The Honorable Governor Jon Corzine

Office of the Governor

PO Box 001

Trenton, NJ 08625

Dear Governor Corzine,

On May 8, AP reported your remarks at a press conference regarding your upcoming trip to China and New Jersey’s trade deals with the country.

According to the report, you said that China’s human rights violations don’t compare to other concerns, such as South African apartheid and Sudanese civil warfare. As an organization that has been concerned about the persecution of Falun Gong for the past nearly seven years, we would take exception to that observation. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and even our own State Department have confirmed that China executes more people alone than all other countries in the world combined. The executions have fueled China’s gruesome and extremely lucrative business of organ harvesting, which has recently been spotlighted by the British Transplantation Society. BTS suggested that the number of transplants and the speed with which they are able to take place indicates that people are being warehoused for the express purpose of organ extraction.

Indeed, our own information has caused great concern in this area, since our reports indicate that many thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have been warehoused for just such a purpose and in fact have had their organs removed, and then were cremated, often while they were still alive. The scale of such an organized business requires cooperation from all branches of government, involving collusion between courts, hospitals, and above all, the military. While our State Department has said that its investigations did not turn up any evidence, we note that China did not respond to these allegations until three weeks after they were first made, and an initial look by a state department official occurred two weeks after the claims surfaced. This is ample time to sanitize any evidence.

To your point that expanded trade with China can improve human rights, we would respectfully ask for any historical precedent to support this idea. In fact, since Nixon went into China, its human rights violations have not decreased but have indeed become worse, again, according to international human rights organizations and our own State Department reports.  In fact, it was only after foreign countries stopped doing business with South Africa that apartheid was destroyed, and that happened after the Sun City artists made it uncool to do business there.  When business opportunities vanished, there was no choice but to change politically.

Let’s also remember that China is a supporter of terrorist regimes worldwide, including those in Iran, Korea, and Sudan, and any efforts we make to isolate these countries economically are undone by China’s support.

We recognize that your mandate as governor is to close the state’s budget gap and to increase the global competitiveness of its businesses, among other things. We applaud you for that and we are not opposed to engaging in trade with China, particularly that which sells our products and services there. But such a relationship cannot and should not be at the expense of the principles that support our freedom to live and work in a society where we are able to speak our minds and worship as we choose. New Jersey should not support, in word or in deed, any country currently engaged in human rights atrocities such as those described above. We believe that the issues on which our concerns are based reflect an affront not only to people who practice Falun Gong, but to all of humanity.

We would like to offer our online press kit for substantiating documentation and third-party coverage and editorial comment.

https://fofg.org/news/news_story.php?doc_id=1282

Thank you for your time and attention to our New Jersey-based organization’s concerns. We would welcome an opportunity to meet with you – in fact during your campaign one of our volunteers did have a chance to personally speak with you (at a Chinese festival) and you invited her to call your office.

In our “global village,” no issue exists in isolation and we would like to be of service to you in any way possible. We would like to set up an appointment, to offer you the information we are privy to, supplied by insiders on the mainland, to understand your concerns and aspirations as they relate to China, and to work with your office for the betterment of our great state.

We look forward to meeting with you.

Respectfully yours,

Alan Adler

Executive Director

Friends of Falun Gong USA