Executed Prisoners Feed China's Transplant Industry

Executed prisoners feed China's transplant industry
Tim Johnson
Knight Ridder Newspapers
565 words
13 April 2006
The Seattle Times
Fourth
A7
English
© 2006 Seattle Times. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights reserved.
TIANJIN, China -- A few weeks after receiving a lifesaving liver transplant, Pakistani businessman Shaukat Javed shuffled slowly around a specialty hospital ward chatting with fellow organ recipients.

Patients from around the globe mingled in the fourth-floor ward of the First Tianjin Central Hospital, some of them with nurses bracing their steps.

In the last few years, several Chinese hospitals have done a soaring business in liver, heart and kidney transplants. They charge barely half as much as in the West, advertise through intermediaries abroad and pull in a steady stream of patients who are unable to find donors in their home countries.

"About every nation is here," said Javed, who owns a soap factory not far from Lahore. "There are Korean, Japanese, Arabs, the whole [Persian] Gulf region. ... There are a few guys from Israel as well."

Javed's mood turned sour only when he was asked about the donor of the liver that now was sewn firmly into his own abdomen. Did he know anything about the person?

"It isn't nice to look into these matters," he said tersely.

A variety of human-rights groups -- such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Laogai Research Foundation -- say donated organs in China often come from executed prisoners, and there are concerns that prisoners' wishes aren't always respected.

China's hospitals have a seemingly endless supply of organs because the country applies the death penalty more freely than any other nation. By harvesting from executed prisoners, hospitals receive a steady stream of organs and can match donors' compatibility with recipients ahead of time. China doesn't say how many prisoners it kills each year, but legal scholars say it's probably between 3,000 and 8,000.

Authorities don't hide the fact that executed prisoners are a source for some organs, but they say it isn't a rampant practice.

Organs come from executed prisoners "only after they or their family members voluntarily sign donation documents," said Mao Qun'an, a spokesman for the Health Ministry. "In reality, there are very few cases of organs taken from executed prisoners. Some overseas media purposely concocted the rumor that China takes organs from executed prisoners at will. It is a malicious attack on China's judicial system."

A number of social and political issues intersect in the matter of China's organ transplants. First, there's a rising level of medical sophistication. The country is among the world leaders in the number of organ transplants each year. Secondly, as China veers toward a free-market economy, institutions such as hospitals are grasping at income-generating opportunities.

Accusations about harvesting organs from prisoners in China have existed for several decades. But they revived in recent weeks with reports in The Epoch Times, an overseas newspaper linked to Falun Gong, a banned spiritual movement. The newspaper charged that a secret labor camp near Shenyang, in China's northeastern region, contained Falun Gong detainees who were to be executed for the purpose of providing organs that the state would sell.

Deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said March 31 that the Bush administration took the charges "very seriously."

Such allegations can't be proved or disproved easily, and a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Beijing, Liu Jianchao, dismissed them roundly.