[Photo by Chen Jingyu/Asianewsphoto]

In March 2006, the "Falun Gong" cult began fabricating and disseminating rumors about the Chinese government "harvesting" organs from its practitioners. Ever since, the US Congress and some other official and unofficial Western organizations have repeatedly claimed that organs are removed from "prisoners of conscience" in China without their consent.

In 2006, David Kilgour, then Canada's secretary of state for Asia-Pacific affairs, co-authored a report, accusing China of extracting body organs from "prisoners of conscience" and "political prisoners", which damaged China's image in the West.

However, in March of the same year, the US embassy in China sent personnel to the so-called Sujiatun concentration camp in Shenyang, Liaoning province in Northeast China, to investigate allegations of organ harvesting from "Falun Gong" members, and found no evidence of it.

If there was such a high number of live organ transplants from Falun Gong practitioners in China every year, it would indeed be a terrible scenario, one that would inevitably cause outrage across Chinese society and be widely discussed by its internet users. However, there has never been such a discussion.

Therefore, it is really unbelievable the Chinese government would choose to use such brutality to punish the practitioners of the banned "Falun Gong" cult. And the argument that it harvests organs in this way to sell for profit, as claimed by some, also lacks persuasiveness.

In early 2015, China officially banned organs being removed from the bodies of executed prisoners and confirmed voluntary organ donations were the only legitimate source of organs. Any medical organizations and individuals involved in the illegal trading of organs will be severely punished.

As a populous country, it is impossible to claim that China has an absolutely clean environment for organs to be used in transplants, but the forced extraction of body parts is a crime no matter who the organ provider is.--Global Times Chinese Edition