Organ harvesting in China and why the American media and businesses have turned a blind eye

Maura Moynihan, a China activist and the daughter of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, says she is "disgusted" and "sick to death" over how government, powerful U.S. media companies and others serve as China apologists. 

"The mainstream media is so beyond downplaying this, it's irresponsible," Moynihan said on a new John Solomon Reports podcast about the media's recent coverage of China's treatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority.

Among the reported atrocities are members being taken in the middle of the night, forced into labor camps, sterilized and having their organs harvested. 

Moynihan was joined on the podcast by longtime China watcher Ethan Gutmann to discuss human rights abuses by the Chinese Communist Party.

Moynihan argues that U.S. media companies have been minimizing the severity of China's human rights abuses, even as the Trump administration imposes increased sanctions on the country over the last six weeks.

She says coverage of the recent protests over the death of George Floyd has kept the China atrocities "virtually out of the news."

"I am sick to death of seeing the China apologist gang, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Committee of 100, the Asian Society, it goes on and on," she said. "They always get out front on the narrative on China. We have no resources in the Tibet movement. ... They've got tons of funding, because they're on the Chinese payroll."

When asked what the United States government can do to hold China accountable for their atrocious behavior, Moynihan said that a key move would be for the administration to continue cracking down on "these front media companies" that act "as agencies of espionage of the Chinese Communist Party." 

"Seize their assets, seize their real estate," Moynihan said. "Ban visas for Chinese communist officials."

Moynihan commended Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Trump for taking action recently on the matter of Hong Kong, on which Beijing recently imposed a sweeping national security law, effectively ending democracy in the world's third largest capital market.

"You can be damned sure that if Hillary Clinton was president, none of this would be happening, because she was such a China apologist, all the way," Moynihan added.

She emphasized the importance of committing American funds toward rooting out those in the pocket of the CCP working in America. Specifically, Moynihan believes the New York Stock Exchange's leniency when it comes to audits of Chinese companies is absurd and unjust. 

"We've also gotta still hunt out the moles, the appeasers, and the spies that have infected our government, media, and academia … and if some people in American business don't like it, well tough. Deal with it," she said.

Gutmann spoke about the market giveaways that he thinks indicate some of the abuses taking place against the Uyghurs, which he says include the explosion of the human hair wig market from China. 

Recently, China has changed the balance of the global wig market by providing hugely increased numbers of valuable human hair wigs, in colors like chestnut brown and reddish hues that are very different than Chinese hair. 

According to Gutmann, we know this is an indicator of abuse because we know from the testimony of survivors that Chinese officials shave the heads of Uyghur women when they are admitted to work camps in the Xinjiang region. 

The wig collection process, though, pales in comparison to the broader abuses taking place against the Uyghurs, he says.

According to Gutmann, about 18% of young Uyghurs are being sent to work camps, where they are kept alive but held against their will, subjected to ideological and behavioral re-education and forced to labor without pay. 

He also said that as many as 5% of Uyghurs, age about 28 years old, which Chinese doctors consider to be the best age for the use of organs, disappear in the middle of the night to become a part of the Chinese Communist Party's harvesting network.

Gutmann estimates that roughly 25,000 Uyghurs a year have their organs harvested, yielding a Chinese organ transplant industry worth between $10 to $20 billion annually. 

China is currently conducting 60,000 to 100,000 transplants a year, which is far more than anywhere else in the world.

Moynihan and Gutmann believe the country is getting away with it because of the failure of American and global institutions to confront them in a meaningful way.