Matthew Robertson
Research Fellow in China Studies
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“I worked at the Epoch Times years ago. Am I, then, one of 'them'?"
Adrian Zenz, a German anthropologist and notorious right-wing Christian zealot, is the most high-profile researcher at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) as its Director of China Studies. For now, I don’t have anything new to say about him. Matthew Robertson, on the other hand, is another noteworthy anti-China researcher.
Robertson, an Australian VOC data scientist, appears to have authored 846 articles for the Epoch Times from 2007-16, and in that span became its China news editor. Since then the Epoch Media Group has become well known as an ultraconservative media empire associated with the ostensibly apolitical Falun Gong, a cultish religious movement that started in 1990s China. Robertson is apparently a Falun Gong practitioner.
2019 was a big year for Matt Robertson. He became a VOC Research Fellow in China Studies, co-authored an academic article “cast[ing] doubt on the credibility of China’s organ transplant reform,” began his doctoral research at the Australian National University on the “political economy of organ trafficking” in China, and contributed to an activist “China Tribunal,” which acknowledged that he is “associated with Falun Gong.”
Previously, from 2015-19, at first while still a news editor at the Epoch Times, Robertson translated most of the content published on “China Change.” This obscure website exists thanks to the hundreds of thousands of dollars it has received from the National Endowment for Democracy, which is funded by the U.S. government. Meanwhile, Robertson served as a “research fellow” and board member of the probably more obscure Human Rights Law Foundation in Washington, which exclusively advocates for “Falun Gong believers.”
In 2020, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation published the above investigation into Falun Gong, featuring people affected by some of its cult-like tendencies and harmful teachings against medical science and mixed marriages. Robertson co-authored a rebuttal with Wendy Rogers, a professor at Macquarie University in Sydney and a leader of the “International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China,” which organized the China Tribunal. They suggested that the investigation echoed a “vicious [Chinese] campaign against the religion,” and accused the ABC of using “propagandistic techniques, emotional appeals, caricatures, and tropes to frame Falun Gong as a dangerous threat and morally deviant.”
Matthew Robertson also wrote a long Twitter thread, which noted, "Kind of hilarious in this connection that I worked at the Epoch Times years ago. Am I, then, one of 'them'?" In conclusion, Robertson said that Falun Gong, “whether we like it or not… [is] the largest Chinese diaspora resistance movement to CCP rule. We need to figure out how to discuss it intelligently, in its indigenous context.” According to a former Falun Gong practitioner who worked at The Epoch Times and aided ABC's investigation, Robertson “says he learned Chinese so that he could read the original teachings of Li Hongzhi after discovering the true meaning of human life through Falun Gong, according to a Chinese-language Epoch Times report... Robertson is, I understand, a Falun Gong practitioner himself..."
Over a year later, Robertson co-authored another article, later published by the American Journal of Transplantation in the spring of 2022, that accused Chinese doctors of participating in “executions by organ removal.” The journal article admitted finding zero evidence of this happening since 2015. That year, experts of the newly formed National Committee on Organ Donation and Transplantation in China acknowledged that they faced “daunting tasks and challenges. China's organ donation and transplant system are still a newborn baby who is in need of a gradual process of growing up.” Two years later, the Washington Post reported, “China used to harvest organs from prisoners. Under pressure, that practice is finally ending.”
China’s organ-transplant system was once a cause of international scorn and outrage, as doctors harvested organs from prisoners condemned to death by criminal courts and transplanted them into patients who often paid dearly for the privilege. After years of denials, China now acknowledges that history and has declared that the practice no longer occurs… Yet skeptics still abound, and a darkly sinister accusation continues to be heard…
The basis for this allegation is research compiled over many years by David Matas, a Canadian human rights lawyer, David Kilgour, a former Canadian politician, and Ethan Gutmann, a journalist, who assert that China is secretly carrying out 60,000 to 100,000 organ transplants a year, mostly with organs taken from Falun Gong practitioners held in secret detention since a crackdown on the movement in 1999. But research and reporting by The Washington Post undercut these allegations.
Gutmann is another VOC Research Fellow in China Studies. In 2014, the year he wrote The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China's Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem, Gutmann’s website stated that he was “standing on the shoulders of giants,” including “Matthew Robertson’s seminal reporting” with the Epoch Times.
