[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

Feb. 6




CHINA:

Investigative Report: A Hospital Built for Murder----Tens of thousands may have 
been killed so the Tianjin First Central Hospital in China could transplant 
organs for profit


By 2006, from his base at the Tianjin First Central Hospital, Dr. Shen 
Zhongyang had performed over 1,600 liver transplantations, boastful Chinese 
media reports say. Tianjin First, a hospital whose transplant ward he led, was 
just getting a new, well-funded building courtesy of the local government. Shen 
had patented his own surgical technique for rapid liver perfusion and 
extraction, and official transplantation websites were calling him China's 
"great transplant pioneer."

With all the celebration in the Chinese press of the doctor's life-saving 
operations, little attention was paid to the sources of the organs he 
transplanted. Dr. Shen's career was being built on a pile of corpses - that 
much was apparent - but the real question was: where did they come from?

The official explanation, that only formally executed prisoners are used, 
relies for its credibility on the number of transplants corresponding roughly 
with the number of executions. In Tianjin, that would be about 40 executions a 
year - a number derived from calculating the city's population against the 
national death row total.

Official numbers from the hospital are scarce, but penetrating that secrecy 
makes clear that Tianjin First Central Hospital, one of the busiest and most 
acclaimed in the country, for years having enjoyed extensive official backing, 
transplanted many times more organs than a supply of executed prisoners could 
support. Moreover, it appears to have transplanted many times more organs than 
it says it did.

In a detailed study of its activities based on publicly available documents, 
Epoch Times found sufficient evidence to throw into great doubt, if not 
demolish entirely, the official narrative of organ sourcing in China. This is 
simply due to the number of transplants: they are far too high.

That's a problem for China.

It means that the vast majority of organs transplanted at the Tianjin First 
Central Hospital - and by extension, other major hospitals around the country - 
could not have come from executed prisoners. Nor did they come from volunteers 
in any significant numbers, given that it is only very recently that a 
voluntary organ donation system has been attempted in China, and it is still in 
its fledgling stages.

This inevitably raises another question, which the Chinese authorities have 
found particularly vexing but have never addressed: where did the organs 
actually come from? What is the secret organ source that in the year 2000 
suddenly became the basis for a nationwide expansion of organ transplant 
capacity, for which the Tianjin First Central Hospital stands as an exemplar?

For years human rights researchers have alleged that the captive population of 
Falun Gong adherents, a persecuted Chinese spiritual practice, is the likely 
source. The gaping disparity in the Tianjin case, along with a variety of other 
circumstantial evidence, adds ammunition and urgency to their claims.

This issue has largely been dodged by luminaries in the international medical 
community. But the circumstantial evidence bolstering the alternative 
explanation - organized mass murder of prisoners of conscience, using the tools 
of medicine, in the service of profit, by the world's most populous nation - 
continues to grow, and with it frustration among doctors that nothing is being 
done.

A Surgeon Starting

In the late 1990s, Shen Zhongyang, a liver transplant surgeon, was at a 
definite ebb in his career: the organ transplantation industry in China was 
little developed, operations were risky, so willing recipients were few, and 
organ supplies were limited.

In May of 1994, he rendered Tianjin its first liver transplant after persuading 
a 37-year-old migrant worker suffering from cirrhosis to undergo a transplant. 
At the time, transplants were done free of charge for the recipients, largely 
due to the low success rate.

Years passed with no notable developments, and in 1998 Shen returned from Japan 
where he had obtained his M.D. Upon return, he spent his own money (100,000 
yuan, or $15,000) to set up a small transplant unit at the Tianjin First 
Central Hospital.

Progress was slow at first: by the end of 1998 his transplant unit performed 
just seven liver transplants. In 1999, they performed 24.

In 2000, things quickly turned around as a new organ supply abruptly came 
online. Over the next decade Shen Zhongyang did some of the briskest organ 
transplantation business in China.

In Tianjin, numbers kept going up: 209 liver transplants by January 2002; and 
then a cumulative total of 1,000 by the end of 2003, according to a report in 
Enorth Netnews, the mouthpiece of the Tianjin municipal government.

Tianjin First Central Hospital's successes are a microcosm of the Chinese organ 
transplantation system: its operations are opaque; paramilitary ties lurk in 
the background; organ procurement remains unexplained and rapid, suggestive of 
a pool of donors waiting to be selected from; and the surgical techniques are 
consistent with live or close-to-live harvesting from donors.

Doing the Build-Out

The most significant moment for the expansion of Tianjin First, an apparent 
sign of confidence of continued abundant organ supply, was the 130 million yuan 
($20 million) investment in December 2003 by the Tianjin Municipal Bureau of 
Health to construct a 17-story (including a ground and 2 basement levels) 
transplant building.

Named the Orient Organ Transplant Center, with a 500 bed capacity and floor 
space of 36,000 square-meters, it was to become a "comprehensive transplant 
center capable of liver, kidney, pancreas, bone, skin, hair, stem cell, heart, 
lung, cornea, and throat transplants," according to Enorth Netnews. The entire 
Tianjin First Central Hospital then consisted of an emergency ward, an 
outpatient center, and the transplant building towering above them both.

