这次联名信最初由美国民主党和共和党二党议员，罗伯特．安德鲁斯（Robert E. Andrews）和史密斯（Chris Smith）共同发起。之前的9月12日，在美国国会曾举办了“中共活体摘取宗教与政治异议人士的器官”听证会，听证会的证词涉及“中国的医院和医生强制从被囚禁者，据称包括法轮功学员、维吾尔族、藏族和家庭基督教徒身上活体摘取器官。”
从那时起，大量的分析和调查，以及相互印证的证人证言，最终导致了两本书的出版，一本是2009年出版的英文版《血腥的活摘器官》（《Bloody Harvest: Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China》），一本是2012年出版的英文版《国家器官》（”State Organs: Transplant Abuse in China”），两本书得出的结论是成千上万的法轮功修炼者因当局活摘器官的需要而被虐杀。
A retired official in south China was found dead in a bathroom while he was held in detention on September 26. The authorities announced it was a suicide and tried to cremate his body immediately, but his family thought otherwise.
Wang Zhongping, 60, was the chief director of the Bureau of Animal Husbandry and Fishery of the city of Loudi, Hunan province until two years ago when he stepped down from the post to take up a secondary job within the bureau. In April, he retired from the post. In January, he reported to the city’s Commission for Discipline Inspection, using his real name as opposed to anonymity adopted by most whistleblowers, that his successor, Huang Jianming, had pocketed several million dollars’ worth of public funds, resulting in a great loss of state-owned assets.
In May, only a few months after Wang blew the whistle, he was investigated by the anti-graft commission for violating party disciplines. On August 23, Wang was subjected to a unique Chinese adiministrative procedure known as shuanggui, or “double regulation”, meaning that he had been held in custody by the commission at a time and a place both “regulated”, that is, designated by the Party for interrogation and would not be released until a decision is made on whether to press formal charges against them.
Strangulation marks on Wang Zhongping’s neck
His niece kept crying after seeing his body in the morgue.
According to the police, at around 4:30 p.m. on September 26, Wang was discovered by them to have hanged himself while taking a shower in the bathroom. He was rushed to the emergency room by an ambulance at 5 p.m. and pronounced dead at 7:03 p.m. by the hospital staff.
However, Wang’s family was not notified of his death until nearly eight hours later. His body had also been transferred to the morgue without consent from any of them.
When Wang’s family arrived, they found multiple bruises clearly visible on his arms, legs and back. Deep strangulation marks could also been seen on his neck. His family was convinced that Wang’s death was a murder.
On the morning of September 27, more than a dozen people were dispatched from Loudi’s Discipline Inspection Commission to try to forcefully take Wang’s body away from the morgue for cremation, only to be met with strong opposition from all members of Wang’s family. By the evening of September 27, several local media had used the official press release, saying that Wang died by suicide.
Huang Jianming, who was accused by Wang of embezzling public funds, is still in office as the new head of Loudi’s Animal Husbandry and Fishery Bureau, whereas the informant had been held in custody since the end of August.
Most netizens also seem to believe that it is a murder instead of a suicide, with a few exceptions who claimed the “bruises” are in fact only normal livor mortis, or postmortem lividity. One exclaimed, “During Shuanggui procedure, they torture (suspects) to death! Never buy the version in those movies!” Another chimed in, “Inspectors, you guys are as fierce as Japanese bandits!” Another lamented, “Anyone understands that better a live coward than a dead hero. But he really had to die.”
However, many thought Wang must have also been involved in corruption and thus deserved to die. One user wrote, “This is called what goes around comes around. He was rather comfortable when he was corrupt, but eventually he did not die in his bed.”
Some are convinced that things much worse could have happened had he not died in this fashion, “His wife should have been happy. If he hadn’t died, his case would have implicated the entire family.”
But others think he could have survived, “If he had gone to the U.S. embassy to seek refuge, he wouldn’t have died,” alluding to the fact that in a highly publicized political scandal that took place about eight months ago, Wang Lijun, the former police chief of Chongqing, walked into the U.S. consulate in Chengdu and turned to American diplomats for help after he felt his life might be in danger as a result of falling out with his patron, Bo Xilai.
Strangulation marks on Wang Zhongping’s neck.
Bruises on Wang’s back.
Bruises on Wang’s leg.
Wang Zhongping, 60, in a glass coffin.
Wang’s wife, left, has been overwhelmed with grief.
Wang’s families congregate at the entrance of the morgue to stop his body from being taken away and cremated.
