In June, a report examining over 700 hospitals in China was published alleging that the Communist Party has been conducting a secret industrialized slaughter of prisoners of conscience for their organs. The researchers met with no substantive rebuttal, and key leaders in the international transplantation field have given a nod to some of its important conclusions.
The response from the global transplantation establishment has, however, been muted. Top transplantation officials did not express outrage, nor make known their concern over claims of transplant medicine being used as a new form of mass murder.
Nor did they submit polite questions to the Chinese authorities, enquiring about the origin of the surfeit of human organs that have fueled the massive, sustained surge of transplants in China since 2000. The report, authored by investigators Ethan Gutmann, David Kilgour, and David Matas, estimates that between 60,000 and 100,000 transplants were performed each year between 2000 and 2015, with the most likely source for the organs being prisoners of conscience.
Instead, when The Transplantation Society (TTS) holds its biennial conference in Hong Kong this August, China will be the star.
In sessions like “The New Era of Organ Transplantation in China” and “Transplantation Reform in China,” Chinese officials will have the opportunity to tell thousands of medical professionals at the industry’s foremost gathering that they have thoroughly reformed their system, basking in renewed global standing and legitimacy without having passed a single new law—and without a single doctor or official held to account for what has been described as genocide.
Ethical Questions
At the conference in August, two troubling issues stand out, say transplantation watchdogs. The first is that clinical research by Chinese doctors may have been based on organs obtained unethically. The second is that top TTS executives will be sharing a dais with the Chinese military doctors and transplant surgeons who are accused of engaging in the mass killing of innocents.
In the most remarkable case, one well-known Chinese doctor leads a bizarre double life: he is a top liver surgeon, but he also serves as a leader of the Communist Party’s agitprop organ dedicated to inciting hatred against Falun Gong, a persecuted spiritual practice that researchers say is heavily targeted for organ harvesting.