By 2004, while the Oriental Organ building was under construction, in order to 
accommodate demand, Shen???s transplant empire expanded to 5 branches sprinkled 
across Tianjin, Beijing, and Shandong Province. In their official materials, 
the group claimed to perform the highest number of liver transplants in the 
world, and the highest number of kidney transplants in China.

The Beijing branch was located in the General Hospital of the People's Armed 
Police, the Communist Party's 1-million strong paramilitary force, where Shen 
Zhongyang served as director of the transplant department.

If one transplant center in China had to be chosen for its notoriety, it would 
probably be the Orient. The facility became a major headache for Chinese 
authorities, Western apologists, and the official story behind China???s 
transplant industry.

Hospital With a History

Ethan Gutmann, a researcher whose 2014 book, "The Slaughter," documents what he 
says is the mass killing of Falun Gong prisoners of conscience for their 
organs, described the website as his "favorite party trick."

"I would speak to a college audience and ask anyone who had any doubts to visit 
the website on their smartphones," he said in an interview with Epoch Times 
shortly after the website advertising the services of the hospital was shut 
down in June 2014.

It was precisely this center that inspired an exasperated letter in early 2014 
from the normally deferential international transplantation establishment, 
rebuking China for flouting recent promises to no longer use organs from 
executed prisoners.

"The Tianjin website continues to recruit international patients who are 
seeking organ transplants," the letter co-signed by The Transplantation Society 
says. "The underlying abuse by these medical professionals and widespread 
collusion for profit are unacceptable."

It was a high-profile operation targeting wealthy customers with a premium, 
very rare product: fresh human organs available at a rapid turnaround, no 
questions asked.

That a center so large and sophisticated would be built, staffed, equipped, and 
operated at high capacity for nearly a decade, when China had practically no 
voluntary donations, has chilling implications, researchers say.

"It means there's an absolute conviction that you're going to find donors to 
supply those organs," said Maria Fiatarone Singh, a professor of health 
medicine at the University of Sydney, in a telephone interview.

"In the context of no voluntary donation system, it implies a complete belief 
that this unethical supply will be huge and continuous, and that there's a huge 
profit to make from it." Singh is a board member of Doctors Against Forced 
Organ Harvesting, a medical advocacy group that raises awareness about 
transplant abuse in China.

But how many transplants did Tianjin First actually conduct?

The Trouble With Numbers

It is extremely difficult to get an accurate handle on the actual number of 
organ transplants conducted in China over the years, either in aggregate, or 
even at a single hospital. In a closed society, information of this sort is 
highly politically sensitive.

China did not even have a national organ transplantation system until recently. 
It was a Wild West of hospitals competing for business, doing deals with organ 
brokers, and getting their hands on human supply however they could. 
Statistical integrity, or any kind of reliable statistics at all, are the least 
of the victims.

In the United States, finding out the number of organ transplants that take 
place is simple. The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, affiliated 
with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, maintains a database 
that can be queried by dozens of criteria. The total number of transplants 
performed in the United States from January to September in 2015, for example, 
was 23,134.

Other datasets provide specific hospital information. The Scientific Registry 
of Transplant Recipients is able to spit out a report showing detailed 
transplant information at any given transplant center. The most active in New 
York state, for example, is the NY Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia Univ. Medical 
Center. A report with data current as of April 2015 shows that it performed 110 
liver transplants in 2013 and 142 in 2014. The 60 page report provides an 
abundance of information about those on the waiting list, donor types, 
transplant rates, and more.

Nothing like this information is available on Chinese hospitals - and for good 
reason: it's a state secret.

Dr. Huang Jiefu, the Chinese official who interfaces with the rest of the world 
on organ transplantation policy, was remarkably frank about why numbers are so 
hard to pin down, in a rare interview with Chinese journalists last year. The 
interview was part of an intense run of publicity as Huang sought to get out 
the message (later debunked) that China was no longer using organs from 
executed prisoners.

"The death penalty is a state secret," Huang said. "Organs were sourced from 
executed prisoners. If you know the number of transplantations performed, then 
you would know the state secret."

The reporter pressed further, and Huang countered again: "The issue you are 
talking about is too sensitive. That's why I cannot tell you that clearly. If 
you think about it, you will understand. Because the country has no 
transparency, you don't know how the organs were obtained; the number of 
performed transplantations was also a secret."

But numbers inevitably seem to trickle out from the holes in even the Chinese 
Communist Party's formidable propaganda machine.

In the case of Tianjin First Central Hospital, there are several ways of 
getting them. While the procedure may have a certain monotony about it, let us 
consider each in turn.

The Official Graph

The 1st datapoint is simply a graph from a now defunct but archived page 
belonging to the Orient Organ Transplant Center, showing the cumulative liver 
transplants from 1998 to 2004. The yearly numbers grow almost geometrically: 9, 
24, 78, 129, 272, 289, and 800. These figures, however, are contradicted by 
figures in other official sources.

