A man held captive in a brutal Chinese prison has recounted the harrowing ordeal of how he was sedated and awoke to find his organs removed, purely because of his religious beliefs.

Cheng Pei Ming claims he was subjected to state-sanctioned detention and forced organ harvesting between 1999 and 2006 by the Chinese Communist Party due to his practice of Falun Gong, which was banned as an "evil cult" by China in 1999.

Cheng Pei Ming alleges he was asked to sign a medical consent form, which he refused. Despite his protestations, he claims he was then forcibly injected with a sedative.

Upon regaining consciousness, he discovered an incision running down his chest. He later learned parts of his liver and lung had been extracted while he was unconscious, according to the Diplomat.

Cheng told The Daily Mail: "Six guards grabbed me and held me down and I was injected with something. The next thing I remember is being in a hospital bed with tubes in my nose and I was going in and out of consciousness. There was a tube with bloody liquid coming from under the bandaging that was on my side.", reports the Daily Star.

Photographs of the aftermath, which Cheng believes were taken by a hospital employee, show him unconscious and shackled to the hospital bed.

These images have been widely shared online, particularly on a Chinese website called Minghui.org, which publishes information regarding the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners. Cheng is an adherent of this spiritual movement, which has strong foundations in Buddhist ideology.

Medical experts are unable to conclusively explain why his organs were removed, but Professor Wendy Rogers, Chair of the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC)'s International Advisory Board stated "he did not have a disease or illness requiring this surgery."

The procedure bears a resemblance to techniques employed in a 1990s operation used to extract liver tissue for paediatric transplants, which the professor confirmed.

She explained: "Mr. Cheng's case illustrates the callous indifference to the human rights of prisoners of conscience in China... he was surgically assaulted as part of a wider pattern of persecution, incarceration and torture."

Cheng is reported to have been gravely ill following the alleged forced procedure, suffering chronic fatigue and breathing difficulties, yet was unable to receive further medical attention as he reportedly remained detained for a further 18 months.

In March 2006, he embarked on a hunger strike, whereupon he was informed he would need to undergo yet another unexplained operation.

Realising this surgery could very well prove fatal, Cheng made the desperate decision to flee the facility in a bold bid for freedom.

He said: "When they took me to the hospital again and said I had to have another operation, I thought for sure they were going to kill me."

Hours before his surgery he requested the guard monitoring his room escort him to the toilet. On his return, the guard forgot to re-shackle him to the bedframe and fortunately for Cheng, dozed off in his chair.

Grasping his moment of opportunity, Cheng escaped and made his way through the building's fire stairs. He flagged down a taxi from outside the hospital, offering tinned fruit he had snatched from his room as fare payment. Cheng was free.

He remained in hiding in China for nearly a decade before securing unofficial sanctuary in Thailand. It wasn't until July 2020 he managed to reach the United States as an official United Nations refugee.

David Matas, an international human rights lawyer and ETAC Co-Founder, said Cheng represents thousands of victims - but he is unique in that he survived.

He said: "Mr. Cheng is, in one sense, a typical victim of China's forced organ harvesting practices - a Falun Gong practitioner who had their organs stolen by the CCP.

"In another sense, he is unusual because he survived organ extraction and escaped both the Chinese authorities and China itself.

"Like other Falun Gong practitioners, Mr. Cheng was never told he was going to have his organs extracted. Nor was he told afterwards that he had been organ extracted. He found that out only after he fled China and was medically examined.

"He illustrates a general phenomenon, the exception which proves the norm, the norm in this case being the gruesome reality of the mass killing of Falun Gong for their organs."

The China Tribunal, an independent People's Tribunal chaired by British barrister Sir Geoffrey Nice, concluded in 2020 that China's forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience amounts to crimes against humanity.

The Tribunal estimated that between 60,000 and 100,000 unlawful organ transplants are performed annually. The US Senate is currently examining the Falun Gong Protection Act, which seeks to impose sanctions on those responsible for forced organ harvesting and demand accountability from the Chinese government.

Beijing has consistently denied allegations that it forcibly removes organs from prisoners of conscience, claiming it ceased using organs from executed prisoners in 2015.

In response to a request for comment following the China Tribunal's findings, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in London stated that human organ donation must be "voluntary and without payment."