People gather at a park in ChangChun to practice Falun Gong in 1998, prior to the persecution (Minghui)
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Peter Navarro, former White House trade adviser under the Trump administration and author of “Death by China” and “In Trump Time,” is well aware of the Chinese Communist Party’s deceptive machinations, including the infamous Xinjiang slave labor camps, and is raising the alarm in order to put another group into focus—Falun Gong.
“The tragedy here is that the Falun Gong were essentially the canaries in the Chinese Communist Party concentration camp coal mine. And they’re being persecuted to this day, but even when there is awareness of the concentration camps, the focus seems to be on the Uyghurs when in fact there’s countless Falun Gong still imprisoned by the Chinese,” Navarro told The Epoch Times.
President Donald Trump (C), Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin (2nd R), Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer (R), White House Chief of Staff John Kelly (L), assistant to the president Peter Navarro (2nd L), national security adviser John Bolton (3rd L), and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hold a dinner meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping (not pictured) at the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Dec. 1, 2018. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that includes meditation exercises and teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. It grew in popularity during the 1990s, and 70 million to 100 million people were practicing in China by the end of the decade, according to Chinese government estimates at the time.
People gather at a park in Beijing to practice Falun Gong in 1998, prior to the persecution (Minghui)
The CCP felt threatened by its popularity and the classical Chinese values that the meditation emphasizes, and launched a systematic elimination campaign in July 1999. Since then, millions of practitioners have been detained inside prisons, labor camps, and other facilities, with hundreds of thousands tortured while incarcerated, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.
‘A New Form of Evil on the Planet’
Navarro also took the opportunity to express his condolences on the passing away of David Kilgour, a former Canadian Cabinet minister, longtime member of Parliament, and renowned defender of human rights.
“Let me salute a man who was tremendously important in uncovering the atrocities committed against the Falun Gong by the CCP in terms of organ harvesting—former member of parliament in Canada, David Kilgour. He passed just recently,” Navarro said.
(L-R) David Kilgour, David Matas, and Ethan Gutmann, authors of “Bloody Harvest/The Slaughter: An Update,” in London, England, on Nov. 25, 2014. (Simon Gross/The Epoch Times)
In a Ted Talk titled “Two Davids and Goliath,” Kilgour said:
“In every 10 years or so, the [Chinese Communist] Party starts persecution of a minority and mainly I think to instill fear in the general population. Consider just three of the persecution campaigns that have gone on since 1950. The so-called Great Leap Forward where an estimated 40 million people starved to death. The Cultural Revolution … of 1966 to 76, saw perhaps another 2 million killed. The Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 … where soldiers killed thousands of people who were seeking openness and democracy.
“So what if David [Matas] and I told you that hundreds of thousands of innocent people have been put into slave labor camps across China, where they’re not only making goods for export, but they’re also tortured, blood tested, and the unlucky ones are killed on demand for their organs, harvested for profit.”
David Kilgour and Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas conducted an independent investigation on allegations of state-sanctioned organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners spanning at least a decade, which has received minimal international coverage and attention.
The two investigators concluded that what they found was “so disturbing that we have called what’s happening, a ‘new form of evil on the planet.’”
“Over the past 10 years, the evidence has become overwhelming. We have 32 kinds of evidence that [organ harvesting] is happening in China. A surgeon, Enver Tohti, has testified that he was forced to remove the organs from a live Uyghur political prisoner in the mid-90s,” Kilgour said.
“Organ pillaging most likely then moved to the Tibetans, then to the Uyghurs, and finally to the House Christians and then massively to the Falun Gong community.
“In 2013, the EU parliament, to its credit, passed a resolution where it ‘expresses its deep concern over the persistent and credible reports of systematic state-sanctioned organ harvesting from large numbers of Falun Gong practitioners.’”