The same page advertises the waiting time for a liver transplant as 2 weeks - 
unheard of in countries with voluntary donation systems.

Livers are a useful organ for calculating how many executions must have been 
carried out for transplants, given that they are a vital organ, and a 
transplantation of a full liver requires a death. Given that executions in 
China have traditionally been the sole source of transplant organs - whether 
that has changed is another matter - the question of number becomes 
significant.

The problem with the graph is that it stops at 2004.

The Pastiche

Another method is to simply look at media reports that provide numbers. In this 
case, beginning in 2000, the number is 78 - same as above. The source is a puff 
piece about Shen Zhongyang in Science and Technology Daily titled "He brought 
liver transplant technique to the pinnacle of world medicine." A later source 
in 2000 gives a cumulative total of 100.

In 2001 there is no cumulative figure, but the annual total is 109 liver and 80 
kidney transplants, the sources being a Chinese medical encyclopedia and news 
reports.

In 2002 there is no annual figure, but the cumulative is 300, according to a 
profile of Shen Zhongyang.

In 2003 the cumulative total in Tianjin is 645 (though up to 400 other 
transplants were performed by the Tianjin First team in other hospitals around 
China, according to an official news report) and the annual 253.

This is when a budget is approved at the end of the year for the construction 
of the 17-story Oriental Organ Transplant Center.

In 2004, no specific yearly total was published - but the cumulative total 
stood at 1,000, according to a report on Medical Education Net, a large Chinese 
online medical encyclopedia.

In 2005, no cumulative total was published, but the yearly total sat at 647 
(according to an official, laudatory profile of Shen published in 2014.)

In 2006, 655 transplants were recorded, according to an official profile of 
Shen and a medical paper he authored. In that paper, he said that his center 
had surpassed the world record of liver transplants maintained by the 
University of Pittsburgh for 10 years.

And then ... radio silence.

Tianjin's Orient Organ Transplant Center officially opened on Sept. 1, 2006. It 
remains unclear why, right when the numbers would be expected to jump, annual 
data dries up.

Incidentally - or not - in March of 2006 allegations began emerging that Falun 
Gong prisoners were the major source of China's booming organ trade. Chinese 
officials dismissed the reports as nefarious propaganda, though never seriously 
refuted either their argument or inference.

In all available sources, only 2 numbers appear post-2006, both from the same 
source: a glowing profile of Shen Zhongyang by the Tianjin propaganda 
authorities.

The Official Profile

The official profile of Shen Zhongyang is published on ttwj.gov.cn. The website 
is run by the Office of the Tianjin Municipal Government Human Resources 
Leading Small Group, and serves as the mouthpiece for the Tianjin leadership. 
"The Tianjin Party Committee and government pays a great deal of attention to 
human resource work," the About Us section on the website notes.

The profile discusses the incredible success of Shen Zhongyang, his 
enterprising spirit helping the construction of the Chinese transplant 
industry, and provides a few transplant numbers.

The early figures are roughly the same as those above, and while after 2006 no 
precise numbers are given, the profile declares that "for the next 2 years it 
became the foremost liver transplant center by volume, and made the Orient 
Transplant Center the largest scale transplant center in Asia." It adds that as 
of the end of 2013, the Center had performed the most surgeries in China for 16 
years straight. Some of its techniques had become the "most advanced" in the 
world.

And, crucially, it provides two more numbers: A cumulative total of 5,000 liver 
transplants in 2010, and a cumulative total of "nearly 10,000" by the end of 
2014, supposedly a quarter of the national total.

Graphed, the series now looks like this:

Tianjin_First_Central_Hospital_cumulative_transplant_numbers__chartbuilder

Those numbers are already disturbingly high, and extremely difficult to fit 
into the official narrative of executed-prisoners-as-organ-source.

It is still unclear why annual numbers ceased after the major new transplant 
center was built, which calls into question whether the neat, rounded numbers 
can be trusted.

The real number of transplants, according to other records, may have in fact 
been much, much higher.

There are 3 indicators of this probability: anecdotes of a booming business in 
providing organs to Korean tourists; significant transplant figures by Shen 
Zhongyang's colleagues; and a guerrilla analysis derived from Tianjin First 
Central's own renovation records, dredged from an obscure Chinese database.

Korean Connection

Korean patients began streaming into China, and in particular Tianjin - just a 
90 minute flight from Seoul - in 2002, according to Li Lianjin, head nurse at 
Tianjin First Central Hospital. The hospital had provided organ transplants to 
over 500 Korean patients between 2002 and 2006, Li said.

Li spoke to Phoenix Weekly, a magazine run by the Hong Kong-based, pro-Beijing 
Phoenix television station. The article was titled "An investigation of tens of 
thousands of foreigners coming to China for organ transplants."

All this activity took place before the Oriental Organ Transplant Center came 
online in September of 2006.