Indeed, in 2013, the Society of Professional Journalists honored Matt Robertson for obsessively writing about alleged forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong in China. “To refute those who insist that the web has debased quality journalism, take one look at the Epoch Times,” according to the judges. In the years to come, the Epoch Media Group began to champion Donald Trump and promote other conspiracy theories embraced by his supporters. The less evidence, the more sinister.
Matthew Robertson co-authored his 2019 and 2022 journal articles with Dr. Jacob Lavee, an Israeli transplant surgeon, son of a Holocaust survivor, and Robertson’s “long-term collaborator.” Last year, they co-authored an article published by Tablet Magazine, a Jewish publication, declaring that “crimes similar to those of the Nazi doctors are repeating themselves in front of our eyes, and yet the world remains quiet.” Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), a notoriously bloodthirsty “neocon hero to MAGA icon,” shared this article on Twitter: “The Chinese Communist Party continues to harvest organs from persecuted religious groups, prisoners of conscience, and inmates.” Earlier in 2022, days after their journal article came out, Robertson and Lavee provided a relatively sober analysis during a VOC webinar.
“Conclusion—Is this ongoing? We do not know…” said their slideshow. “We think there is compelling evidence that prisoners are still being used.” By “compelling evidence” they apparently meant extreme suspicion that “collectivist” China could have a successful voluntary transplant system. Later on, Robertson tried to clarify, “there are voluntary transplants, but there’s definitely many less, like almost certainly many, many less than are claimed. Many, you know, several orders of magnitude less than that are actually claimed. And yet, there is still a lot of activity going on…” Minutes later, Lavee chimed in, “the official number of transplants hasn’t even come down since they allegedly stopped using the executed prisoners, but actually come up. This doesn’t make any sense... Admittedly, these are circumstantial evidences, but they are very strong evidences, we believe.”
A month later, U.S. Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ) invited Matthew Robertson to give “expert testimony” to the Congressional Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on “Forced Organ Harvesting in China.” The hearing was actually a webinar. Tom Lantos’ daughter, president of the Lantos Foundation, sits on the VOC Advisory Council. Congressman Smith, as co-chairman of the “Human Rights Caucus” and the “Victims of Communism Caucus,” wasn’t nearly as careful as Robertson and Lavee to sound credible and nuanced. Delivering his opening comments, the New Jersey politician almost sounded like he was reading for the first time a statement prepared by a Falun Gong practitioner.
This [forced organ harvesting] is also an apparent form of punishment, and indeed a tool of genocide meant to cull minority populations deemed ‘undesirable’ by the state. Thus we see dissidents targeted for harvesting, first and foremost the Falun Gong, whose peaceful meditation and exercise practices unfortunately make their organs more desirable. They are declared an evil cult by the Chinese Communist Party, and thus fit for butchering…
Regrettably, despite the Chinese Communist Party’s claim of initiating reforms to the transplant system, and reducing transplant tourism, troubling series of abuse continue to come to light. There’s been no abatement. It’s gotten worse. As one of our expert witnesses, Dr. Matthew Robertson of the Australian National University will explain to us today…
Robertson started off by explaining that “gathering reliable data about China’s organ transplant system is extremely difficult,” and jumping to the conclusion that the Chinese government is running a “state-sanctioned organ trafficking business out of its hospitals.” According to Robertson, “things changed a little in 2015,” citing his 2019 journal article, which he said demonstrated that “the [Chinese] data was extremely smooth to an unnatural degree.” As for his recently published journal article, it suggested that “[heart] donors who were prisoners were alive at the time of the surgery, and were killed by the transplant surgeons in the process of heart abstraction.” More importantly, and increasingly dubious,
These findings show a unique and close-running collaboration between the PRC’s medical establishment and its public security system. It’s also likely that many of these transplants were from political prisoners, and this would mean that PRC surgeons—many of whom were trained in the West—have been involved in medicalized extra-judicial killing. Although our last finding in the paper was in 2015, we’re not certain that this means that China ceases the practice. We think it’s at least as—if not more—plausible that journalists are simply told to stop publishing the incriminating details… We think the absence of further findings from 2015 could be either way. It could be the reforms, or they simply stopped publishing it. And I think in the end, it depends on what one thinks about China’s government and political system, as to which explanation, you know, one prefers. Or finds more plausible.
Years ago, Robertson once seemed to suggest that his goal is to “delegitimize the authority of the state.”
