By VOA News. China continues to harvest organs from prisoners on a massive scale, according to a new report that finds prisoners of conscience, including Falun Gong practitioners, remain the primary target.

In 2006, Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas and former Canadian Asia-Pacific Secretary of State David Kilgour began an investigation into accusations of the Chinese government’s role in harvesting the organs of Falun Gong practitioners.

Their published findings, “Bloody Harvest: Revised Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China,” attracted international attention.

On Wednesday, they published an even more comprehensive report that finds the scale of organ harvesting has significantly increased. According to these latest findings, the number of China’s annual organ transplant surgeries far surpasses Beijing’s official estimate of 10,000.

“We look at individual hospitals that do transplants through their websites, their publications, their newsletters, their back calendars and patient volume and so on, and at a variety of indicators going hospital by hospital,” Matas told VOA. “There are around 900 hospitals that do transplants. We don’t give a specific figure but we can say it is much larger than the 10,000 a year — at minimum 60,000 a year and probably more than that.” (Read more from “Investigators: China Still Harvesting Human Organs on Huge Scale” HERE)

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Chinese Officials Tear down Virgin Mary Painting, Replace It with President Xi

By American Military News. Authorities in the eastern province of Jiangxi have forced a Catholic church to replace a painting of the Virgin Mary with her child with one of President Xi Jinping, as well as hang up the Chinese flag and nationalist slogans in support of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

The True Origin Catholic Church in Jiangxi’s Ji’an city built the church after raising more than a million yuan in donations from believers, according to the overseas-based news website Bitter Winter.

But in September, officials from the local government’s religious affairs bureau ordered the church to remove the church name from public display, and replace it with a banner proclaiming “Follow the party, thank the party, obey the party.”

Officials also took down an image of the Madonna and hung President Xi’s portrait in its place. Shortly afterwards, officials confiscated the keys to the building and its members were unable to use it for worship, the report said.

Xi Jinping Portraits Replace Catholic Symbols in Churches
Places of worship refusing to be controlled by the state are being shut down, while government-run churches are used to worship the Chinese Communist Party.https://t.co/4iMIlXCUZm

— BitterWinterMagazine (@BitterWinterMag) November 26, 2019

(Read more from “Chinese Officials Tear down Virgin Mary Painting, Replace It with President Xi” HERE)

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Foreign-born researchers working at U.S. agencies secretly joined China’s payroll, sending sensitive U.S.-funded research to the country while U.S. government agencies took almost no defensive measures against a major recruitment operation, a Senate investigation found.

Researchers linked to the Chinese government formed a Chinese cell within the Department of Energy, attained access to American genomic data, and recruited other U.S. researchers to join, the bipartisan report stated.

China’s Thousand Talents Plan (TTP) aims to get foreign governments to finance the communist power’s military and economy by buying off researchers who are doing work abroad. The experts apply to the program, and if approved by the Communist Party, they join China’s payroll and sign secret side agreements that the experts will share their research with that country, according to the investigation.

Some of the information captured by TTP had significant military value. For example, in 2016, Dr. Long Yu, a Chinese citizen and U.S. permanent resident working for a U.S. defense contractor, applied for Chinese talent plans and was arrested for attempting to give hundreds of gigabytes to China, including design info on military jet engines, according to the investigation.

“China wins twice. First, the American taxpayer funds China’s research and development. Second, China uses that research to improve its economic and military status,” Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican who chairs the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said in a statement. (Read more from “Foreign-Born Researchers at U.S. Agencies Were Secretly Working for China and Recruiting Others” HERE)

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President Donald Trump collected a win in the ongoing trade war with China on Thursday as the communist nation announced that it was lifting a five-year ban on U.S. poultry effective immediately.

“The decision out of Beijing is effective immediately and the announcement sent shares of major U.S. chicken processers, Sanderson Farms, Tyson Foods and Pilgrim’s Pride to new highs for the year Thursday,” The Associated Press reported. “The Chinese market looks especially promising for U.S. poultry producers because an outbreak of African swine fever has devastated a competing protein in China: pork.”

The move comes after the U.S. and China made a partial trade deal in October in which China committed to purchasing $40-50 billion of American agricultural products every year which is a massive increase as “American farm exports to China peaked at around $25.5 billion in 2016,” The New York Times reported last month. “From China’s perspective, the biggest win is a promise by Mr. Trump to cancel an Oct. 15 tariff increase, when taxes on $250 billion of Chinese goods were set to rise to 30 percent from 25 percent.” (Read more from “Trump Gets Win for U.S. Farmers in Trade War With China” HERE)

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