So doctors improvised. One third of their original 12-story building was 
converted to house transplant patients; the 8th floor of another hospital (the 
International Cardiovascular Hospital) was also used for Korean recipients; and 
the 24th and 25th floors of a nearby hotel were also reserved for those 
waiting. 2 nurses were assigned to that location. "Even so, we're still short 
of beds," Li said.

Tianjin was an agreeable destination for Korean organ tourists because in Korea 
they could typically only receive partial liver transplants from living donors. 
But in China, they could get whole livers, "and the donor livers are of 
excellent quality," the report says.

Procedures were also expedited: foreign patients would simply fax their medical 
records then fly in. Waiting times were extremely short by international 
standards. "Originally, patients had to wait about a week. But now, because 
more and more people have joined the queue, the waiting times are longer. The 
longest time now is a bit over 3 months," the report says.

3 months is still a remarkably short waiting time to guarantee a liver.

The Chosun Ilbo, a large Korean daily newspaper, reported that Tianjin First 
Central performed 44 liver transplants in 1 week in December 2004, including 24 
in a day (including kidney transplants), according to the Phoenix report.

Patients from other countries were also there: from Japan, Malaysia, Egypt, 
Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. The cafe in 
the ward on the 4th floor became an "international club," where patients of 
different ethnicities met to exchange their experiences, reported Chosun Ilbo.

The report includes this anecdote: "Surgeons at the hospital are busy every 
day, shuttling between wards and operating rooms. They have no time to greet 
each other. Every day they mumble the same thing: 'Today I'm so busy, ten 
surgeries a day.' Some doctors spend the entire night in surgery."

No numbers are given in the report, but it at least confirms that the staff at 
Tianjin First had been extremely busy leading up to the completion of the new 
transplant building.

Staffing

The Oriental Organ Transplant Center has 110 doctors participating in liver and 
kidney transplants, among whom 46 are chief surgeons and physicians, and 13 
attending physicians, according to the World Organization to Investigate the 
Persecution of Falun Gong, a network of researchers who performed the 
monumental task of cataloging the staff of hundreds of hospitals around China.

Media reports, speeches by a select number of Shen Zhongyang's colleagues, as 
well as information on the hospital's own website and other records, indicate 
many of them had each completed a large number of transplants themselves.

For instance, by 2011, Vice President of the hospital Zhu Zhijun had completed 
at least 1,400 liver transplants, 100 of which were partial liver donations 
from living relatives, according to his profile on the website "We Doctors 
Group," a directory for Chinese doctors.

As of July 2006, associate chief surgeon Pan Cheng had personally performed 
over 1,000 liver transplants, and 1,600 liver graft procurements.

Chief surgeon Gao Wei completed over 800 liver transplants after ten years of 
practice, according to his undated profile on "Good Doctors Online," another 
well-known Chinese doctors database.

Associate chief surgeon Song Wenli from the renal transplant department 
performed around 2,000 kidney transplants; associate chief surgeon Mo Chunbo 
over 1,500, both according to undated profiles on the same site.

Some of those operations did not result in the killing of a donor - hundreds of 
donations were from living relatives, for instance (if they were indeed from 
relatives) - but many of them must have.

If the average total transplant volume of these surgeons was simply 
extrapolated to the rest of the staff - not necessarily a reliable methodology 
- the total transplant volume, as of 2014, would immediately be several times 
greater than the official number of 10,000. It is clear from just a few doctor 
profiles, however, that the figures are beginning to approach the totals 
announced by the hospital.

Of course, the doctors whose profiles are available may simply be outliers. Or 
they may be inflating their records, or have participated in joint operations - 
all distinct possibilities. In any case, even given drastic discounts, the 
surgeons' own organ numbers seem to far outstrip the official ones.

But building records indicate that the transplant volume could be much higher 
than even that.

Renovating a Transplant Center

Given that the municipal government spent about $20 million (130 million yuan) 
in building the Orient Organ Transplant Center, common sense dictates that 
there would be an intended use for it.

But this is China. Huge amounts of infrastructure spending is wasteful, often 
used to prop up local economic figures rather than create productive 
businesses. Thus, the mere fact of construction and renovation cannot tell us 
everything.

There is compelling evidence, however, that the new building was put into 
immediate and extensive use. This comes from the hospital's own building and 
renovation records in the China Construction and Remodeling Database, a public 
resource maintained by a variety of officially-affiliated agencies, providing 
details of construction and renovation work from across China.

These documents show what seems to have been deliberately hidden in every other 
available Chinese source: that it was full speed ahead at Tianjin First after 
the new transplant center came online in 2006.

The key evidence is a 22 page PDF file, available for download after creating a 
username and password on the site, which discusses the further renovations to 
the new building, completed in 2008.

The renovation described in the document is primarily to the main building, the 
outpatient building, and the emergency ward (the transplant building is left 
untouched), and included the addition of insulation to the facade "in order to 
save energy and increase the comfort of patients." Another floor would be also 
be added to the outpatient building, taking it from 3 to 4 stories.

