever been able to achieve.

In 2019, an independent tribunal in London ruled that the Chinese government continued to commit crimes against humanity by targeting minorities, including the Falun Gong movement, for organ harvesting. The CCP has denied accusations of organ harvesting and repeatedly denied that Falun Gong practitioners have been killed for their organs.

Mr Chang was first arrested in September 1999. In the years that followed, he was “kidnapped by the CCP” five times, each time suffering “unbearable” torture, he said. “I remembered asking: ‘Why don’t you kill me instead?’ And they said: ‘It is too easy, we get great pleasure in torturing you,’” Mr Cheng said. In July 2004, Mr Cheng said he was dragged into a hospital where agents from the CCP’s infamous 610 office – dubbed “China’s gestapo” – tried to make him sign consent forms. When he refused, they knocked him down and put him to sleep. His family was told that he was undergoing surgery and had a 20 per cent chance of survival. Mr Cheng woke up three days later, terrified, shackled to a bed, and with a 35cm incision across his chest. Scans show sections of his liver and left lung were surgically removed.

Two years later, prison guards took him back to hospital. “There was no reason for them to operate, so I understood I would be killed. My family were told I had swallowed knives and wasn’t likely to survive.”

But an unexpected opportunity presented itself for escape. His guard had fallen asleep, so Mr Cheng made a run for it.

Mr Cheng, whose family largely remains in China, still can’t feel parts of his chest, and he struggles on a daily basis with shocks of pain that ripple through his body.