Taiwan will be included into the U.S. Visa Waiver Program, which allows Taiwanese passport holders to enter the U.S. for up to 90 days without a previously arranged travel visa. The latest announcement has been heatedly discussed on Chinese social media. One microblogging post, which describes the difference between ‘the dark red passport’ (Chinese) and ‘the dark green one’ (Taiwanese) to be ‘the longest distance ever existing in the world’, has been shared by 28,000 users.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced Tuesday in Washington that beginning November 1, Taiwan will be the 37th place – and the first non-sovereignty – in the world to be granted a visa-free status.
The moment the news came out, Chinese netizens started to talk about it on Sina Weibo, an immensely popular China-based microblogging site that incorporates features of both Twitter and Facebook. A net user, who goes by the name “@假装在纽约” (literally ‘Pretending to be in New York’), wrote on Sina Weibo:
“The longest distance in the world exists where I celebrate National Day on October 1 and you celebrate National Day on October 10. The longest distance in the world exists where I hold my dark red passport and go through all kinds of hardships for one visa and you hold your dark green passport and travel to over 120 countries unimpeded.”
He also wrote, “The longest distance exists where we speak the same language but have different countenances, difference types of sadness and joy, and different fates.”
The Weibo post comes with a computer generated image which incorporates the flag of the Republic of China (ROC) into the flag of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Until press time, the post has garnered 28,349 shares and 6,127 comments.
One user commented,“Okay, I do love the Blue Sky, White Sun, and a Wholly Red Earth (flag).” Another wrote, “What world are we living in! Taiwanese can go to the U.S. visa-free! I want to emigrate!”
One created a similar sentence based on the original format, “The longest distance is, in ’49, you mailed me a boat ticket to the island, and I missed it because of having to celebrate the Liberation (meaning that the Communists liberated Chinese people by founding the PRC).”
Similar posts that disparage a Chinese passport in favor of benefits tied to Taiwanese citizenship can be easily found on Sina Weibo. @Chinalaw, an account that often comments on current affairs in China, wrote, “Chinese passport is regarded as one of the rubbish passports in the world, with visa-free access to only fewer than 20 countries. It ranks only higher than the Pakistani and Bangladeshi ones. More important, countries that grant Chinese passport holders visa-free status are not suitable for business travel, vacation or family visiting. They are only suitable for adventure, with either cholera or war.”
The government of the Republic of China, celebrates its National Day on October 10, commemorating an uprising activated on October 10, 1911 that led to the downfall of the imperial Qing Dynasty and the establishment of the new republic.
The ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) fled to Taiwan in 1949 after their defeat in the Chinese civil war to the Communists and designated Taipei as the temporary capital of the Republic of China, hoping to later stage a comeback and seize back the power.
Though six decades later, Taiwan has become a de facto independent state sans formal recognition from the United Nations, Chinese government and its people, as well as older generations of residents in Taiwan with roots in mainland China, still regard Taiwan as a renegade province of China.
Members of U.S. Congress Urge State Department to Release Information on Organ Harvesting in China
Over 100 representatives sign bi-partisan letter asking for details divulged by Wang Lijun
04 Oct 2012
Over 100 members of Congress request the State Department to release information it may have about organ transplant-related atrocities in China.
WASHINGTON DC – In an unprecedented step to unveil organ transplant abuses in China, 106 members of the U.S. Congress sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on October 3. The letter requests the release of information about transplant abuses in China that the U.S. government may possess, including details that former Chongqing deputy mayor Wang Lijun is believed to have transmitted during his stay in the U.S. Consulate in February.
“Medical doctors in the United States and around the world are growing increasingly concerned about alleged unethical organ procurement practices and abuses of transplant medicine abroad. This is no truer than in China, where serious allegations suggest unimaginable abuses have occurred,” reads the letter.
“While at the US Consulate, it is claimed that Wang Lijun may have divulged information about the harvesting of organs from still living Falun Gong practitioners. If such evidence was received and brought to light, measures could be taken to help stop such abominable abuses. We therefore ask that the State Department release any information it may have that relates to transplant abuses in China, including any documentation that Wang Lijun may have provided to our Consulate in Chengdu.”
The Dear Colleague Letter follows on a hearing about organ harvesting from religious and political prisoners in China that was held on September 12 (news). The letter states that testimony presented implicated “Chinese hospitals and doctors in the practice of forced organ harvesting from prisoners, to allegedly include from living practitioners of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, Uighurs, Tibetans, and House Christians.”
The letter was submitted with bi-partisan support, co-sponsored by Representatives Robert Andrews (D-NJ) and Chris Smith (R-NJ), and signed by 106 members from across both parties. The full text of the letter is available here.