The key line, though, is this: "There is a daily average of 2,000 outpatient 
services conducted per day; the bed utilization rate is 86 %; kidney and liver 
transplantation beds are at 90 % utilization."

The total number of beds devoted to transplantation at Tianjin First during 
this period was 500, at the Oriental Organ Transplant Center. Total bed count 
at the hospital sat at 1,226, with 726 originally available. Total floor space 
was 46,558 square meters, the document states.

Thus, according to these documents, 450 beds were used for transplants, whether 
livers, kidneys, or other organs.

According to Tianjin's advertising materials for foreign patients, the total 
time an organ tourist would expect to stay in the hospital could be between one 
and 2 months, depending on the wait time for an organ, and how long it takes to 
convalesce.

If an average patient stay was 30 days per transplant, then 5,400 transplants 
per year would have taken place at the Oriental Organ Transplant Center from 
late 2006 until the end of 2008. If the stay was two months, the total would be 
2,700.

It is impossible to know the actual average length of stay at Tianjin First, 
but transplant surgeons who reviewed this report considered that either of 
those scenarios would be plausible.

But was this high level of utilization a mere blip in the 2 years following the 
opening of the new center? No, according to other renovation reports. It soon 
became the norm.

The next available datapoint on transplant-relevant bed usage rates at Tianjin 
First comes from a profile of the hospital on Enorth Netnews, the official 
Tianjin government mouthpiece, on June 25, 2014.

It says that it had "made progress" across various departments in 2013, and 
achieved a bed usage rate of 131.1 %, an increase of 5.7 % from 2012. (The 
report does not make clear how a utilization rate of over 100 % is possible, 
but it is common in Chinese hospitals to see extra beds wedged between 
established bedding places.)

By 2013 it had also added 300 beds, bringing its total number now to 1,500. The 
hospital had also adjusted the number of beds allocated to different 
departments, including the organ transplant center, though it did not specify 
how many beds were allocated to each area.

It is difficult to know how many of the 1,500 total beds, or 500 Orient Organ 
Transplant Center beds, were used for organ transplants in 2012 and 2013.

But there is a consistency in the reported utilization rates: 90 % utilization 
reported in 2009, and 130 % for 2013.

Whether that ratio plummeted for four years before soaring - or slowly grew, as 
the trend of official transplant numbers (though clearly manipulated) indicate 
- is impossible to tell, though a steady increase seems most intuitive and 
internally consistent.

Yet more construction took place in 2015 at a newly opened site, including an 
outpatient service able to process between 6,000 to 7,000 people per day, an 
emergency center able to process 1,200 daily, an underground carpark able to 
hold 2,000 vehicles, and a helipad.

The new construction, which began in July 2015 and was scheduled for completion 
at the end of 2017, will have a total of 2,000 beds. It is unclear how many of 
them will be devoted to transplants.

Guerrilla Numbers

What numbers emerge from this kaleidoscope of activity?

The hospital would have us believe that when their new transplant center came 
online, giving them hundreds of additional beds and much more sophisticated 
facilities, there was no increase in the transplant rate.

The only official data for the post-2006 period is a figure of 5,000 cumulative 
transplants in 2010, and 14,000 in 2014 - a neat, linear increase.

But the facts paint a different picture: anecdotal reports from Korean organ 
recipients say that occupancy was far more than the hospital could handle; 
building records showing the need for continued expansion after 2006; and 
impressive staff resumes showing thousands of transplants from a few of the 
over 100 doctors.

With utilization of the 500 beds at Oriental Organ Transplant Center near or 
above capacity from 2007 to end of 2013, the total number of transplants could 
range anywhere from around 20,000 to around 60,000, depending on the length of 
stay of patients. Only very rough estimates are possible given the many 
unknowns.

This is far higher than the claimed cumulative total of 10,000 liver 
transplants over 15 years reported in official sources. That number already 
presents an awkward dilemma to explain away - but the numbers based simply on 
bed utilization rates are far higher than any known source of organs is able to 
explain.

Of course, there is no way to know whether in its building renovation documents 
hospital staff are simply lying. But it's unclear what incentive the hospital 
would have for fabricating the data on its renovation plans, submitted to a 
national database years after the funds had been committed, and the 
construction completed, by municipal authorities. Floor space or numbers of 
beds are tangible infrastructure that cannot easily be falsified, and bed 
occupancy ratios, from 2 separate official sources, show the same upward 
trajectory of high-usage from late 2006 until end 2013.

There are many caveats to these estimates, however, including the fact that the 
number of executions implied by the bed occupancy rates is not clear. The ratio 
is likely not 1:1, given that the donation of a single kidney, to a relative, 
for instance, is neither fatal nor unethical. Tianjin First certainly engaged 
in this form of transplant activity. Further, one death can yield multiple 
transplant organs.

At the same time, Chinese media reports contain anecdotes of Shen Zhongyang 
going through several livers - each bringing death even as it carried potential 
life - for a single patient.

