Janja Kellick (6:39)

Returned to Kazakhstan or returned to Xinjiang?

Ethan Gutman (6:42)

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 a. The Kazakh authoritarian state. It's not a totalitarian state. It's an authoritarian state exposed itself and 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 and selling things in the bazaars. They'd been there for years. They were all pulled back, 90% of them.

Janja Kellick (7:28)

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Ethan Gutman (10:17)

Okay, Central Asia has always been sort of at the periphery of the Chinese empire. Okay? It was something a desert land out west, and especially in the northern part, the southern, western part is Tibet. It's this huge, massive plateau which Tibet consists of. And the Chinese always had a very strong relationship to some extent, maybe a sort of admiration of society, you know, that the emperors would, you know, you go into the tombs, the ancient tombs, and they're all Tibetan. Sanskrit is everywhere. I mean, it's. In fact, people have a hard time deciphering it, but that's what they insisted on. This is not true with the Uyghurs, which are the main people of what used to be called East Turkestan, sometimes Chinese. Turkestan. Chinese call it Xinjiang, which means very simply, new land or new territory. Okay? So this is why the Uyghurs are very touchy about that. And even the title of this book, the Xinjiang Procedure. I apologize. Right in the beginning, I think. Sorry. This is a user friendly book. We're not going to, 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, you know, Eurocentric or something. Look, this is a people who are basically Caucasian. They're part of the Huns. The same 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 is 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's Han Chinese and so there's mostly, mostly Han Chai, mostly.

Janja Kellick (12:12)

I'm just saying that because I've met Uyghur Falun Gong practitioners.

Ethan Gutman (12:16)

Well, that's true, there's a few, but

Janja Kellick (12:18)

let's not get bogged down.

Ethan Gutman (12:19)

Yeah, and Virtuti would claim there's 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 the Uyghurs themselves. I mean, the first woman I interview talk about in the book, 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, if I may

Janja Kellick (13:17)

comment, the Chinese Communist Party, and this is a topic for a whole nother interview I'll do one day. They've weaponized, you know, essentially racism to, you know, they fanned the flames of these kind of racial tension to maintain their power, which is a horrible, horrible thing. And it's way under reported also because we're not kind of not allowed to talk about racism and so forth in the West. But this is part what you're describing, right, is 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. You instrumentalized it as yet another tool. Right? And this is the context in which, you know, you're writing the Xinjiang procedure.

Ethan Gutman (14:02)

The heat that Falun Gong and investigators, okay, like me and David Matis and other people had brought in on this, and Matt Robertson certainly 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 used the term 8.9 billion per year. I tend to call it 9 billion per year. I think it's the back of the napkin, I'd say napkin kind of thing.

Janja Kellick (14:37)

No, exactly.

Ethan Gutman (14:38)

But nonetheless, we don't really know, but we know that the numbers are huge. We know that once you added in things like ecmo, which is oxygenation and perfusion techniques, that you suddenly take an organ, which was 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, you know, $100,000 or something, if they were for selling to foreigners, up to almost a million dollars, if you do it correctly, 750,000 at least. So that is a really. 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 that part of this part. And I can't explain the camps completely, but when they started that construction of the camps in 2015, something was going on, and they suddenly had this massive captive population that 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. Okay? One of them they learned. Well, one of the things they learned was stop naming your torture centers. Glamorous names. Dragon Mountain. No, you don't use them. Dragon Mountain. You know, all these different terms.

Janja Kellick (16:12)

Yeah, they get a number. They get a.

Ethan Gutman (16:14)

Now they just get a number. Or not even that sometimes. I mean, so you stop doing that. You got to keep the hospitals kind of private and don't 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. A lot of Falun Gong got out, from our perspective.

Janja Kellick (16:45)

Enough to be able to talk about it.

Ethan Gutman (16:47)

That's right. And to do a lot of field work. I interviewed over 100 practitioners. 50 of them were directly from labor camps and so forth, 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's wonderful things written about those stories because they're always fascinating. Nobody was getting out. You had these camps. You had. Even the State Department was estimating them at 1.5 million to 2 million at that point. Yet we had 10 people, nine people in the west who'd made it over to the U.S. that's nothing.

Janja Kellick (17:28)

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

Ethan Gutman (17:43)

That's exactly right. And that's one of the reasons why, when you look at something like 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 where you had a car appear suddenly in Tiananmen Square, ran a bunch of people over, and it was driven by a Uyghur mother and so forth at weaker plates. 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.

Janja Kellick (18:18)

It's another setup, 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.

