On Aug. 4, 2012, the Ministry of Public Security announced that the police had busted 28 organ trafficking gangs. On Sept. 9, Caixing Magazine published an article describing in detail the trial of one of these cases.
This report claimed that a criminal named Zheng Wei had organized a network. Zheng’s network searched for a potential organ donor who wanted to sell one of his own kidneys, set up the facility for harvesting the organ, got the forged legal documents from the court, including the fake or real execution certificate and signed consent forms, and transported the organ.
The kidneys finally turned up in the operating room of a most prominent hospital, the 304 Hospital of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which is the First Affiliated Hospital of the General Hospital of the PLA, also known as the 301 Hospital. All Chinese leaders are treated in this hospital.
For a regular criminal, a member of a street gang, creating a sophisticated organ transplant system by himself would be almost impossible.
According to the prosecutor, Zheng has only been involved in the illegal organ harvesting business for three years. Obviously, he doesn’t have the knowledge, the power, or the connections to establish this kind of organ-supply system.
Zheng was just filling a hole in the existing system. Three years ago, Zheng Wei met the top transplant surgeon in the 304 Hospital. The surgeon complained to him that he couldn’t meet the quota that the hospital assigned to him due to a lack of organs. The quota is usually set according to the previous year’s production.