Given the multiple variables and vast unknowns, it would be foolhardy to 
suggest a firm estimate for the number of executions that may have taken place 
to fuel the business of Tianjin First. But whatever the figure, the 
implications are the same: the need for a mysterious, unknown organ source.

So, where did the organs come from?

Prisoners Can't Explain It

China's only serious source of organs through these years is, according to the 
official explanation, executed prisoners.

In an interview with China Health News in January 2015, Huang Jiefu, the 
official who serves as the voice of China's transplant policy, says: "For a 
long time China has not been able to establish a national donation system ... 
from the 1980s until 2009, there were only 120 cases of citizen donations. 
China is the country with the lowest donation rate in the world."

The number of executions in China is a state secret and no numbers are 
provided, but estimates have long been made by third party organizations. Those 
vary from 12,000 to 2,400 per year during the period in question, according to 
Duihua, a U.S.-based human rights organization focused on China.

If the nationwide death penalty was 6,000, for the purpose of our analysis, the 
number of executions taking place in Tianjin would be about 42 (given a 
population of about 7 million and a proportional distribution of executions.) 
If the number of executions nationwide was 5,000, there would only be 35 
executions in Tianjin.

But many prisoners are not eligible organ donors because of blood diseases, 
drug addiction, age, and other disqualifying maladies. Procedures around 
executions involve the local courts and prisons, which have their own 
relationships with hospitals and doctors, as indicated by abundant testimony 
from Chinese officials and defectors. The fief-like nature of the Chinese 
bureaucracy means it???s not as though Tianjin First could have its pick from 
any execution taking place anywhere in China.

In particular, Tianjin First's build-up was not an isolated phenomenon: dozens, 
if not hundreds of other transplant hospitals in China were establishing 
training programs for surgeons, building new facilities, and promoting their 
ability to deliver fresh organs to recipients in short order - weeks or months 
at most.

In 2014 Xinhua, the state mouthpiece, reported that in past years there were 
600 hospitals in China, vying and contending for organ sources. All of those 
transplant centers needed organs, too.

And then there are the unnerving advertisements on the hospital's website, 
which have since been taken down.

"It is true that the source of organ supply are fairly abundant in China 
compared with that in western countries," an archived page on the site says 
blithely in 2008, in English, obviously targeting foreign transplant tourists.

In the guide for prospective recipients, it outlines the few steps necessary to 
get a new organ. There's no waiting list. One simply emails the paperwork, pays 
$500, and gets on a plane. Step nine is "Staying in hospital to be carefully 
checked-up, to be well treated while waiting for a matching donor (1 month ??? 
)."

The website's landing page in Chinese, on the other hand, advertised a waiting 
time of 2 weeks.

In another section, the question is posed: "What are the initial procedures 
while arriving?" The answer: "Once your data are set, the hospital will start 
to search all over China for an organ that matches."

"Just that 1 line is so shocking," said Maria Singh, the University of Sydney 
professor who sits on the board of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, in 
a phone interview. "We'll search the country far and wide for your organ,!" she 
continued. "Searching for your organ? To search the country for a donor when 
there is no registry for donors. What does that mean? It means that absolutely 
they're looking for the guy they can kill for your surgery. It's just 
outrageous. It's pretty hard to believe."

In a recent documentary with this very title - "Hard to Believe" - Arthur 
Caplan, the founding director of the division of medical ethics at New York 
University Medical Center, explains the contrast in starker terms: "In the 
U.S., in Europe, you have to be dead first in order to be an organ donor. In 
China, they make you dead."

This rapid matching from what appears to be a pool of prematched donors is 
consistent with both death row prisoner use and harvesting from prisoners of 
conscience.

But when it comes to volume, death row prisoners simply could not sustain the 
kind of supply Tianjin needed. Of course, by itself this is positive proof of 
nothing - except that the organs had to come from somewhere else.

Recognizing this is the critical first step in any further exploration of the 
problem: if the organs aren't from volunteer donors or executed criminals, then 
they must be coming from somewhere else.

"Anyone who is even remotely familiar with the trends of organ donations 
worldwide cannot accept the claims of miraculously replacing a huge and well 
established organ source from executed prisoners within a single year by 
voluntarily donated organs," said Dr. Jacob Lavee, the president of the Israel 
Transplantation Society and director of the heart transplantation unit at Tel 
Aviv University???s medical center, in an email.

Lavee continued: "If indeed the use of organs from formally executed prisoners 
has dwindled, the large number of organ transplants which, apparently, continue 
to be performed in Tianjin and elsewhere in China, must have an alternative 
organ source, which needs to be explained."

Into that breach come researchers who have raised allegations of a hidden and 
largely overlooked mass murder. Coupled with volumes of other evidence, they 
describe a crime against humanity in which the doctors stand alongside the 
murderers; the cause of death is the surgery itself, as organs are drained of 
blood and pumped with cold preservative chemicals.

