[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] For two decades, investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann has been researching how the Chinese Communist Party secretly harvests the organs of prisoners of conscience and kills them in the process.

He authored the groundbreaking 2014 work “The Slaughter” and, more recently, “The Xinjiang Procedure.”

In his latest book, he gathers evidence of how the regime—which has long targeted Falun Gong practitioners for their organs—is now exploiting captive Uyghurs for this same macabre industry.

Gutmann traveled to Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkey to interview many Uyghurs and Kazaks who had managed to escape after being imprisoned in camps in Xinjiang, China, also known as East Turkestan. Many spoke to him at great personal risk to themselves and their loved ones.

What they revealed to him was nothing short of horrific.

A central witness named “Samal” described working in one of four medical labs located several stories below the concentration camp. One of the clinics—the one she worked in—was used for intestinal removal.

“The other three clinics were there to remove organs. You couldn’t see them, but occasionally the door would open. You‘d see somebody handling a kidney, a liver, and so forth. Every day that she worked there … there’d be eight or nine bodies. Sometimes it was as many as 20,” Gutmann said.

During his research, Gutmann realized a disturbing pattern. Many of those who disappeared in the middle of the night from the camps were typically 28 or 29 years old.

He believes the CCP has made this age demographic its primary target for forced organ harvesting.

“You are at the peak of your health. At that point, your organs have stopped growing,” Gutmann says.

In this episode, he breaks down the devastating evidence he’s uncovered—and the failure of Western institutions to address these crimes.

The spread of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) technology—which keeps organs oxygenated and viable for many hours—has made the CCP’s organ trade even more lucrative than before.

“Suddenly,” he told me, “you can pull a lot more organs off a single person and get them to distribute them around. And so the profit margin goes way up on a single human being from $100,000 up to almost a million dollars, if they were selling to foreigners.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Ethan Gutmann, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Ethan Gutmann:

It’s great to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:

In your book The Xinjiang Procedure, on the forced organ harvesting aspect, because you cover a lot of ground in there, what would you say was the single most shocking thing that you came across that was most shocking to you in your work?

Mr. Gutmann:

We talk about victims a lot in organ harvesting, and that’s appropriate. We should be. But the truth is, the strongest witness that you can come up with is somebody from the medical world who performs some sort of surgery or is in some way tangentially involved in this nexus of organ harvesting. In this case, the final witness in the central chapter, the beating heart of the book in a way, it’s called The Perfect 28, because 28 is the age they like to organ harvest people, the Chinese like to organ harvest people, is a woman named Samar.

It was an unusual interview because I don’t encourage people to emote heavily in my interviews. In fact, I don’t, I’m not a TV interviewer, okay? And I’m not putting, nothing to do with what you do. But you know the deal. You have to get people to emote; they have to express it; they have to show that they have scars; they show that this is where they burned me with the cigarettes.

I’m not doing that. This is writing; this is a book. These people can’t even be shown. They’re in great danger in Kazakhstan. They’re usually in a very tenuous situation. This woman comes in, says I’m going to talk about something that I haven’t talked about to anyone. And then she bursts into tears. Great heaving sobs. Not just usual tears. Sobs and sobs. I hand her the tissue box. After three minutes, she sort of calms down, and then she starts telling this story.

At first, she’s telling it in the third person. She describes something, a series of medical labs below a concentration camp. Four stories down, and there are these, well, three clinics, if you want to talk about it that way. And there’s really a fourth one, which is sort of the first one you come to. She describes these; she says there’s no surveillance down there, but there are two guards who stand there, AKs at the low ready, totally masked. We walk between them, and then there’s the first gurney, and that’s where, and I figured it out fairly quickly, she’s been there. She’s done this.

Her job, along with a veterinarian who pulled her in, so that’s kind of higher, was to remove the intestines. Normally, you wouldn’t even care about the intestines if you’re dealing with a corpse. It’s not essential to absolutely go after the intestines first, but if you’re four stories down. And your ventilation system is not that good; you might want to look into the intestines first, clean them, remove them, get rid of them. In fact, they had had problems with this before.

The other three clinics were there to remove organs. You couldn’t see them, but occasionally the door would open, and you'd see somebody handling a kidney, a liver, and so forth. Every day that she worked there, she wasn’t in the camp, but every day that she worked there, there would be eight or nine bodies. Sometimes it was as many as 20. Sometimes it would be three or four. Almost always young.

To me, she was a central witness in a weird way. She brought it up to speed in a new time. Now, what connects her to the rest of the book is that they also, while she was working there, at one point, the guards got together and gang-raped her. What pulls it in again to the whole Uyghur experience of captivity is that the day before she left, ran away from this job, her supervisor put his hand into her pants as if he was assessing a piece of fruit, whether it was ripe or not, literally, while he talked to her.

She said, you can’t do that. And he said, oh, you know all the rules, don’t you? Oh, you’re so up on things, you know everything. You know what? You’re a Kazakh, and Kazakhstan is a terrorist state; it’s right here on our list, okay? And we can do anything we want with you at any time. In fact, get here at seven tomorrow because I have something I want to talk to you about.

That night, she couldn’t sleep, and she made a dash for the border; she left everything. All her bank accounts, everything she had. She came in with less than $100 in her pocket into Kazakhstan and was able to somehow get her way through the border in the middle of the night. She'd only been there nine months when I got there. You know, the BBC was very interested in pursuing this story. But I have a feeling she just got returned to Kazakhstan anyway. I think the last thing I have is a tape of her voice. That’s what we’re next.

Mr. Jekielek:

Returned to Kazakhstan or returned to Xinjiang?