Chinese Citizens Killed, Organs Extracted to Fuel Lucrative Transplantation Business
China now performs the second highest number of transplants per year after the United States, around 10,000 according to official statistics. The Chinese government claims that over 90 percent of the organs are from executed death row inmates, However, medical experts and human rights workers say that the numbers do not add up, and that the logistics of performing transplantations means that such an arrangement is unfeasible.
Several investigations suggest the gap is filled by prisoners of conscience, especially detained practitioners of Falun Gong. Tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners are held, pre-screened (for blood type and other qualities required to match an organ to a patient) and reportedly killed on-demand in order to extract organs to fuel the transplantation industry in China, which generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue (fact sheet).
Publicly available evidence indicates that Wang, whose flight to the U.S. consulate sparked a high-profile political scandal and the downfall of Chongqing Communist Party Chief Bo Xilai, was involved in organ transplants from prisoners. Wang admitted during a 2006 award ceremony to having been present at thousands of organ removal and transplant operations as chief of police in Liaoning’s Jinzhou. In an earlier state-media interview, he referred to the experience of seeing someone executed and “within minutes” seeing their organ in another’s body as “soul stirring.”
* See here for the written testimonies from the September 12 hearing. * See here for a Falun Dafa Information Center fact sheet summarizing the history and evidence of organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners of conscience.
Essential Background
In July of 1999, China’s autocratic Communist Party launched an unlawful campaign of arrests, violence, and propaganda against Chinese citizens practicing Falun Gong (or “Falun Dafa”) with the intent of “eradicating” the apolitical practice. Former Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin launched the persecution fearing the practice’s growing popularity among the Chinese people (70 to 100 million) was overshadowing his own legacy (article). Since then, the Falun Dafa Information Center, based in New York, has reported over 3,500 deaths from abuse and over 80,000 cases of torture. The United Nations, Amnesty International, Chinese human rights lawyers, and foreign media have also documented Falun Gong torture and deaths at the hands of Chinese officials (samples). Hundreds of thousands of Chinese who practice Falun Gong remain in captivity, rendering them the single largest group of prisoners of conscience in China (article). Falun Gong is a traditional Chinese spiritual discipline that is Buddhist in nature, but not part of the religion of Buddhism. It consists of slow-moving “qigong” exercises, meditation, and teachings for daily life centered on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance (about Falun Gong).
It may be offensive to review how China lags far behind and yet is so eager to imitate Japan at a time when anti-Japanese sentiments have swept China, but a video that compares scenes of the Japanese anime “Hikarian: Great Railroad Protector” with a Chinese cartoon called “高铁侠”, which literally means ‘High-speed Train Hero’, can surely make most viewers laugh and may help diffuse the tension.
Any one that see clips of the two anime put side by side may agree that the two look strikingly similar, and even the plot and the characters are exactly the same, except that the Chinese knockoff, produced in 2010, is so much coarser than the Japanese original released in 1996.
Video:
Below: screencaps of the side-by-side comparison. Top left: China’s High Speed Train Hero; Bottom right: Japan’s Hikarian.
This is another blatant copy of foreign works on screen. In January, 2010, Ministry of Tofu broke to the English-speaking world the news of state broadcaster China Central Television passing off scenes from Tom Cruise’s Top Gun in its coverage of a military drill.
A former employee of Feifan, the Chinese animation company that stole the idea from Hikarian, ranted about the absurd plagiarism in his blog. According to him, government subsidies are the main driver of the catch-as-catch-can animation industry that often produces unoriginal and unappealing works.
“In China, an animation production company with an annual output of 2,000 minutes (of works) can receive a subsidy of 1,000 yuan (US$150) per minute. The bigger the annual output, the higher per-minute subsidy you receive,” he wrote in the post.
“In 2011, Feifan produced 10,000 minutes of animated works,” he went on with his tirade, “Anyone that has worked in the industry knows how to make sense of it. An annual output of more than 10,000 minutes means churning out 40 episodes of 20-minute-long anime series every month. To put that into perspective, if Feifan were a Japanese company, it could undertake all new episodes in the entire country… with no pressure.
“In this case, no matter how many unpaid interns Feifan has or how low the salary of a full-time employee is, it cannot possibly meet the requirement, so how did they tackle this problem? Our genius boss came up with a great idea: he finds old classics and transfer them directly into 3D works shot-for-shot. This is how he created the legend.”
An elementary school teacher in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen has been widely criticized on the Internet for stamping red and blue marks on her students’ faces based on how they behave at school to tell good students from “bad” ones.