David Matas, the co-author of a seminal report on organ harvesting from Falun 
Gong, said in a telephone interview: "What this research does is pose the 
question; it doesn't answer the question. But it does put into doubt the 
established answers that have been given."

The Forbidden Question

There's a potential clue about the organ source in one of the many hats that 
Dr. Shen Zhongyang is found wearing: he appears on the website of the Beijing 
Armed Police Forces General Hospital, where he serves as director of the organ 
transplantation department, in full paramilitary regalia. The People's Armed 
Police are a domestic standing army of 1.2 million, deployed around the country 
and mobilized to suppress riots.

The most fundamental obstacle in performing large numbers of organ transplants 
is a donor source. Given that China had no voluntary, open transplant system, 
political connections, often mediated through brokers, have been the only way 
to get bodies.

As Huang Jiefu himself remarked in an interview in early 2015: "Our country is 
very big. This source of using prisoner organs, this kind of situation 
naturally would come to have all kinds of murky and difficult problems in it. 
You know what I'm trying to say? It became filthy. It became murky and 
intractable. It became an extremely sensitive, extremely complicated area, 
basically a forbidden area." He then went on to blame the abuse of organ 
transplantation in China on Zhou Yongkang, the deposed former security czar. 
Prisoners of conscience, of course, never came up.

Theories about how Tianjin First Central turned on the organ spigot thus 
revolve around its political ties, including that of Shen Zhongyang, who became 
a member of the Communist Party's faux advisory body, the Chinese People's 
Political and Consultative Conference, in 2013. Shen is also a member of the 
standing committee of the Chinese Peasants' and Workers' Democratic Party, 1 of 
the 8 legal political parties in China that give a window dressing of democracy 
while stiffly following the Party line.

But it's his paramilitary title that is most significant for organ sourcing, 
given that military and paramilitary hospitals are plugged into the security 
apparatus that hold hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, and are 
believed to be involved in much of the illegal trafficking in human organs.

A handful of investigators have been tracking the military-organ nexus for 
years. In his 2014 book "The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and 
China's Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem," American journalist Ethan 
Gutmann marshals a mass of evidence, collected over nearly a decade, to show 
that practitioners of Falun Gong, a traditional spiritual discipline, have been 
primary targets for organ harvesting.

Falun Gong, a practice of self-cultivation which involves exercises and moral 
teachings, has been persecuted in China since 1999, after the Party leader at 
the time, Jiang Zemin, declared it a challenge to Party rule. By the late 
1990s, the number of people practicing it seemed to exceed the membership of 
the Communist Party.

Hundreds of hospitals around China, like Tianjin First, all saw a dramatic 
spike in organ transplants in 2000, the year after the persecution began in 
July 1999.

"There's no national organ distribution at this point. There's no organ 
donation system. The official answer is the death penalty," says David Matas. 
"But then you've got organ size and blood type compatibility issues, hepatitis 
in prison, very short waiting times, all of that."

With no official explanation for the battery of unanswered questions, 
suspicions, and mounting circumstantial evidence, "you're pushed back into what 
myself, David Kilgour, and Ethan Gutmann have been saying," says Matas. "That 
it's prisoners of conscience." He continued: "The bigger the scale, the bigger 
the requirement for an explanation, and that explanation is not forthcoming. 
There's no obvious other source."

Gutmann, asked what he thought the likely source of Tianjin's organs was in a 
telephone interview, said: "I think the majority of these organs are being 
sourced from Falun Gong." He added: "There has been a large resident population 
of Falun Gong, of between 1/2 a million to a million at any given time within 
the laogai system through this entire period," using the Chinese term that 
refers to the system of labor camps.

"This is the only potential source, numerically, which they could be pulling 
from. There may be some Uyghur Muslims and Tibetans in there too, though the 
rates of disappearance are not as high for those communities."

Gutmann's interviews of hundreds of refugees found that 1 in 5, and sometimes 2 
in 5, Falun Gong detainees were subject to blood testing while in captivity. 
Those released from labor camps also describe disappearances of those tested. 
In covertly recorded telephone calls with overseas investigators since 2006, 
doctors and nurses in China, believing they are speaking to a fellow doctor or 
the relative of an individual in urgent need of a new liver, have acknowledged 
that they source their organs from Falun Gong prisoners.

In his book, Gutmann describes the exams, which his interviewee, a Falun Gong 
refugee, thought little of. "What she described was terrifying and inexplicable 
- rather than the doctor administering a normal physical examination, it was 
more like he was already picking over a fresh corpse ... I remember feeling an 
unfamiliar chill as my safe, hedging cloak of skepticism fell away for a 
moment."

Tianjin Blood Exams

As in prisons and labor camps around the country, there are anecdotal reports 
of prisoners of conscience in Tianjin being singled out for blood and urine 
tests during the period in which Tianjin First Central was at its peak of 
operations.