Mr. Gutmann:

Returned to Xinjiang. I mean, that was when COVID hit, and it was coming in right at the time we were interviewing. That was used as an excuse to go into people’s apartments and take them away and so forth. So this was the Kazakh authoritarian state. It’s not a totalitarian state; it’s an authoritarian state. It exposed itself.

And then the Chinese were putting very heavy pressure on this issue. And they were trying to pull in all the Uyghurs and Kazakhs back into the camps. There weren’t many Uyghurs. The only Uyghurs were people who were in Tajikistan and so forth, selling things in the bazaars. They had been there for years. They were all pulled back, 90 percent of them.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s sort of zoom out a little bit. A lot of people won’t just be familiar with this whole world that you’re describing here, right? We’re looking at a totalitarian level of control. We’re talking about extreme dehumanization of people that allows for this kind of behavior. Frankly, when you’re talking about this woman, I’m thinking, like, I don’t even know if it’s appropriate, but I guess we can talk about it as Sonderkommando, right? That’s what I’m thinking. Someone involved in this in that way, in the way that she was.

Frame for me, first, how Xinjiang is situated in China, how it’s viewed, what’s happened to the people in terms of dehumanization and so forth, and then why Kazakhstan and how you got in there. Let’s start with Xinjiang. Let’s start with what it is. Who are the people? How are they different? And how does Kazakhstan fit into it? And finally, how is it that you managed to get there and do these interviews?

Mr. Gutmann:

Central Asia has always been sort of at the periphery of the Chinese empire. It was something, a desert land out west, and especially in the north. The southwestern part is Tibet. It’s this huge, massive plateau, of which Tibet consists. And the Chinese always had a very strong relationship to some extent, maybe a sort of admiration of society. You go into the tombs, the ancient tombs, and they’re all Tibetan Sanskrit everywhere.

In fact, people have a hard time deciphering it, but that’s what they insisted on. This is not true with the Uyghurs, who are the main people of what used to be called East Turkestan, sometimes Chinese Turkestan. The Chinese call it Xinjiang, which means very simply, new land or new territory. This is why the Uyghurs are very touchy about that.

Even in The Xinjiang Procedure, I apologize right at the beginning. I say, sorry, this is a user-friendly book. We’re not going to control language here. I use Western terms like Western and Eastern. I don’t really care if that’s sort of Eurocentric or something. Look, these are people who are basically Caucasian. They’re part of the Huns. It goes all the way to Hungary, right? And they’re part of that culture.

They’re part of the Central Asian or Turkic culture, really. And they always have been. So the differences between them and the Han Chinese are very different in that sense than, say, the Falun Gong, who became the main victims of organ harvesting for so many years, for decades, because Falun Gong is Han Chinese.

Mr. Jekielek:

Mostly.

Mr. Gutmann:

Mostly Han Chinese.

Mr. Jekielek:

I’m just saying that because I’ve met Uyghur Falun Gong practitioners over the years as well.

Mr. Gutmann:

There’s a few.

Mr. Jekielek:

But let’s not get bogged down.

Mr. Gutmann:

Yes, and there are claims about a lot of Christians around in the Uyghur community, too. But I don’t think there are very many. I mean, they’re mainly Muslim. But look, the bottom line is this is a very different kind of culture. And there’s always been some kind of conflict between the Han Chinese. There’s so much hatred now between the Uyghurs and the Chinese. It’s so dramatic. There’s so much dehumanization, particularly on the Chinese side, but also among the Uyghurs themselves.

The first woman I interview in the book in the first chapter, at one point, we were having a very nice Uyghur dinner in Istanbul. And I said, well, how do you really feel about the Chinese? And she said, they’re lower than dogs. You know, it was like this. And it was as if a blast furnace had opened up for a second. I mean, just the rage in her eyes. And there was no escaping it. There was no reason for me to doubt her feelings here.

Mr. Jekielek:

If I may comment, the Chinese Communist Party—and this is a topic for a whole other interview I'll do one day—they’ve weaponized essentially racism to fan the flames of this kind of racial tension to maintain their power, which is a horrible, horrible thing. And it’s way underreported also because we’re not allowed to talk about racism and so forth in the West. But this is part of what you’re describing, right? It’s pitting people against each other, doing horrible things; people want to do horrible things back. I mean, we’ve seen this play out so many times in history, but the CCP is just another instrument that has been used as yet another tool, right? And this is the context in which you’re writing The Xinjiang Procedure.

Mr. Gutmann:

The heat that Falun Gong and investigators like me took, along with David Matas, and certainly Matt Robertson, meant that they had to kind of rationalize the system a bit and meant moving it out of the public eye more. One of the problems with Falun Gong is it’s distributed throughout the country. We’re talking about huge numbers here. I mean, I think you’ve used the term 8.9 billion per year. I tend to call it 9 billion per year. I think it’s the back of a napkin kind of thing.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, no, exactly. We don’t.

Mr. Gutmann:

But nonetheless, we don’t really know. But we know that the numbers are huge. We know that once you add in things like ECMO [extracorporeal membrane oxygenation], with organs that are only going to last four hours, you can suddenly pull a lot more organs off a single person and get them and distribute them around. And so suddenly the profit margin goes way up on a single human being from $100,000, if we’re selling to foreigners, up to almost a million dollars, if you do it correctly—$750,000 at least. So these are huge advances that have been made within the Chinese transplant industry.

