Bitter Harvest: China’s ‘Organ Donation’ Nightmare ~ When Wang Lijun made his break for the US consulate in Chengdu on the night of February 6th 2012, he was in a unique position to reveal a series of damaging stories about his superior, Bo Xilai: Bo’s familial connection to the suspected murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, siphoning of Chongqing’s public funds, and shakedowns of local criminal and triad elements. As former head of the Chongqing Public Security Bureau, Wang also knew that Bo, as Chongqing party secretary, had engaged in surveillance of Politburo members, potentially implying that Bo and other players aligned with Jiang Zemin’s faction—most prominently, Zhou Yongkang, secretary of the powerful Political and Legislative Affairs Committee (PLAC)—were thinking about seizing power. Faced with the complexity of China’s leadership transition crisis, most Western editors played up the Sopranos aspect of the sordid tale, fixing on the alleged Heywood murder, essentially the same interpretation being relentlessly pushed by the Chinese Communist Party–controlled media, and allowed an even more sinister story to slip by virtually unnoticed. On March 23rd, China’s vice minister of health, Huang Jiefu, publicly declared the country’s intention to end “organ donations” from executed prisoners. Yet the euphemism didn’t conceal the reality, for on the night of February 6th, Wang was in a unique position to reveal one more story—specifically, how the party has been harvesting the organs of their political enemies for years. Wang’s rise, paralleling that of his patron Bo Xilai, goes back to the early years of the last decade and the northeastern Chinese province of Liaoning. As governor there, Bo gained a reputation for decisive, ruthless leadership, a standard route to the Politburo. As his protégé, Wang directed the Public Security Bureau of Jinzhou and ran a medical entity, opaquely identified as the “Jinzhou City Public Security Bureau On-site Psychological Research Center.” It was here, according to an official Chinese account of a medical innovation award ceremony held in 2006, that Wang oversaw “several thousand intensive on-site cases” of organ transplantation. These were not relatives sparing an extra kidney for a loved one. It was surgery to remove any physical part that carried retail potential from individuals selected by the state. Transplanted into new recipients, foreign and Chinese alike, a kidney could go for $60,000, a liver $90,000, with hearts, lungs, and corneas fetching what might be termed a seasonal price. Judging by the photographs in which he is shown clad in scrubs, lecturing surgeons while a patient lies on a gurney, Wang was a hands-on manager. In his acceptance speech, Wang explained that he found the act of transplant followed by lethal injection to be “soul stirring.” Who were the victims of this “surgical procedure”? The 2006 account sheds no light on this question, but it’s no longer a fool’s errand to try to answer it. Cumulative evidence has been building for six years and the first medical witnesses have recently forsaken the anonymity of their exile to speak about the organ industry in their former homeland. In February 2012, the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) found the Wang awards ceremony hidden in plain sight on multiple Chinese websites and has just revealed a new investigation into the harvesting of prisoners of conscience that sheds light on the Politburo’s culpibality as a central player. To fully understand the party’s vulnerability to these charges, it is necessary to briefly trace the development of organ harvesting over the last three decades. According to extensive documentation complied by Harry Wu, the preeminent dissident scholar of China’s labor camps, and the Laogai Research Foundation, the Chinese state began harvesting the organs of death-row criminals—those charged with murder, rape, and other capital crimes—on an ad hoc basis in the early 1980s. It was a simple procedure: a legal execution was followed by a military doctor harvesting the kidneys, often in makeshift conditions. By the early 1990s, according to my interviews with medical personnel, the infrastructure evolved and these procedures became widespread. One doctor, who spoke anonymously because he still practices in China, vividly described a scene in 1992—an execution ground near the city of Guangzhou filled with specialized white vans from every major hospital in the region. Confined to the medical van, his surgical task, to remove the liver and the kidneys from a man who had just been executed by a shot through the heart, was technically simple but emotionally complicated by the mark of a wire around the man’s neck, indicating that the police had forcibly prevented this particular man from speaking up in court. In 1994, Nijat Abudureyimu was a policeman in a specialized Xinjiang unit that focused on political prisoners. His first hint that the routine procedure of harvesting had begun a macabre evolution came from a fellow policeman, who happened to overhear screams coming from one of the harvesting vans. A Uighur surgeon from the same region, Dr. Enver Tohti, recalls an execution ground in 1995: a prisoner shot in the chest, not to kill, but to send the body into deep shock, minimizing the squirming and contractions that could make harvesting problematic. Under his supervisor’s watchful eye, Tohti performed a live surgical extraction of the man’s liver and kidneys. Tohti’s account was confirmed by Abudureyimu’s discussions with his unit’s head surgeon in 1996. In short, live organ harvesting was pioneered by 1994 and was a significant medical practice throughout at least one Chinese province by 1996. Following the Ghulja Incident of 1997—a Muslim demonstration followed by a massive government crackdown throughout Xinjiang—a Uighur nurse, who also spoke anonymously but has agreed to testify before the US Congress if ever called, claims that, along with euthanizing of Uighur babies, the first harvesting of organs from a Uighur political demonstrator occurred about six months following the crackdown. That timing matches the interview with a young doctor (who has also agreed to testify) who was ordered to begin blood-testing prisoners in the political wing of an Urumqi prison on behalf of highly placed party officials in search of viable organs. These political prisoners were not on death row, so a major legal and ethical barrier had quietly been breached. According to the young doctor, in 1998 the practice of harvesting organs from political prisoners accelerated, with military hospitals leading the way. Then the trail goes cold, and witness testimony or documentation referring to harvesting from prisoners of conscience disappears for several years. Through the efforts of two Canadian human rights lawyers, David Kilgour and David Matas, WOIPFG, and my extensive interviews with refugees—former prisoners, labor-camp personnel, and security insiders—we can collectively reconstruct the next decade of organ harvesting in detail... Continues @ nexusilluminati.blogspot.au/2013/06/bitter-harvest-chinas-organ-donation.html by Ethan Gutmann
Posted on: Tue, 16 Jul 2013 10:29:23 +0000
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