Forced Organ Harvesting in China

There has been a long-standing tradition of forced organ harvesting in China, the horrors of which we still have not seen a full glimpse of. This is despite multiple attempts by doctors and human rights activists to shed light on the topic. The most recent of which is a report in the American Journal of Transplantation in 2022 by Dr. Matthew Robertson and Dr.Jacob Lavee, who referenced more than 124,000 scientific articles within China since 1950. The report concluded that at least 71 cases irrefutably existed wherein physicians were responsible for killing the patient through the removal of organs before they were brain dead, thus violating a key donor transplant rule of not removing organs from a live body.

The former Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific David Kilgour, human rights lawyer David Matas and London based investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann spent more than seven years publishing a 680-page report in June 2016 titled Bloody Harvest with more than 2400 references on the issue. One of the key findings was that “The ultimate conclusion is that the Chinese Communist Party has engaged the State in the mass killings of innocents, primarily practitioners of the spiritually-based set of exercises, Falun Gong, but also Uyghurs, Tibetans, and select House Christians, in order to obtain organs for transplants.”

Reportedly, organ harvesting in China started in the 1970’s from live prisoners but it only became a true nationwide practice in the 1990’s when Jiang Zemin came to power. Having established a perception of Falun Gong being a threat to the Communist Party, he set about eradicating the movement from July 1995 onwards and reportedly gave the directive to harvest their organs. It was in June 1999 that a special extra legal security agency was established called the 610 office which was never reorganized until 2018 under the Ministry of Public Security. 2003 also saw the expansion of the 610 mandate from Falun Gong to nearly 28 other ‘heretical religions’.

For a long time in China, there has been a cultural practice of keeping the body whole after death which raises the question as to where Chinese patients are procuring their desperately needed organs. In other countries, transplant wait times are generally in the months or years whereas China is able to reduce it to days or weeks with sometimes spare organs from living recipients being continuously available during an operation.

The crackdown on Falun Gong saw the increase in hospitals performing organ transplant from 150 in 1999 to nearly 1000 in 2007. While there was a brief outcry in 2006, it only led to the Ministry of Health instantly falsifying data and reducing the original transplant centres to 164 while secretly increasing transplants and allowing hospitals to perform these operations without permits. This led to a practice where prison officials were collaborating with hospitals to split the transplant fees equally and the 610 office responsible for ensuring the secrecy of the whole process and subsequent deletion of prisoner data from all hospital records.

Doctors have claimed to have been forced to participate in the whole process, often performing more than 20 such operations daily, suffering from PTSD like symptoms and being forced to take several hundred thousand dollars to ensure their complicity and willing participation.

Chinese propaganda on organ harvesting has always been denial, but 2010 saw the establishment of a voluntary organ donation system for the first time across 19 provinces. For the first two years, it only received more than 200 donations before it went nationwide in August 2013 and became the China Organ Transplant Response System (COTRS).

Chinese health minister Huang Jiefu then stated that voluntary organ donations constituted 20% of all transplants in 2013, 80% in 2014, and from January 2015 onwards the official Communist Party stance has been that the multi-billion dollar medical trade in organ harvesting does not exist and everything comes from willing donors. Concentration camps are affectionately titled schools which just happen to have a friendly crematorium next door.

Ethnic minorities and religious groups somehow never graduate from the `schools’ but coincidentally international tourists can procure a kidney in less than a week if they happen to be hospitalized near one of these `schools’. More than a generation has passed since China started persecuting the nearly 100 million Falun Gong practitioners. The shortage of transplant donors has led to the search for a new minority to oppress, namely the Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang province. Beijing hospitals even went so far as to make marketing videos aimed at oil rich Middle Eastern customers promising to give them `halal’ organs if they should choose to come to China for medical tourism.

Chinese models of organ transplantation have been praised internationally after 2017 as the official justification has been that 164 hospitals perform nearly 10,000 transplants a year. International companies have colluded to state that they only supplied that amount of immunosuppressant drugs to allow patients to survive the transplant. It is clearly evident that the wealthy who control power and influence do not allow this decades long state-sponsored act of genocide to stop as it will impact their interests. The only other place in the world where you could procure an organ that fast would be an ISIS controlled territory.

The world still allows Chinese transplant doctors who have publicly stated that they have performed thousands of surgeries to participate in international medical forums. Official information clearly shows that as early as 2004, domestically manufactured immunosuppressant drugs in China had more than half of the total market share and the number has only increased since then. Clearly, China has not stopped organ harvesting in 2015 from prisoners despite claiming otherwise.

Having run out of Falun Gong practitioners, we can clearly see that testing the blood of 15 million Uyghurs and imprisoning almost 2 million of them in a concentration camp near a transplant hospital is by no means a coincidence. In the lack of any meaningful data, we can only estimate that at least 25,000 Uyghurs go missing every year whose organs are harvested. While the numbers are horrifying, it is even more disturbing how fast governments have become silent on the issue. Coercing the healthcare system of more than a billion people to participate in genocide just goes to show the lengths that China is willing to go to in order to maintain the power of the Communist party.