Now, they had to rationalize a little bit, and I started picking up signals on this part. I can’t explain the camps completely. But when they started construction of the camps in 2015, something was going on, and they suddenly had this massive captive population that they completely controlled. And that’s what I felt I had to follow. The method I looked at was very few Uyghurs; the Chinese Communist Party learned a lot of things from the conflict with Falun Gong. One of the things they learned was to stop naming your torture centers glamorous names like Dragon Mountain. No, you don’t use Dragon Mountain.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, they get a number.

Mr. Gutmann:

Now the centers just get a number. Or not even that sometimes, so you stop doing that. You’ve got to keep the hospitals kind of private and not let them talk. And you’ve got to keep the victims squared away. It’s always a difficult procedure. The other thing they learned was don’t let your victims out. Don’t let the friends of the victims out. Don’t let the family members out, and so forth.

Mr. Jekielek:

A lot of Falun Gong got out from our perspective. Enough to be able to talk about it.

Mr. Gutmann:

That’s right, and to do a lot of field work. I interviewed over 100 practitioners. 50 of them were directly from labor camps, or at least very long-term detention centers. Some of them were from black jails. It was the laogai system, and a lot of them got out. They got out through different means, and there are wonderful things written about those stories because they’re always fascinating. But hardly anybody was getting out. You had these camps. Even the State Department was estimating them at one-and-a-half million to two million at that point. Yet we only had ten people, nine people in the West who'd made it over to the U.S. That’s nothing.

Mr. Jekielek:

And if I may just comment, it’s not just the camps because the whole region is a camp in a sense because it’s under military control. So there are so many layers of security that you would have to get through to actually get out. It makes it virtually impossible.

Mr. Gutmann:

That’s exactly right. And that’s one of the reasons why when you look at something like, you know, we’ve talked, I think, in the past about the Tiananmen Square self-immolation incident, right, which looks very phony when you actually start looking at the facts. And it’s similar, you know, where you had a car appear suddenly in Tiananmen Square and it ran a bunch of people over. It was driven by a Uyghur mother and it had Xinjiang plates on the car. How is that possible? You couldn’t get a car out of Xinjiang and drive it to Tiananmen Square. It’s ridiculous.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right, right.

Mr. Gutmann:

It’s another setup thing.

Mr. Jekielek:

A lot of staged propaganda. I mean, the regime, I argue that it’s perhaps the thing they’re actually best at of all, even never mind the repression, is the propaganda creation. But that’s a whole different discussion.

Mr. Gutmann:

It’s a fascinating thing and it’s made for TV; it’s fascinating stuff, right? Here’s the thing, nobody can get out; you’re absolutely right. And they closed off the passport situation very effectively. They kept people thinking that they had real passports. You would not believe the amount of hours I’ve wasted listening to people talk about their passport troubles. It’s the dullest part of my interviews; people have to talk about this, but it’s just the most frustrating Kafkaesque bureaucratic procedure you’ve ever heard of, and nothing ever happens.

They also set up certain horror stories. Mothers would go with their children, saying, okay, we’re all going to Istanbul, we’re going to get out, we’ve got to, we can do it. And at the last minute, as they’re getting aboard the plane, they pull the children back and say, there’s problems with the children’s passports; don’t worry, they’re going to be on the next plane. Please just get on the plane.

The mother goes over. I talked to a room full of these women in Istanbul, all of whom don’t have their children. And the only time they see their children is occasionally when the Chinese do sort of a program on these wonderful orphanages they’ve got. Then they see their own kid for a second, looking alive, which is something. Sometimes they see them on TikTok. It’s horrifying. And of course, the unspoken part here is that these children are being indoctrinated as part of the genocidal policy. Some of them will be made into assets, intelligence assets. It’s very likely for the smart ones.

Okay, but back to our thing. So basically, they’re not getting out. And my work revolves around fieldwork, not just by choice, because it’s what I prefer, though it is, but it’s also true that in this case, there was no information to be gained about organ harvesting on the web. You could not sit at a computer and ascertain anything. The whole thing’s a black box.So let’s take two minutes to just explain this, okay? This is incredibly important.

When the research started, basically, on forced organ harvesting, the scale part right was about 2005, 2006, and every time I explain how this worked—like how we got to the point where it’s very difficult to find anything online—well, what happened was there was a group; there were several groups, but I’m just going to name one of them, and it’s a mouthful: World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong [WOIPFG]. The people who were manning it had mad talent. They did nearly a superhuman effort of going through every hospital website that was potentially doing transplants and seeing what they said about it.

But they didn’t stop there. They went into dissertations. They went into Nurses Weekly. They went into all these different sources, and they hacked. They hacked MedicalFi. And out of that, this massive amount of information came. Well, at one point, they would release it, but nobody would pay very much attention. At one point, a splinter group from them came and approached us and said, we'll give you all this information—you, David Kilgour, and David Matas. Will you write a report?

We said, yes, we will. It was a lot of information to collate and go through. But the truth is that they had hit on the Chinese transplant volume in China. Now, they hadn’t hit on it perfectly. We didn’t cover every hospital. But a lot of hospitals, the Chinese have a weakness. They brag. They love to brag about, especially about production. So it’s like in Mao’s day, they'd say, this is the best apple harvest ever. We’re way above quota.

Now, they talk about transplants, and what we were able to do was come at it and start getting patterns, and then I kind of personally came up with a number of one a day for each hospital that was establishing, you know, we knew how many transplant teams they had, three to four on average, okay, and so forth. It’s the idea that they’re just sitting around; they have 40 beds, you know. The idea they’re just sitting around—no, one a day. And even right there, it brings you up from what the Chinese were claiming was 10,000 transplants per year, successful transplants.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, just to clarify that. The official Chinese position was they were doing, for the entire country, 10,000 a year. Exactly.

