From the writer of the acclaimed, Nobel Peace Prize-nominated book THE SLAUGHTER, which tells the story of Falun Gong organ harvesting with intelligence and heart, comes an in-depth exploration of the latest research into human rights violations against Uyghur people in China.
There are several pivotal points in time when investigative journalism has exposed unspeakable abuses.
Shared on global stages, these pieces of work shape our understanding of the world around us, uncovering genocides, war crimes, and structural power imbalances.
Ethan Gutmann, touted as “the leading field researcher on China’s forced organ harvesting” by Real Clear Politics, has produced such a work: a fundamental exploration of organ harvesting in China, The Xinjiang Procedure (Armin Lear Press).
Xinjiang refers to the northwest of China where the Uyghur people, Muslims with Turkic roots, have lived for thousands of years, while the procedure refers to Chinese transplant surgeons surgically extracting Uyghur organs while their hearts are still beating, the average age being 28 years old.
Gutmann uncovers foreign organ tourists purchasing them to order, an average young woman’s organs valued at $900,000. Extensively researched, his second non-fiction book details startling new evidence from the Xinjiang concentration camps.
We are taken back to 2015, when the World Health Organization and the Transplantation Society asserted this organ harvesting was fiction. There followed the medical testing of any Uyghur above the age of twelve – including ten million blood and DNA tests – and the camps filled the desert.
In a new heartbreaking, unmissable exposé, Gutmann recounts how Beijing was murdering tens of thousands of young people for their organs every year. Refugees were crossing the Kazakh border, fleeing China in a vivid display of human endurance, but Beijing had changed the rules. Throughout Central Asia, human rights investigators were now considered spies. The Chinese press explicitly identified Gutmann as a new “Cold Warrior” – so he was forced to find a new way in.
Mustering a 4×4 with no GPS tracker, his foster daughter, skis, a paper map, and a compass, the pair drove from Germany to the Kazakh border where they were searched and biometrically photographed. Then, from the standpoint of electronic surveillance, they vanished into thin air.
This is the detailed yet lively account of how Gutmann uncovered this evidence – an essential read for anyone with a stake in modern politics, human rights, and undercover journalism, but more importantly, anyone with a keen sense of compassion.
Gutmann conducts his interviews with his subjects’ personhood and humanity at the heart. For instance, he interviews one woman, Rukiye, in the opening pages by asking first about her childhood, avoiding lines of enquiry that may echo her past interrogations.
This empathy carries through to his writing, delivering outstandingly-researched evidence while at all times treating his subjects with considered care.
The Xinjiang Procedure brings the story of Beijing’s organ harvesting juggernaut, and its Western medical apologists, to conclusion – and points to an unconventional way forward. Setting a new standard in narrative non-fiction, Gutmann never loses sight of the hard evidence that has unmitigated power to shift our world.