Ethan Gutman (18:29)

No, it's a fascinating thing. Yes, it is. 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 most dullest part of my interviews is that 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. 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. They 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 roomful of these women in Istanbul, all who don't have their children. And the only time they see their children is occasionally when they. The Chinese do sort of a program on, you know, these wonderful orphanages they've got. And they see their own kid for a second looking alive, which is something. Sometimes they see them on TikTok. It's horrifying.

Janja Kellick (19:53)

And of course, the part. The unspoken part here is that these children are being indoctrinated as part of the genocidal policy.

Ethan Gutman (20:04)

Some of them will be made into assets, intelligence assets. That'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 field work, 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 cannot sit at a computer and ascertain anything. The whole thing's a black box.

Janja Kellick (20:33)

So let's take two minutes to just explain this, okay? This is incredibly important. When the research started, basically, on forced organ harvesting at the scale part, right. Was about 2005, 2006. And every time, explain how this worked, like how we got to the point where there's no more. It's very difficult to find anything online.

Ethan Gutman (20:57)

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. A world organization to Investigate the persecution of Falun Gong. I like to call it wipe fig. It's the most awkward acronym I've ever seen. But the people who were manning it had mad talent, okay? And 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 medical files. 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. So at one point, a splinter group from them came and approached us and said, we'll give you all this information. You, me, Kilgore and Matis, David Kilger and David Matis, and will you write a report? And we said, yeah, we will. It was a lot of information to collate and go through, but the truth is that they had hit on really transplant. 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, you know, this is the best apple harvest ever. You know, 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. We knew how many transplant teams they had, three to four per average and so forth. It's the idea that they're just sitting around. They have 40 beds. The idea they're just sitting around now, one a day. And even right there, it brings you up from not what Chinese were claiming was 10,000 transplants per year, successful transplants.

Janja Kellick (23:13)

Yeah. Just to just. I'll clarify that. The official Chinese position was they were doing for the entire country, 10,000 a year.

Ethan Gutman (23:22)

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 amount 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 look at Beijing 309, Shenzhen, there's a whole series of hospitals, Sun Yat Sen Hospital. And the numbers quickly escalate, in fact. So 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. Okay, Chinese, it's just something you do in Chinese society and under the ccp. And, you know, if the fish was this big, you know, it's kind of this big. Okay, so you exaggerated a little bit. I think that's important to acknowledge that. And I kind of took that into my calculations. But 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. 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 very persuasive to the ccc, for example. And it was a very important countermeasure at a time when China was announcing that they were moving to just voluntary systems only. And we had this evidence saying, ah, not so fast. And it was very hard for people to refute the evidence at that time. But then, since then, the Chinese squeezed it. We had nothing. We had one thing that I knew. I knew that Kazaks, 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.

Janja Kellick (25:56)

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

Ethan Gutman (26:07)

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. 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 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 from Germany. He said, okay, what kind of car? And I said, it's got to be less than a 2005. It's got to be older than a 2005. He said, why? Because I said they had 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 it's terrible weather, the roads are awful. And he said, okay. He said, came back a couple weeks later, said, I got you the car. He got me a RAV4, Toyota RAV4. Now, nowadays, Toyota RAV4s are kind of big and nice. Back then. They were like boxes. Another black box here and in Fact, it was black, but it worked. And we put skis on top of the car. And we had a story that we used at every border crossing, because there was 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. 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. Okay, here's the skis. You know, we had all this.

Janja Kellick (27:49)

It was entirely true, just not the whole story.

Ethan Gutman (27:53)

We never did ski, actually. I said I was taking 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 on this. And 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. Okay? We took the trucker ferry across 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. And then here you are on the edge of Kazakhstan, which is a huge country. East, west, it's like America, almost exactly. 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 was, like, this guy sort of investigates stuff, but they never bothered to check me. We had a bad moment where me and my daughter 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. 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 the road. There aren't that many roads. You can't get that lost. But we had a very difficult time getting through it, we had very, very bad weather. But the bottom line was. And we got stopped by the police again and again. And I had to bribe my way out of that every time, okay? Because I didn't want them to take me down to the station. And all they were interested in was money, really, you know, and there was this whole business of routine, of sort of. You'd give them the dough that they wanted, you have to pass it underneath their internal camera. And then we'd both put our hands in our hearts to represent how touched we were by each other's position and so forth. Shake hands. Hated that stuff. Oh, my God, I was seething inside. But I couldn't do anything. I didn't want to blow the investigation. I'd set up two fixers ahead of time in Almaty. I knew they'd be a little competitive with each other. That's a good thing.

Janja Kellick (30:43)

To help deliver witnesses.