Mr. Gutmann:

Now, Matt Robertson, in his study, was a very important part of breaking that because he found one hospital, Tianjin Central Hospital, which was doing 5,000 per year, which was in fact renting out hotel rooms for the number of people who were having transplants. And that one caters to foreigners, so it’s particularly interesting. So right there, you’ve got 5,000. You can look at the PLA No. 309 Hospital of Beijing and Sun Yat-sen Hospital. There’s a whole series of hospitals, and the numbers quickly escalate.

In fact, I tend to say it’s about 60,000 per year at a minimum, maybe up to 100,000. I am well aware that the Chinese like to exaggerate a little bit. It’s just something you do in Chinese society and under the CCP. If the fish was this big, it’s really kind of this big, so you exaggerate it a little bit. I think that’s important to acknowledge. I took that into my calculations. Honestly, this is a real phenomenon.

Now, we'll never be able to do that Chinese transplant study again because they completely, even while we were working on the report, the hospital websites started disappearing. Just like mushrooms after a spring rain. They were just gone. And now, in most cases, we archived it. Not in all cases. There’s always a tragedy.

But we did enough of it that it was very, very persuasive. And it was a very important countermeasure at a time when China was announcing that they were moving to voluntary systems only.  We had this evidence saying, no, not so fast. And it was very hard for people to refute the evidence at that time. But since then, the Chinese have squeezed it. We had nothing.

We had one thing that I knew. I knew that ethnic Kazakhs who were Chinese citizens, were getting out of Xinjiang. They were bribing their way out. They had connections across the border, that kind of thing. The border was a little porous. And so maybe several thousand had gotten out and they were hiding out in Kazakh society. We'd never hear from them. And the reporters who went into Kazakhstan or went touring in Xinjiang never asked the questions. They were completely incurious about this whole issue. And that was the challenge.

Mr. Jekielek:

And so tell me now what you did, just very, again, very briefly, to actually meet these people.

Mr. Gutmann:

Basically what we did was I found the right partner, who was my daughter, who was 24 years old at that time, and said, would you be willing to do this? She’s very pretty, she’s got blonde hair. She and I bought her some beautiful hats in Istanbul, and I said, we’re going to take this car. I approached a wonderful guy, Peter, a Falun Gong practitioner, and said, can you help me out? I need a car.

He said, what do you want to do? I said, I want to drive to Almaty, Kazakhstan, from Germany. He said, okay, what kind of car? I said, it’s got to be less than 2005. He said, why? I said, they put chips in the car after that. It’s really easy to track them. All you do is you can track it anywhere. I said, it’s got to be four-wheel drive because there’s terrible weather and the roads are awful. He said, okay. He came back a couple of weeks later and said, I got you the car. He got a Toyota RAV4. Nowadays, Toyota RAV4s are kind of big and nice. Back then, they were like boxes, another black box here.

In fact, it was black, but it worked, and we put skis on top of the car. We had a story that we used at every border crossing because there were a lot of border crossings to get over to Kazakhstan, a lot of places, which developed over time. Basically, I said, which was true, I said, if my daughter, you know, I said, if you get honors when you graduate from college, I’m going to take you on the trip of a lifetime. And here we are on the trip of a lifetime. OK, here are the skis. You know, we had all this.

Mr. Jekielek:

It was entirely true. It’s just not the whole story.

Mr. Gutmann:

We never did ski, actually. I said I was taking her to Mongolia. That was the other thing. We said, no, it’s not Almaty. We’re going to Mongolia. We’re going to ski in Mongolia for the bragging rights. Now, this is somewhat plausible because occasionally foreigners do appear there.

The other thing to do was to stay completely away from anything that a journalist would do. So we took the trucker routes. We took trucker routes through Ukraine. We took the trucker ferry across the Black Sea, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and then we took this ferry that doesn’t even run on a regular schedule that’s all truckers again, and we took that across the Caspian Sea.

And then here we are on the edge of Kazakhstan, which is a huge country. It’s east-west. It’s like America. It comes with terrible roads. And then they go crazy on you. They take all these biometric photographs and all the rest of it. It’s all Russian. It’s Russian surveillance, so it’s good, high quality. But we turned all our devices off. Nobody ever recognized us. Nobody recognized me, which was the big problem. It was like, oh, this guy sort of investigates stuff. But they never bothered to check me.

We had a bad moment where my daughter and I were separated, but she had all the right answers to all the questions. And, you know, basically we got out of there. They had dogs sniffing through the car and everything. We got out of there, and none of our devices were turned on, and they were all in Faraday cages. They’re soft Faraday cage things now. There was no way to trace us. We weren’t using any electronics at all.

So we had to rely on a map. I had a German map of Kazakhstan. She couldn’t drive; my daughter couldn’t drive, but she’s a good map reader. Okay, very good. And so we made our way. We got lost a couple of times. But there aren’t that many roads; you can’t get that lost. But we had a very difficult time getting through. We had very, very bad weather.

But the bottom line was, we got stopped by the police again and again, and I had to bribe my way out of that every time because I didn’t want them to take me down to the station. All they were interested in was money, really. There was this whole business routine of you give them the dough that they wanted, and you have to pass it underneath their internal camera, and then we'd put our hands and our hearts to represent how touched we were by each other’s position and shake hands.

I hated that stuff. I was seething inside, but I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t want to blow the investigation. I‘d set up two fixtures ahead of time in Almaty. I knew they’d be a little competitive with each other. That’s a good thing. To help deliver witnesses, and to be translators as well. They both had different qualities; both had different strengths.

