Website attacked after report on CCP forced organ harvesting

A website belonging to a human rights organization became the target of cyberattacks last month after publishing a report on the Chinese Communist Party’s forced organ harvests of Falun Gong practitioners.

Falun Gong is an offshoot of Buddhism which quickly gained recognition as an official branch of qigong meditation and exercise system after its introduction in 1992. When the movement—which came to number in the millions—rebuffed demands from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to embed the party in the religion, Falun Gong’s local coordinators and practitioners were abducted and imprisoned.

For over two decades, CCP operatives have been forcibly removing the organs of Falun Gong practitioners while they are still alive. According to a whistleblower surgeon who performed some of these procedures, Falun Gong organs are more lucrative on China’s black market because the religion forbids smoking and drinking.

Some world officials and activists have tried drawing attention to the forced organ harvesting, including the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG).

Last month the WOIPFG—founded in New York in 2003—published a report with firsthand testimony of such organ harvesting operations. Within hours, the site was hit with a “massive” denial of service (dos) attack which made it sporadically inaccessible throughout the next week.

“The same night the report went online, the CCP was aware,” the report’s lead author and researcher Dr. Wang Zhiyuan told the Falun Dafa Information Center. “They started attacking our organization’s website the same day. We came under cyberattack three hours after the report was posted. The cyberattacks shut down the website multiple times per day, for a period of approximately one week.”

The report includes details shared by a Falun Gong practitioner as she lay on her deathbed following a harvest. In the last minutes of her life, 46-year-old Zhang Xiuqin recorded her testimony in a video which was given to a physician from the Heilongjiang province, who then shared the information with the WOIPFG.

Zhang told of living organ donor pools, basements where Falun Gong prisoners are kept for harvest. In 2019 she was held in such a basement with dozens of others who were brought out to be harvested—often in hospitals—and then replaced with more “donors”. When it was her turn, Zhang’s abdomen was cut open and her kidney was removed. They moved to take her liver as well, but it was too damaged, ostensibly from torture she had received along with other prisoners. Her surgical wounds were not sutured back up and she was left to die.

The CCP forcibly harvests organs not only from Falun Gong prisoners but also Uyghurs and other political dissidents. Human rights lawyer Hamid Sabi confirmed the practice in a 2019 report to the United Nations Human Rights Council. Sabi represents the China Tribunal, an independent panel exposing Chinese organ harvesting. The panel is headed by British lawyer Sir Geoffery NIce who had previously led the prosecution against Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. According to Sabi:

Forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, including the religious minorities of Falun Gong and Uighurs, has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale … [by having doctors] cut open [prisoners' bodies] while still alive for their kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, cornea and skin to be removed and turned into commodities for sale.

In 2016 the US House of Representatives approved a resolution condemning China’s forced organ harvesting and demanding the release of Falun Gong prisoners.

Last month, Israelis protested in front of the Chinese embassy in Tel Aviv to mark the 24th anniversary of Communist China's abduction and detainment of thousands of local coordinators of Falun Gong on January 20, 1999 and its continuing persecution of practitioners.