HOW credible is China’s claim to have created a vast voluntary national organ donor system in less than 10 years?
In 2006, allegations emerged that prisoners of conscience were being killed on demand to supply organs for transplant. By 2013, the official line was that 23 percent of organs were donated (the rest came from judicial executions); yet in 2015 China insisted it had now moved to an entirely voluntary donor-based system. It has taken other countries decades to develop such programmes; and based on US figures, China’s 2017 figure of 373,536 registered donors would have yielded only dozens of donations.
A report released at a transplant conference in Madrid last month suggests a more chilling explanation for a “state-driven industry that transplants far more organs… than can be accounted for by officially acknowledged organ sources”. The report by the China Organ Harvest Research Center, an independent non-profit body, says China’s claim is simply “not plausible”.
Free liver transplants
After visiting multiple hospitals, investigators believe China performs not the 15,000 annual transplants it claims, but around 70,000. This is despite declining numbers of judicial executions, and a failure to enact any laws governing brain death or ethical organ sourcing, donation and allocation.
Chinese hospitals advertise waiting times for organs from living donors ranging from days to weeks. Recipients can pay extra to secure an earlier transplant, and there are promises of multiple back-up organs if the first fails. In October 2016, one hospital did 10 heart transplants in a day. Another offered free liver transplants for the first ten children to register. In November 2016, Australian senator Derryn Hinch claimed he was encouraged by a senior businessman in Melbourne to “go to Shanghai and for $150,000 get a new liver next week”.
Meanwhile the “regulatory” agencies in China are mere “empty shells” run from inside ministry buildings. Surgery is scheduled weeks in advance, so the donors cannot be accident victims. Everything suggests an “unlimited stream” of vital organs from still-living donors. But who are they?
Enemies of the state
The report’s disturbing conclusion is that those considered enemies of the state are being tissue-typed as resources for harvesting. It claims the vast majority of organs are procured from prisoners of conscience in extra-judicial killings. This allows China to dispense with its opponents without the fuss of an embarrassing trial, while offering organs to foreign dignitaries and wealthy Chinese expatriates. Surgeons, meanwhile, develop stellar careers; and China’s denials of transplant tourism are contradicted by the three floors of international transplant wards in one hospital. Nurses told investigators most recipients were from South Korea and the Middle East.
Organ harvesting
Falun Gong practitioners are the largest group of prisoners of conscience in China. They have been forcibly tissue typed both in state custody and in their homes since 1999 (when the transplant drive began.) They have been protesting against organ harvesting outside the Chinese embassy in London since 2002. In December 2017, Human Rights Watch reported that the Chinese government had also collected DNA samples and blood type data from 19m Uyghurs in Xinjiang, calling it a public health programme. The government now has a database of more than 40m, including dissidents and migrants, and plans to increase this to 100m by 2020.
While China’s transplant surgeons continue to appear at international conferences claiming to be part of an ethical, donation-based system restricted to Chinese nationals, the truth seems hidden in plain sight.
‘Dr Grim’