We arrived in Almaty and they got us a safe apartment. One of them had some real estate deals. They‘d done some real estate deals. They got us a place that our names were never on. I just paid some cash. We’d sewn the cash into my jeans across these borders. You cannot use a credit card. You cannot use a, you cannot, the only device you can ever use is a burner phone. And you must use it once, throw it away. Use it once, throw it away.

So we had a box of burner phones. And we were asked about them at one of the borders. And I just said, oh, well, that’s, you know, they’re gifts for people because they’ve got this funny sound. It would play a funny song when you opened it up. Okay, so we’re doing it. That was the idea. The idea was to make it look fun.

That was the innovation, if you like, because a lot of people talk about doing this stuff, and they do do it. And there’s a lot of different ways to do it. I’m not claiming ours was the only way. It’s very amateurish. But I think ours was clever because of the fun part. We always looked like we were having a good time. We didn’t try to blend in. We looked totally like foreigners, you know, kind of stupid, you know, naive foreigners.

And we had this very cute girl who, if things got hairy at the border, she‘d suddenly say, I have to use the toilet. And then they’d have to get a woman dressed in these old Soviet-style outfits and take her to the bathroom, whatever bathroom they had. She was very good about that. She created diversions like you wouldn’t believe. Daddy, daddy, I think they can help us. So that was sort of the fun part. And then we got into the interviews. We did those for about two-and-a-half months.

Mr. Jekielek:

And how many people did you manage to interview?

Mr. Gutmann:

Nearly 20. And I didn’t throw out any of the cases, even the ones who didn’t see anything that I wanted, because a study is a study. I wanted it very clear, we’re not doing cutting room floor here. But that’s why I’m kind of confident in the numbers, because even in the four cases where people didn’t see anything or couldn’t say they saw somebody disappear, I was able to at least explain where they were coming from.

One guy was one of these consummate survivors who could survive in any camp because he just knows how to play by the rules. And I mean, if I were in Auschwitz with him, I'd try to be his wingman, okay? You know, the off chance that I can survive just hanging around with this guy. So he doesn’t see things. He doesn’t want to see things. It’s often a really good survival technique. Another woman said, I didn’t see anything. But then all these women kept disappearing because they had medical troubles.

When I asked her about the medical drugs, there was a high blood pressure. oh, I think this one was a druggie. Oh, she got pregnant. I asked, how does she get pregnant? It’s a women’s camp, right? There’s only male on Chinese cards. Oh, I don’t know. Her husband came back at that point, so we never got into that.

But every time you had somebody like her, all said other people could absolutely sort of say, well, it was about five percent per year, or we‘d figure it out, but it had to be firsthand. I didn’t want numbers they’d heard from anybody else. I didn’t want to talk about organ harvesting. I just said disappearances. How old were they? Did you have a blood test? This kind of thing.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, the thing that I love about the conversation that we’re having right now is I think you’re highlighting the difficulty of doing all this kind of work. You’re always dealing, when you’re dealing with these sort of extreme atrocity type situations, whether it’s Falun Gong practitioners or Uyghurs, you just don’t have a lot of people to work with. You have to figure out there’s a lot of inference based on information. It’s just...

Mr. Gutmann:

Well, I think there was one advantage with the Kazakhs, I must say here, okay? I mean, this was always a problem with Falun Gong or Uyghurs that they’re right in the middle of this. They’re the targets. The Kazakhs have always been sort of incidental here. They’re just like, well, you look like Uyghurs and you talk kind of like Uyghurs, so we’re going to put you in too.

Now, I’m not saying they haven’t suffered. They’ve suffered horribly. But the point is they don’t have quite the same relationship to the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] that the Uyghurs do. And the Uyghurs, I mean, it is a little bit like what I was saying. They’re lower than dogs. I mean, there’s a kind of very strong emotion that’s produced within the Uyghur community.

Within Falun Gong, there’s, you know, the CCP has been the dead set enemy against Falun Gong. They’ve done horrible things to these people and their families and the rest of it. I mean, just unbelievable. How can a mother talk about her daughter, you know, who’s dead now and not talk about this without some emotion, without wanting to tell me a story that they think will move me, right? That’s all fine and good. And that’s a different problem.

But in this case, I didn’t have to think about this as much because, in a sense, they’re talking about the Uyghurs as kind of like their cousins or something, and they don’t like the Chinese Communist Party, but they don’t feel quite as involved in the struggle, so it made it a little easier to feel like, well, this is fairly objective material. Again, I can work around non-objective material. I’m not against passion; I don’t refuse people to talk about what’s important to them. That’s not at all my strategy. My strategy is to come in and let them vent as much as possible and just be willing to take my time.

Mr. Jekielek:

But basically, in this situation, this is what you could do. And the side benefit was that this emotional involvement wasn’t as deep. That’s right.

Mr. Gutmann:

Not quite as deep, just a little bit removed. And so that made it a little simpler to do. And sometimes the interviews could be a little shorter. I wouldn’t have to wear them down for nine hours. Like a psychiatrist, the patient keeps trying to end the appointment, and you’re still like, I’m still here listening, you know, which is a normal trick that I do because I’ve seen psychiatrists do it, actually.

Mr. Jekielek:

Ethan, you have an unbelievable commitment to discerning truth.

Mr. Gutmann:

No, I’m just stubborn. I’m just following up on the Uyghurs. I’m just stubborn. I don’t like to be told no.

Mr. Jekielek:

No, but that’s, I mean, this is something, also, I keep thinking about. You know, you’re not going in with a preconceived notion. You’re going in actually trying to figure out what’s going on.