Ethan Gutman (30:44)

Yes, exactly. And to be translators as well. They both had different qualities, both had different strengths. And we arrived in Almaty, they got us a safe apartment. One of them had some real estate deals or they'd done some real estate deals. They got us a place that our names were never on it. I just paid some cash. We'd sewn the cash into my jeans. So we'd cross these borders. You cannot use a credit card. You cannot use a. 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. 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. Kind of stupid, 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, you know, earn. A Kleb type woman dressed in you know, these old Soviet kind of 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.

Janja Kellick (32:44)

And how many people did you manage to interview in?

Ethan Gutman (32:46)

20. 20. Really? Only 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 a 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. I mean, if I were in Auschwitz with him, I'd try to be his wingman. Okay. On the off chance that I could survive just hanging around with this guy. So he doesn't see things, doesn't want to see things. Right. Often that can be 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 troubles, oh, it's a high blood pressure. Oh, I think this woman was a druggie. Oh, she got pregnant. I'm like, well, how did she get pregnant? There's no. It's a woman's camp, right? There's only male Han Chinese cards, right? Oh, I don't know. Her husband came back at that point, so we never got into that. But, you know, you see, when every time you had somebody like her, you also had other people could absolutely sort of say, well, it was about 5% 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 even want to talk about organ harvesting. I just had disappearances. How old were they? Did you have a blood test? This kind of thing?

Janja Kellick (34:17)

You know, the thing that I love about the conversation that we're having right now is I think you're highlighting, you know, the difficulty of doing this, 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.

Ethan Gutman (34:45)

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 is 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 ccp, to the Chinese Communist Party that the Uyghurs do. And then the Uyghurs, I mean, it is a little bit like what I was saying, you know, they're lower than dogs. I mean, there's a kind of a 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 this problem in this case, I didn't have to think about this as much because in a sense they're sort of talking about the Uyghurs are 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. You know, 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 venture as much as possible and just be willing to take my time.

Janja Kellick (36:34)

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

Ethan Gutman (36:41)

That's right, 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 psychiatrists, the patient keeps trying to end the appointment. And you're still like, I'm still here listening. Which is a normal trick that I do because I've seen psychiatrists do it, actually.

Janja Kellick (37:04)

Ethan, you have an unbelievable commitment to discerning truth.

Ethan Gutman (37:10)

No, I'm just stubborn. I'm just like Falun Gong on the Uyghurs. I'm just stubborn. I don't like to be told no.

Janja Kellick (37:18)

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.

Ethan Gutman (37:29)

Look, I was very worried about that. I was.

Janja Kellick (37:30)

It's rare. It's rare these days.

Ethan Gutman (37:32)

Okay, okay, fair enough. I mean, look, I was genuine. I will be honest here. I was on the way to Kazakhstan, and I didn't let my daughter know about this because I think it would have upset her. A lot of things were upsetting her on the way. It was a tough trip. But, you know, I was thinking, what is this? You know, what if I get to Almaty and there's no pot of gold here? What if I'm just wrong? You know, 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? I said, what was this 28 thing?

Janja Kellick (38:07)

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.

Ethan Gutman (38:25)

Well, it does, because this was a discovery, really, by Charles Lee, Dr. Charles Lee. It was a discovery by these practitioners who kind of. I'm not sure if it was 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 who's 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 side by side by side. The person who's going to receive the organy 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 this minor difference on it. But the point is that you are at the peak of your health at that point and 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? Low. 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.

Janja Kellick (39:55)

Bad joke from the book, but yeah, let's not get into that.

Ethan Gutman (40:01)

No, but here's the thing. So that's the 28th thing was established through that. As I say, Charles Lee looks at it as 29. And that's what I told her. I said, you know, if we. 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, and it used to be. It used to be just blood test within 10 days before. And they're 28 years old and they disappeared in the middle of the night. So it's very different from the other groups that leave. So there's 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. They're going to work at this wonderful factory. Let's have a. Sometimes they even, you know, a little bit of applause for them. Okay, they're off to. You know, those women will work there till 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 have a case where a woman used to spoon with another woman just to keep warm. Terribly cold. And they were very close. And she only noticed that she'd 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, that 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. Okay. This is a huge system, as you've established. You know, 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 it's 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. And there we have a. You know, I have a chart and it sort of shows it. And some people 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 respectful. Although one of my best witnesses says the disappearance rate was actually 7.5% every year, not 5, 2.5%. And that is. And he's here in America because I got him and his family out. Okay. And he's Christian, by the way, and Kyrgyz. But here's the point. We have to do something to generate numbers. People have a right for these to have numbers. They have a right to have some kind of scale on these things, 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 assume we'll just go in and take over this and engage with our counterparts in China ranging from the press, who's shown an incredible lack of interest and bought everything that Chinese Communist Party said about Falun Gong. And to some extent, even to some extent the Uyghurs got a lot of shade too. Not as much, but they did get some shade. The politicians, obviously there are huge exceptions like Congressman Smith and so forth, but you know, to a great extent did very little or were cautious to do anything. The human rights organizations have been a disaster. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Watch interpreted the fact that people were getting DNA tests as a kind of surveillance tool, that 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 that I did put some things in the book about that and I did. Maybe I, I'm sure I won't be popular with some people afterwards because I'm very candid about this. For every group that I mentioned, there is an exception in there for the press. There's Dee Dee Kirsantello. The New York Times 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.

