October 1, 2012 | Quote

After Bo Xilai’s Purge, Web Searches for ‘Organ Harvest’ Suddenly Allowed

The Communist Party in China enforces a regime of Internet censorship so strict that when there’s a gap—especially a big, obvious, gaping one—observers are apt to conclude that it simply must have been deliberate.

So when, soon after it was announced on Sept. 28 that ousted Politburo official Bo Xilai was being expelled from the Party, searches for highly sensitive political terms like “live harvest” and “bloody harvest” were allowed on several popular websites, analysts began trying to figure out what it meant.

“I think only a handful of people really know the meaning of this,” wrote Ethan Gutmann, a researcher who has published extensively on abusive organ transplantation practices in China, in an email.

“It is tantalizing to imagine that this suggests that someone in Party Central was sending a message to hard-liners and latent Bo supporters,” something along the lines of: “‘We could have taken the charges against Bo much, much further. So we’re doing Bo a favor. Walk away. Forget it. It’s Chinatown.’” The last sentence refers to the idea that in Chinatown, criminal bosses don’t inform on one another.

Two major Twitter-like platforms, Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo (weibo means “microblog” in Chinese), lifted the ban on searches for terms associated with organ harvesting. Articles in the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times detailing recent testimony about the topic at the United Nations Human Rights Council were circulated by Chinese Internet users using those keywords.

The terms that were unblocked, like “live harvest,” are almost solely used to refer to the allegations of live organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, most often Falun Gong practitioners.

A similar sequence of events took place back in March, after Wang Lijun fled to the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu. He was thought to have divulged to U.S. officials his involvement in organ harvesting activities in China’s northeast.

From 2003 to 2008 Wang was security chief in Jinzhou City and ran a medical laboratory attached to the Public Security Bureau, focused on practical organ transplantation research.

Read the full articles here.