Mr. Gutmann:

Look, I was very worried about that.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s rare. It’s rare these days.

Mr. Gutmann:

Okay, fair enough. I mean, look, I will be honest here. I was on the way to Kazakhstan, and I didn’t let my daughter know about this because I thought it would have upset her. A lot of things were upsetting her on the way. It was a tough trip. But I was thinking, what if I get to Almaty and there’s no pot of gold here? What if I’m just wrong? I doubted it, but she asked me about that. She said, what are you going to do? How are you going to do this? And I said, you’re looking for one weird trick, like they say on the internet. What’s the one weird trick that I’m going to use? And I said, well, it’s this 28 thing.

Mr. Jekielek:

So excellent. Let’s talk about that. I mean, I think it’s a center, as you actually mentioned at the beginning of the interview. It’s sort of the centerpiece of the book and actually very important, and it almost bridges this, you know, kind of the early stages of this organ harvesting to the current stage. But maybe just talk about that.

Mr. Gutmann:

Well, it does because this was a discovery really by Dr. Charles Lee. It was a discovery by these practitioners who kind of—I’m not sure how they got ahold of those files, but they got ahold of these files. And what they were, were basically doctors’ case files. And there was case after case of transplants happening. And they'd say something about the person was often male, not always female, but usually male. And the ischemia time, that is the time of transplant, is very short—very, very short. So clearly, you’ve got the two people.

Mr. Jekielek:

The person—side by side.

Mr. Gutmann:

Side by side, the person who’s going to receive the organ, or maybe just in the next room. But the point is that the age after age after age would come up, and it was 28, sometimes 29. Actually, Charles argues that it’s not really 29; I’m wrong, it’s 28. We have the spider difference on it, but the point is that you are at the peak of your health at that point. Your organs have stopped growing, so it’s natural they'd pick that. The other thing was that it always said heart failure. Oh, so this patient died of heart failure. Do you know what the stats are for heart failure at age 28?

Mr. Jekielek:

Low.

Mr. Gutmann:

About as low as you are ever going to have them in your lifetime. I mean, it’s just one of these extremely unlikely things, unless you’re like me and almost eat too much hot pot in Taipei to the point where you shouldn’t. Bad joke from the book.

Mr. Jekielek:

But yes, let’s not get into that.

Mr. Gutmann:

But no, but here’s the thing. So that’s the 28 thing that was established through that. As I say, Charles Lee looks at his 29. And that’s what I told her. I said, you know, there are certain things we know about disappearances. If they had a blood test and a DNA test, because now it’s blood and DNA; it used to be just a blood test, within 10 days before, and they are 28 years old, and they disappear in the middle of the night. So it’s very different from the other groups that leave.

So there are a lot of times younger women, Uyghur women, would leave, and it would be announced at lunch. They‘d say, these 10 girls are all leaving, and they’re going to work at this wonderful factory. Let’s have a, sometimes they’d even have a little bit of applause for them. And they’re going to work at this wonderful factory. Sometimes they need a little bit of applause for them. Those women will work there until they’re about 45 or 50 when they can no longer produce children, and then they'll be sent back. But again, that was done in the open.

This is different. It happens in the middle of the night. Literally, I had a case where a woman used a spoon with another woman just to keep warm, terribly cold, and they were very close. And she only noticed that she had gone missing because the bed was cold. And then the toothbrush was still there the next morning. Clearly, you weren’t supposed to talk about these people. Even the guards would look through you if you tried to. And by 10:30 in the morning, the toothbrush was gone, too. That was it. Okay, so we have so many cases like that.

But again, the 28 thing was a real tip-off. So I said that, you know, I’m going to look for this. And then one of our very first cases, our first case actually, was a 28. The woman said, well, this woman went missing. And the reason why we do this 10-day blood testing appears to be a kind of final health check before you do the transplant. But it’s there for two reasons. It’s not just there to make sure they’re still healthy. It’s also there to make sure there’s been no mix-up.

This is a huge system, as you’ve established. This is a massive transplant industry, a system. And yes, it’s all computerized, but people aren’t really, you know, they don’t have chips in their skin. So you really want to make sure you get the right person every time. And this is that final check. It’s like a car that’s about to go off the assembly line. So I think that was very important. That was a big tip-off, and it’s a small thing in a way. It is a weird trick but nonetheless, you can generate numbers looking at that. And sometimes they’re 29, sometimes they’re 30, sometimes they’re 27.

But within that group is where you see a cluster. And there we have a, you know, I have a chart, and it sort of shows it. And to some people who look at that chart and say, well, it’s all over the place. I don’t really think it’s all over the place. I think it’s phenomenally given people’s memories and their own personal experiences. The fact that we have any continuity in that chart at all is a kind of miracle; at least, it was to me. So I think it’s respectable, although one of my best witnesses says the disappearance rate was actually seven point five percent every year, not five to two point five percent. And that is, and he’s here in America because I got him and his family out, and he’s Christian, by the way.

But here’s the point: we have to do something to generate numbers. People have a right to have these numbers. They have a right to have some kind of scale on these things. We ask them to care about a problem. And part of our problem is, of course, yes, this whole thing, the whole response to the organ harvesting, has been a case study in American failure on many, many levels, ranging from the doctors who assumed we'll just go in and take over this, you know, and engage with our counterparts in China, to the press, who showed an incredible lack of interest and bought everything the Chinese Communist Party said about Falun Gong. And to some extent, even the Uyghurs got a lot of shade too. Not as much, but they did get some shade.

