American doctors go to great lengths to uphold the highest ethical standards while working to save thousands of sick patients awaiting organ donation. This is underlined by recent reports on groundbreaking transplantation experiments with genetically modified pig hearts. On the other hand, China’s transplant industry, freed from strict ethical rules, has found another solution: a thriving transplant industry, the second largest in the world, based on a stockpile of organs harvested from forcibly executed prisoners likely prisoners of conscience, those who they are held back by their ideology or their beliefs.
Although China announced it had banned this heinous practice in 2015, there is a lack of transparency. Mounting evidence suggests it’s moving forward. However, the American transplant industry adheres to medical ethics within the country, but openly supports China’s doctors and the transplant industry.
In 2006, shocking reports surfaced that China was forcibly harvesting organs from detained followers of the Chinese spiritual meditation practice, Falun Gong. According to these reports, after Falun Gong was targeted for “eradication” by the Chinese President in 1999, thousands of practitioners were thrown into concentration camps and prisons and subjected to organ examinations, unexplained deaths and the disappearance of Falun Gong.
According to religious group officials, many were killed for this organ harvesting, which was sold to China’s transplant sector, creating a billiondollar industry. Reliable statements from former prisoners, relatives, patients and surgeons support this thesis.
During this time, dozens of Chinese surgeons published articles openly describing procedures on prisoners who were “alive and breathing while the surgeons excised their hearts,” as per a 2022 article by Matthew Robertson in the respected American Journal of Transplantation, Fellow of the Victims of Communism Foundation, and Israeli Dr. Jacob Lavaee.
Last year, 12 independent UN experts said they were “extremely concerned” by “reliable information” that organ harvesting was ongoing and was also targeting several of China’s religious minorities. Sources report evidence that the atrocity has spread to Xinjiang’s massive network of detention centers built after 2015, which both Republicans and Democrats have acknowledged as the scene of the ongoing genocide of China’s Uyghur Muslims.
Nury Turkel, chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, documented forced blood tests and organ examinations on Uyghur prisoners. One of them was a Christian, Ovalbek Turdakun, who has already been interviewed by our team.
As noted in a May 2022 European Parliament resolution, a Beijing hospital openly announced the use of “halal organs” by Uyghur and Muslim minorities. At the International Religious Freedom Summit held in Washington in June, Ethan Gutmann, the senior field researcher on organ harvesting in China, estimated that 25,000 to 50,000 Uyghurs are killed for their organs each year. Gutmann’s research involves a former hospital in Aksu, Xinjiang, with quick access to an airport that distributes organs to hospitals across the country.
There are just 1 million registered voluntary donors in China, compared to 145 million in the US in 2019. There is no explanation for how Chinese patients can schedule transplant surgery appointments in days or weeks not months or years, the report says patients and researchers. In addition, Robertson, Lavee and Australian statistician Raymond Hinde concluded that the growth curves of China’s voluntary donor lists for three organ types form unrealistic equations.
A 2019 article in the medical ethics journal pointed out that China’s donor database was “fake” because it was “manufactured and manipulated from the core levels of China’s medical bureaucracy.” In addition, the reported number of annual transplants from China, at five to six thousand, appears to be an underestimate. Gutmann and Canadian human rights experts David Mattas and David Kilgour, who document Chinese hospitals, beds and transplant surgeons, estimate that there are 60,000 to 100,000 organ transplants per year in China, with 8,000 per year in a single hospital.
China’s lack of medical ethics, while shocking, is not entirely surprising given the country’s ethnoreligious genocide. However, given the serious organ supply issues raised in these reports and China’s lack of transparency, it is inconceivable that leading American universities and hospitals would support the Asian country’s transplant sector. As reported on their websites, Harvard, Stanford, University of Pittsburgh and many others offer China Scholarships, academic exchanges, conferences and joint research projects. American institutions trained 344 transplant doctors from China.
Apparently, part of the American medical profession is collaborating to convince its Chinese partners that organ donation is truly voluntary. These US institutions take China’s word, even when prevented from demanding change, and even commend the Chinese’s work.
But they don’t buy China’s lies of their own accord. The Journal of Medical Ethics cited above stated: “The World Health Organization, the Transplantation Society, the Istanbul Protocol and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences have provided contributions based on seemingly corrupt data.”
For example, the WHO Organ Transplant Task Force was founded in 2017 by Dr. Huang Jiefu, who headed China’s transplant donor registry, was a longtime member of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee and, while far from independent, was appointed to the task force himself. Under the chairmanship of Dr. Harvard’s Francis Delmonico, who toured China’s hospitals as Huang’s guest and described him as a “brave leader” in congressional testimony, the task force was tasked with identifying crises in the transplant field. However, Gutmann, Robertson and Mattas say this group got the research out of control.
To date, no US government has taken seriously the ongoing allegations of organ harvesting in China. In 2018, the State Department attempted to settle the matter, bluntly stating that the Chinese government “officially ended in January 2015 the longstanding practice of involuntarily harvesting organs from executed prisoners for use in transplants.”
The United States also failed to conduct an independent review. Biden’s management should reexamine all evidence of organ harvesting and issue its own statement. Congress should pass the 2021 law to monitor and prevent illegal organ harvesting.
Former Chinese military surgeon Dr. Enver Tohti, who testified before the Human Rights Commission, recently commented on Western indifference to the issue. Forced organ harvesting seemed “too bad to be true,” he said. But the evidence is too compelling to hold on to this naïve belief. Until compliance with international ethical standards is verified, the American transplant industry must cease all cooperation with China.
Nina Shea is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, where he directs the Center for Religious Liberty. She is a former vice chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, for which she was nominated by House Republicans.
Katrina Lantos Swett is President of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice. She is a professor of human rights at Tufts University and former chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, for which she was nominated by Senate Democrats.
©2022 RealClearPolitics. Released with permission. Original in English.