Ken Stone and Irene Silber’s Hard to Believe is a tight 56-minute exposé of an issue that few people like to think about: forced organ harvesting in China. It isn’t exactly a secret that the Chinese government performs surgery on its political prisoners without their consent, but in recent years the media has largely neglected this still very present atrocity. This documentary, which mostly looks at the communist party’s persecution of Falun Gong spiritual practitioners, is Stone and Silber’s great effort to bring this issue back into the spotlight, to push past the compassion fatigue that most Western citizens in particular seem to be feeling. Most of the interviews here have been conducted with American Human Rights Defenders Torsten Trey and Ethan Gutmann, who urge people to realise that these horrific violations will never be stopped if everyone just keeps waiting for someone else to fight the fight. It seems to Trey and Gutmann that if this was happening anywhere other than in China, one of the most powerful global economic players, then the international outrage and protest would be much louder and stronger. They also suggest that the problem feels too large and abstract for most outsiders to really comprehend. The human impact of these practices can easily to get lost in the sea of statistics, or indeed in the literal sea that divides China from most other countries in the world.

While the short running time does make the film easier to digest, and could well encourage some of the more apathetic people to actually see sit through it, it doesn’t really allow Stone and Silber enough time to explore the issue in quite enough detail. On top of that, far too much of this time is spent listening to these two white social commentators, while any interviews with the victims of this abhorrent system of exploitation are something of a rarity. In fact, out of the interviewees who are actually Chinese, the one who is given the most screen time is a perpetrator, not a victim. We hear a great deal about how prison doctors are being coerced into stealing the organs of their patients while they are still alive and fully awake. We also hear some of the telephone calls made by people wanting to purchase these rare healthy “criminal” organs. There’s no denying that these are both crucial things to cover, but this should not be at the expense of the voices that have already been horrifically suppressed. If anyone is going to be made the face of forced organ harvesting, it should unquestionably be one of the victims. While Gutmann doesn’t believe it’s fair to expect these people to advocate for themselves, since most of them don’t have the legal or political expertise, the idea that none of them have the skills or the capability to fight for their own rights is something I actually do find Hard to Believe. Political campaigning might work very differently in the West compared to China, but that does not in any way mean that the Chinese people can’t speak for themselves in the international media, or that they need a white saviour to fly in and rescue them.

In some ways the most, and in other ways the least controversial approach this film adopts is to compare the organ harvesting in the Chinese medical system to the Holocaust. Even though they are both large scale atrocities that were at least initially met with global denial and apathy, we are now unfortunately at a point where this is a very commonly invoked comparison that people have become almost desensitised to. I’m not sure what it would take to shake the rest of the world out of their inaction, but an acceptance of the Chinese people as the leaders of this cause and as the voices of their own national problem would certainly be a start.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

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