With the politicians, obviously, there are huge exceptions like Congressman Smith and so forth, but to a great extent did very little or were cautious to do anything. The human rights organizations have been a disaster; Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch interpreted the fact that people were getting DNA tests as a kind of surveillance tool. It was just a surveillance tool. It’s an invasion of privacy. And it’s not an invasion of privacy to have somebody looking you over about to take your organs and kill you while you’re alive. That’s a very different kind of crime. And so I did put some things in the book about that. And I’m sure I won’t be popular with some people afterwards because I’m very candid about this.

For every group that I mention, there is an exception in there. For the press, there’s Didi Kirsten Tatlow of the New York Times, who lost her job by reporting on this and was told basically by the New York Times to do articles on this but use no evidence. It’s a phenomenal thing. Incredible for a paper of record. What a disaster we’ve had on this in those respects. Every time we move into the issue again, everything’s got to be retaught from scratch.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, Ethan, you mentioned the numbers, and I still remember, I think it was in 2016, you testified under oath to the 60,000 to 100,000 transplants per year, sort of very wide-bound numbers. Now, I always tell people that that boundary itself is a very, very conservative estimate because you were trying to be very, very careful.

Mr. Gutmann:

The Chinese medical establishment commonly claims that China performs 10,000 transplants per year. Yet imagine a typical state-licensed transplant center in China: three or four transplant teams, 30 or 40 beds for transplant patients, a 20 to 30-day recovery period. Patient demand: 300 Chinese waitlisted for organs, not counting foreign organ tourists. Would it be plausible to suggest that such a facility might do one transplant a day? 146 transplant facilities ministry-approved meet that general description.

That yields a back-of-the-envelope answer. You can do it right here. Not 10,000, but over 50,000 transplants per year. Suppose we actually hold those same hospitals and transplant centers to the actual state minimum requirement of transplant activity, beds, surgical staff, and so on: 80,000 to 90,000 transplants per year.

Yet how should we account for the emergence of Tianjin First Central Hospital, easily capable of 5,000 transplants per year? With the PLA General Hospital in Beijing, it is similar. There is also Zhongshan Hospital, the list is extraordinary. A detailed examination yields an average of up to two transplants per day, over 100,000 transplants per year. Now, the figures I have given you are based on Chinese numbers, not from official statements, but sources like Nurses Weekly.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, you know, as you’ve pointed out, this is a very large-scale enterprise, and I really do think, based on your explanation, that is a very conservative estimate.

Mr. Gutmann:

Yes, and even then it was misinterpreted at times because people would say, oh, well, that’s the number of people dying per year. It’s not actually. I mean, you know, we have six organs. I mean, I don’t have a spleen, but you know, you have one of those and all of those the Chinese are selling.

Mr. Jekielek:

And there was this mass influx of the portable ECMO machines, which would facilitate many organs being transplanted from a single body. I mean, it’s macabre to talk about these things in this way, but it’s just the reality.

Mr. Gutmann:

No, in a way, they have gotten a little more efficient. They’ve gotten more efficient.

Mr. Jekielek:

And then we have this whole situation where everything has kind of become this black box because every time we found any information, they would take away the sources of that information.

Mr. Gutmann:

Exactly, but we still have things that we can go on. So we have the 25,000 to 50,000 per year that are being harvested from Xinjiang.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right.

Mr. Gutmann:

Okay, so that’s 25,000 people.

Mr. Jekielek:

Just to be clear, that’s your estimate for Xinjiang that you’ve come up with in this book? How did you come up with that? Similar way?

Mr. Gutmann:

Basically, 2.5 to 5 percent go missing. That’s very clear in the book from the witnesses. And that, if you assume a million people in the camps, that works out to 25,000 to 50,000. It’s a very straightforward number. Now, I think it’s probably closer to the 50,000 or 35,000 mark, but that’s enough. If you have 35,000 people and you get three organs out of them, you’re up to your 100,000. It’s okay. You can meet all the transplant needs of China from a single population.

I don’t believe that’s done that way because I believe that there is competitiveness within the medical system in China. And there’s no question that they’re still using Falun Gong, and they may be branching out to other groups, but I think that’s a little less clear. I don’t believe every 28-year-old who goes missing in China runs away from home.

Mr. Jekielek:

The thing that I’ve noticed is the uptick in dehumanizing rhetoric against Christians. And that’s what has me very concerned. And this is the same with Bob Fu, who I know you’ve worked with a lot in the past as well. He’s seen similar things more systematically than I have. I just saw it anecdotally.

Mr. Gutmann:

And that may well be true. But what you’re saying is, yes, the repetitiveness of this is very disturbing. And I agree with that sentiment very strongly that we start to uncrack something. Well, you can’t go and interview those Kazakh witnesses anymore. They’re all gone. Believe me, China’s gotten rid of them. I’m left with these little tapes, you know, their voices. Who knows what’s happening? Very likely they’re dead.

On the other hand, that’s my interest. I’m not going to be here forever. And I see a young crop of journalists. A lot of them are from The Epoch Times. Some of them are Uyghurs. I love the opportunity to train them in fieldwork because it’s the one thing I’m good at. I like doing it. My enthusiasm is a little infectious, and they have no choice because AI is going to make them all redundant except for one thing: this fieldwork business. Human beings, you cannot completely control individuals. They’re the hardest thing in the world to control. They’re like the wind.

Mr. Jekielek:

This is what every totalitarian regime doesn’t understand. But yes.