“In 2014, Ethan Gutmann published a book, ‘The Slaughter,’ where he interviewed over 100 people and collected new evidence over eight years,” Kilgour continued. “He estimates that at any given time, between 450,000 to a million Falun Gong practitioners are languishing in prisons and slave labor camps. He concludes that approximately 65,000 Falun Gong practitioners and two to 4,000 Uyghurs Tibetans and Christians were killed for their organs in the 2000 to 2008 period.”
“When you follow the money, you partly begin to understand why this is happening. Hospitals can get $62,000 for kidneys and hearts are worth up to $160,000. We’re talking about billions of dollars in profits.”
“So while the mainstream media has paid minimal attention to these atrocities, the truth is gradually getting out,” Kilgour said.
In the same video, a U.S. citizen named Dr. Charles Lee who was detained and put in a forced labor camp in 2003 for practicing Falun Gong, can be heard saying that he used to watch the animated series “The Simpsons” quite often in the States and thought it was very funny, but “when I was forced to make these [Homer Simpson] shoes in prison, you don’t feel it’s funny at all,” Lee said.
Navarro also criticized what he calls “woke corporations” in the United States for having ties too close to China.
A literary and human rights group, Pen America, extensively reported how Hollywood is censoring itself to appease the CCP.
At least 18 players with the NBA currently hold endorsement deals with one of four major Chinese sports apparel companies that have murky ties to forced labor in Xinjiang.
According to the Paulson Institute think-tank, Beijing-backed “firms and investors own a controlling majority” in close to 2,400 U.S. companies.
These include the likes of AMC Entertainment (entertainment), Complete Genomics (health care), First International Oil (energy), G.E. Appliances (technology), IBM—P.C. division (technology), Legendary Entertainment Group (entertainment), Motorola Mobility (technology), Nexteer Automotive (automotive), Riot Games (entertainment), Smithfield Foods (food), to name just a few.
Both MSNBC and NBC, two of the biggest news providers in the United States, are owned by NBC Universal, which appears to have close ties to Xinhua, a propaganda outlet run by the CCP. Other outlets such as ABC and ESPN also appear to have links to the Chinese regime. In 2019, ESPN staff were directly told to avoid discussing Chinese politics at all costs. The warnings came as protests in Hong Kong started to turn violent.
“I think that the juxtaposition of these woke corporations that will cancel and deplatform Americans for speaking freely about certain issues, juxtaposed against the silence of these woke corporations when it comes to the brutality of the CCP needs to be pointed out every day of our lives until that changes,” Navarro said.
“I spent 25 at the University of California Irvine. I saw first how CCP money comes in and co-opts these elites into staying quiet. We just have to appeal to their common sense and conscience and keep getting the story out,” he added, “At some point, I think they will realize just how unacceptable the conduct of communist China is and change the way they run their business model, a lot of universities run on CCP money right now.”
The Real Situation of the CCP Virus in China
On another note, Navarro blasted the CCP for its handling of the pandemic, especially in the Shanghai area, where millions of people have been suffering from severe lockdowns.
According to Our World In Data, China doesn’t even appear as a top infected country, leading many people in the communist state to believe that the United States is doing much worse than China in terms of handling the pandemic.
However, many videos and testimonies from Shanghai show bizarre chaos, which has only seemed to escalate since the city began large-scale lockdowns at the end of March.
“The Chinese Communist Party Party has chosen to handle the pandemic on home soil in typical CCP fashion, which is authoritarian and fascistic—by locking people down in extreme conditions, using bad science and bad politics, and I think it ultimately might threaten the regime if they continue that insanity. It’s certainly not a model for the world,” Navarro said.
“The reality is that at this point in time, the pandemic in the United States seems to be at the least disruptive of any time since 2020 We seem to be adapting and moving toward herd immunity, whereas communist China seems to be back at square one, because of the bad way they are handling it in terms of science.”
“We have no idea what the death toll is in communist China,” Navarro concluded.
John MacGhlionn contributed to this report.