The complaint over the public humiliation and discrimination was first brought by a parent to Southern Metropolis Daily. “Is that any different from stigmatizing an inmate with tattoo on his face in the ancient times?” he asked.
The reporter with the newspaper came to Shangfen Primary School in Shenzhen on the afternoon of September 25, and saw at least three students bearing marks on their foreheads in the third-grade class. According to the students, top-performing students received red marks on their faces, whereas the mischievous ones got blue marks.
In Class 1, Grade 3 at Shangfen Elementary School in Shenzhen, three students are seen bearing stamps on their faces, including one girl having a red flower on her forehead that says “Award.”
The other two students wear smudged blue marks. Both of them have tried to wipe the mark away.
One student with a blue mark told the reporter, “Everyone knows blue stands for bad behavior. Many classmates laughed at me. My pride is so hurt.” He said he once pled the teacher to stamp the mark on his arm instead of the face to make it less visible, only to be refused by the teacher. The teacher even told him not to remove it until he got home.
The reporter found the class was the only one in the school to stamp marks directly on students’ faces. The teacher, Ms.Guo, explained that the school has been promoting a performance appraisal system since the beginning of this year. Each student has a booklet to collect stamps. After a certain number of red stamps are collected, the student can get a badge of honor awarded by the school principal.
Ms. Guo, who has been accused of her improper teaching method, graduated from college not long ago and is a new teacher at the elementary school.
“Given that once the stamp is left on the booklet, it is final and cannot be erased, I wanted to stamp it on their bodies, especially on underachieving kids, to spur them on and fight for more red stamps,” Guo explained. She apologized for her lack of consideration.
Li Yu, the vide principal, said that Ms. Guo is a newly-arrived teacher and lacks experiences; she meant well but did not handle the matter correctly, “We will strengthen our training of young teachers to avoid similar mistakes in the future. Respect for kids always comes first,” but he did not say if Guo would be fired.
Last October, an elementary school forced “bad” students to weargreen scarfas opposed to the typical red scarf worn by most Chinese pupils as a badge of shame, which came in for much criticism of its teaching method.
驴脾气小驴：I just don’t get it: isn’t it perfectly normal for little kids to make a mistake?? Why not? Why can’t they?? If you want to make a saint out of them, at least be a saint yourself! What stuff are teachers nowadays made of~!
Emma-白哲：Don’t dismiss it as a trifle. Its impact on kids’ psychology may be permanent. Little kids have a strong sense of pride. They must be encouraged often. How can one hurt kids’ pride? I think choosing the right school is also important. Should have enough information about teachers before letting kids enroll. My cousin used to attend a dancing class. The teacher there used a lot of profanity when talking. The kid was psychologically adversely affected. Later her parents even filed a complaint.
溜溜达达的懒猫：So are they really going to keep this teacher?
御风而行Vivian：I think it is actually a good idea to use the red stamp as reward. The blue stamp is about letting students know the shame and then work harder. I don’t think the blue stamp is that much a big deal. Teaching is not an easy job. When you have students who just won’t listen to whatever you say and impervious to the grill, you gotta use extreme methods to achieve your intended goal.
众人深爱的家骏哥：I am curious: how many ignorant and unethical scumbags like this is China’s army of teachers made of?
VenusLondonH：Haha, nice mark! Like those on pork for sale!
燕大人围脖：The psychological scar one gets at a very young age is very difficult to get rid of! Such a memory will persist for the rest of one’s life!
Icy努力上多大：Don’t always use the excuse of letting kids know their mistake to mask mistakes of adults. No education can make it up to the psychological would kids get. Such a teacher should really be fired, because her frame of mind, quality of character, education and (lack of) cultivation have all disqualified her for the job of elementary teaching.
嘛嘛育萱：There are unethical teachers everywhere. Hope my daughter will never meet any one of them in the future.
杨朝雨：Chinese good kids will pay for the school, for their education in obedience. Chinese good kids are easily overwhelmed by flattery and honor, whereas those who score low in exams are considered imbeciles. Bad students are negligible laughing stocks at school. Chinese good kids are like caged birds who forget how to fly and lose their bearings once they are released into the society. Chinese good kids are always one being taught. Good kids, mama’s boys?
骑着驴去飚：Red stands for good; blue stands for bad. The truth is, red countries are autocracies; blue countries are democracies. Blue is good. They can definitely relocated to the U.S. The red ones, just go ahead being enslaved in the Heavenly Kingdom!
CL小妞：Those who work as a teacher will also be a parent one day. Try to think about the future of your own kids.
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