Mr. Gutmann:

So I think this is the, I’m hoping that that is kind of a key. I want to be realistic about this thing. It is going to take, I mean, it would be wonderful if it were to move ahead and stop tomorrow, but most likely even if we got minimal traction in Washington and so forth, enough to get this up, at least to cut off our medical relations with China. It would be a huge thing, but it’s still the minimum. And the problem is this is, until the Chinese really feel quite enough heat and they feel that they can somehow cover up this crime without killing more people, we’re going to be on this roller coaster for a while. That’s my feeling.

Mr. Jekielek:

But we have to chip away at it. I mean, the point is, if you don’t start, it just goes on forever, right? I mean, it’s part of their elite longevity project. This is what I’ve been talking about.

Mr. Gutmann:

Absolutely. They keep accelerating it in new ways. And I believe there is a kind of disrespect that we saw with Xi Jinping and Putin talking about this. They knew they were being covered.

Mr. Jekielek:

So this is funny because this is a discussion, right? Like, my tendency is to think it was a real hot mic moment. But many Chinese don’t believe that. I can see you obviously don’t believe that. But, well, and there’s good reason to not believe it. No, because they are, after all, you know, obscenely controlling about such things. And it’s just hard to imagine how it would happen.

Mr. Gutmann:

But look, I could be persuaded either way on that. Honestly, I really could. But I do think it does show either way. It shows the kind of, I mean, let them eat cake kind of moment. It’s, you know, literally like they’re talking about their Maseratis.

Mr. Jekielek:

Or what some people, you know, the more conspiracy-minded few people that I’ve talked to among the Chinese know that that was actually advertising, right? So anyway, we don’t know. We don’t know. And this is a...

Mr. Gutmann:

I think actually I kind of agree with the advertising point. That’s a phenomenal way of looking at it. Sure, I know that makes some sense. Look, we don’t absolutely know a lot of these things. We’re not there with a clipboard. We can’t see into people’s hearts or their minds. But there is a generation coming in which is very motivated to do something about that. That’s the most reassuring thing I’ve seen. I’ve seen a new maturity within the Falun Gong community. I’ve seen a new maturity within the Uyghur community. So I do feel surprisingly hopeful about this.

Mr. Jekielek:

The big thing that I’ve seen really is a shift from talking, because I’ve talked with people for a very long time at great length about this issue for about 20 years, okay? But thanks in part to some of the amazing work you did, frankly, you’ve done. And of course, some of the others we’ve mentioned. But it really has shifted from this sort of inability to understand it, to conceive it, like literally people leaving mid-conversation mentally. I know you’ve encountered this. I think we’ve talked about this in the past.

And then to a point where most people today that I talk to just say, wow, that’s really horrible, you know. And that, like, to me, that, if anything, that’s the most hopeful part, because I feel like we’re ready as a society to say, yes, this is real. Now let’s actually think about how to deal with it, not try to convince people that it’s real. As we finish up, as we have to now, as much as I would love to talk for a lot longer, what’s your hope here at this moment, briefly?

Mr. Gutmann:

Well, my hope is that the Chinese are going to do another one weird trick, which gives us some purchase on this. But my real hope is that somebody else will jump in at this point. You know, I’ve been talking about writing some ghost stories of skiing, skiing ghost stories for years now. I mean, if we can move on, that’s great. If we can’t, that’s okay, too. But I would like to see a very active press community.

Again, I'd like to also use this as a time to examine, if we’re successful, we need to use this as a time to examine all the failures that took place here. The tendency has been to blame it on, oh, well, you know, you had Falun Gong people coming over from China, they didn’t know the system that well here in America and so forth. And, you know, the Uighurs, they don’t know the system that well here in America and so forth. And, you know, the Uyghurs, they don’t know the system either. It’s like, no, we failed. I mean, sector after sector after sector of American society did not do what it was supposed to do.

People talk about, for example, that the Trump administration doesn’t care very much about human rights. It’s like, heal thyself. Go in and look at these human rights organizations that have been created. Go look at the madness that they’ve inculcated, you know, over the Gaza issue. I mean, look at that. Let me give you an example of that, a direct example.

I’ve got a whole chapter here on Tajikistan and how the Chinese have gone into Tajikistan and basically pulled all the Uyghurs who’ve been there for years out of the markets and back to the camps. Okay. Why did we do this? Because the International Criminal Court [ICC] wanted this and said we can do a study on China itself if they interfere with a signatory to the ICC.

Tajikistan likes to join things; it’s a very isolated country, and they are a signatory. I went and risked my life, risked Bavi, my researcher’s life, out in that country. We had an interesting time; there was great food and all that, but it was—I mean, it was a really difficult operation. We came back with results; we came back with interviews and results saying this has happened. We’ve got the numbers for you, and it’s replicated in Kyrgyzstan. What did they do?

They went off and said, oh, you know, let’s investigate Netanyahu, let’s investigate Trump. It was just the usual thing—they just went for something shiny and they dropped this completely. And you know, I never would have put Bavi, a guy like him, who was really under risk, not me; I mean, they might work me up a little bit, but as a Uyghur, he could have been killed. He could have been tortured and killed in this situation. I'd put him at risk for these posers from Europe that are just going around looking for shiny things.

Now, the guy’s got a couple of sexual harassment cases, and they sound pretty plausible to me, biting him in the butt right now. Look, this is not a—we need to heal this stuff, okay? We don’t need this kind of decadence in the human rights world. You and I know this; lots of people know it, but you and I sitting in this room, we know this. We know this is a huge problem. And we’ve always been reluctant to take—we don’t want to lose friends. We don’t want to alienate people. But at some point, we’re going to have to face up to this. This is a major, major problem going forward.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Ethan Gutman, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Mr. Gutmann:

Thanks.

This interview has been partially edited for clarity and brevity.