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Book review: The Slaughter, by Ethan Gutmann

Pity anyone who enters China's penal system for any reason. Even "prisoners of conscience" - Uygurs, Tibetans, Christians and Falun Gong members - are systematically slaughtered inside, according to investigator Ethan Gutmann, whose expose rests on interviews with top police officials, doctors who have killed captives on the operating table, and torture survivors including "Lotus".

LIFE
David Wilson
The Slaughter
by Ethan Gutmann
Prometheus Books
Pity anyone who enters China's penal system for any reason. Even "prisoners of conscience" - Uygurs, Tibetans, Christians and Falun Gong members - are systematically slaughtered inside, according to investigator Ethan Gutmann, whose expose rests on interviews with top police officials, doctors who have killed captives on the operating table, and torture survivors including "Lotus".

"The sensation of being ripped apart was extraordinary," Gutmann writes, describing how plain-clothes police tied and hoisted the Falun Gong member high. Lucky enough to survive such brutality, Lotus - born Wang Huilian - eventually escaped to Thailand.

Treated as guinea pigs, other religious and political captives apparently lose their "retail organs" to transplant tourists from countries including France and Japan. A harvested kidney fetches about US$62,000, according to the foreign-policy wonk who has written for and provided "testimony and briefings" to organisations including the Central Intelligence Agency.

Victims of the invasive trade are apparently plundered while half-alive when their body parts work better. Falun Gong organs are prized because - unlike hepatitis-racked death-row hoods - practitioners exercise religiously and stay in shape, Gutmann says.

Opposed to mainland "spin control", he pans the perception that Falun Gong imaginatively paints "torture tableaux straight out of a Cultural Revolution opera". Emaciated refugees from the Great Leap Forward also met scepticism when they yammered about cannibalism, he notes.

Gutmann is a sophisticated observer with an impressive self-critical streak. Reporters including him "can be clueless jerks", he says.

For , he admits he interviewed just 15 Falun Gong refugees "who had experienced something inexplicable in a medical setting". If that number seems low, consider the difficulty of surviving captivity and escaping China, he says, also citing figures that at least 3,000 Falun Gong members died from torture by 2005 - a dated statistic.

Another minus is the lack of testimony from secrecy-sworn transplant tourists. Worse, Gutmann rambles, exploring Falun Gong history in forensic depth, which means the text sometimes reads like a chronicle of a cult - the second one he has known: his first girlfriend was a devotee of the Divine Light Mission in the late 1970s, he states.

His assessment ends with a glance at preserved corpse exhibitions featuring possible Falun Gong members.

"Why exactly is the party so deeply threatened? Why don't they just leave those people alone?" Gutmann writes. Good question.

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