Janja Kellick (45:44)

So Ethan, you mentioned the numbers and I still remember, I think it was in 2016. You testified under oath to the 60 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.

Ethan Gutman (46:09)

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 wait listed 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 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. PLA 309 Military Hospital in Beijing, similar 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.

Janja Kellick (47:35)

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.

Ethan Gutman (47:44)

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. I mean, the Chinese are selling.

Janja Kellick (48:01)

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

Ethan Gutman (48:14)

They have gotten more efficient. They've gotten more efficient.

Janja Kellick (48:18)

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.

Ethan Gutman (48:29)

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.

Janja Kellick (48:36)

Right.

Ethan Gutman (48:37)

Okay, so that's 25,000 people. 25,000 people.

Janja Kellick (48:40)

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

Ethan Gutman (48:45)

Similar way, basically 2.5 to 5% 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 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 a competitiveness within the medical system within China. And there's no question that they're still using Falun Gong and they may be branching out to other groups Though I think that's a little less clear. I don't believe every 28 year old goes to China.

Janja Kellick (49:32)

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

Ethan Gutman (49:50)

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 they, you know, we start to uncrack something. Well, you can't go and interview Les Kazak interviews 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 happened. Very likely they're dead. So these one weird trick. Yes. On the other hand, that's my interest. I'm not going to be here forever. Okay. And I see a young crop of young 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 it, 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, the human beings, you cannot completely control individuals. They're the hardest thing in the world to control. They're like the wind.

Janja Kellick (50:57)

This is what every totalitarian regime doesn't understand.

Ethan Gutman (51:02)

But yes, 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 a minimal traction in Washington and so forth, enough to get this at least to cut off our relationship, our medical relations with China, 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.

Janja Kellick (51:48)

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. That's. This is what I've been talking about.

Ethan Gutman (51:58)

Absolutely, absolutely. They keep Accelerating it in new ways.

Janja Kellick (52:03)

Right.

Ethan Gutman (52:03)

And I believe there is a kind of disrespect that we saw with Xi Jinping and Putin talking about this. They knew they're being covered, talking about their moment.

Janja Kellick (52:13)

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.

Ethan Gutman (52:24)

But.

Janja Kellick (52:24)

Well, and there's good reason. 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.

Ethan Gutman (52:35)

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

Janja Kellick (52:47)

about their Maseratis or what's some people, 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, it's a. I think,

Ethan Gutman (53:05)

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. Okay. So I do feel surprisingly hopeful about this.

Janja Kellick (53:39)

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. 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, 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?

Ethan Gutman (54:42)

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, my real hope is that somebody else will jump in at this point. You know, I've got, I've been talking about writing some ghost stories of skiing, skiing ghost stories for years now. I mean, it's. 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 and I think, again, I'd like to also use this as a time to examine if we're successful here. We need to use this as a time to examine all the failures that took place here. And I don't mean on the tendency has been to blame it on, oh, well, you know, you had Falun Gong people coming over China. They didn't know the system that well here in America and so forth. And they, 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. And, you know, when people talk about, oh, well, you know, for example, 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, over the Gaza issue. I mean, the. Look at. Let me give you an example of that. 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 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 as a very isolated country. They are a signatory. I went and risked my life, risked Bobby, my researcher's life out in that country. No, we had a. Interesting time and there's 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. Let's investigate Netanyahu, let's investigate Trump, or let's investigate. You know, I mean, 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 Bobby, a guy like him who was really under risk. Not me. I mean, work me up a little bit, you know, work around. But a Uyghur, he could have been killed. He could have been tortured and killed in this situation and put him in this risk for these posers from Europe going around looking for shiny things. Now the guy's got a couple sexual harassment cases, and they sound pretty plausible to me. And they're 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.

Janja Kellick (58:22)

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

Ethan Gutman (58:25)

Thanks.

Janja Kellick (58:26)

Thank you all for joining Ethan Gutman and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janje Kelik.