These accounts are drawn from Minghui.org, a clearinghouse of first-hand 
information about Falun Gong in China. Articles on the site are typically 
submitted by practitioners of Falun Gong, friends, or family members, often 
documenting their experiences under persecution. The site is widely used by by 
academics and human rights researchers studying the practice or its repression, 
and is considered a reliable source for insight into the Falun Gong community 
in China.

A simple search across Minghui.org for the terms "blood test" and "Tianjin" 
reveals 9,720 results. Many of these are likely duplicates or do not refer to 
personal experiences of blood test at Tianjin, but a large number appear to do 
so.

A typical case, submitted on Nov. 9, 2007, is titled "The persecution I 
witnessed and experienced at the Tianjin Women???s Prison." Like many 
submissions on Minghui, the report is anonymous, for obvious reasons. It says: 
"The Third Squadron in the prison specifically targeted Falun Gong ... the 
squadron leader of every Third Squadron in each section of the jail called out 
the Falun Gong practitioners 1 by 1, and gave them blood and urine tests. They 
didn't call out criminal prisoners. The squadron leader said it was because 
they wanted to look after the Falun Gong prisoners." The prison is a little 
over 30 minutes away from the hospital.

The author, reflecting back on the experience, writes "I still wonder where 
those practitioners who disappeared ended up."

Other cases of blood tests are reported at the Qingbowa Re-education Through 
Labor camp. Qingbowa is a 23 minute drive from Tianjin First. The Shuangkou 
Re-education Through Labor is another camp in which, according to reports on 
Minghui, Falun Gong practitioners report having their blood tested while in 
detention. Shuangkou is also about a 30 minute drive from Tianjin First. Falun 
Gong practitioner Hua Lianyou reports having her blood taken in June 2013 in 
the Binhai Prison, which is about 45 minutes from Tianjin First. Xu Haitang, a 
practitioner of Falun Gong, reports having her blood drawn in June 2006 at the 
Banqiao Women's Labor Camp, which is about 90 minutes away.

Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, the Washington, D.C.-based medical 
advocacy group, conducted its own preliminary analysis on these reports of 
blood tests on Minghui, writing: "In screening of the survivor reports it was 
noted that medical exams were not unique occurrences. While single cases as 
outliers might lack significance, this data reveals a large number of victim 
accounts that are not isolated instances, and suggests a systematic use of 
various medical exams imposed upon detained Falun Gong practitioners."

Of course, none of this is proof that the blood tests were for the purpose of 
blood matching for organ transplant.

But it is also true that the actual reason for blood and urine tests is 
unclear, and even confusing: the incarcerated individuals are, after all, in 
prison due to a campaign, led from the highest levels of the Communist Party, 
to eradicate their belief system. They are typically subject to torture, 
electric shocks, and beatings in detention, in an attempt to have them renounce 
their beliefs. Falun Gong had been slandered in the state press, and adherents 
to it incited against, dehumanized, mocked, and declared to be enemies of the 
state. Thousands of deaths from torture have been reported, and no 
investigation or punishment takes place because of the state-sanctioned nature 
of the campaign. So why would prison officials be extracting blood for the 
benefit of the captives?

It's this context that has led analysts to believe that the blood tests and 
disappearances in captivity of Falun Gong, along with the transplant boom that 
took place soon after the persecution began, are most likely explained by mass 
organ harvesting.

The Awkward Silence

Even if the international medical community wished to refrain from concluding 
preemptively on a massive crime against humanity, one might expect at least a 
demand for further attention and investigation into just where the organs are 
coming from, and the extent to which prisoners of conscience have been 
targeted. It would, after all, constitute one of the most disturbing mass 
crimes of the 21st century.

Indeed, a number of respected organizations and individuals have made clear 
that they see a serious problem, and that the idea of mass harvesting from 
Falun Gong is not to be relegated to the realm of science-fiction conspiracy 
theories. The United Nations Committee Against torture in 2008 said: "The State 
party should immediately conduct or commission an independent investigation of 
the claims that some Falun Gong practitioners have been ... used for organ 
transplants and take measures, as appropriate, to ensure that those responsible 
for such abuses are prosecuted and punished."

Arthur Caplan, the ethicist at New York University's Medical Center, lent his 
name to a 2012 petition calling on the White House to "Investigate and publicly 
condemn organ harvesting from Falun Gong believers in China." In an interview 
at the time, he said: "I think you can't stay quiet about killing for organs. 
It's too heinous. It's just too wrong. It violates all ideas of human rights."

The recent documentary film "Human Harvest," which directly addresses the 
question of harvesting from Falun Gong, won a prestigious Peabody Award in 
2014, the broadcast equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize. The awarding of a Peabody 
requires the unanimous support of the 17 board members, who in their summary of 
the documentary described a "highly profitable, monstrous system of forced 
organ donation."

Some countries, including Israel and Taiwan, have adopted legislation aimed at 
preventing their citizens traveling to China to receive organs, after the 
reports of harvesting from Falun Gong emerged.

All this makes the reaction of some of the key players in the international 
transplant scene - the kind of individuals whose imprimatur would lend 
sufficient public heft to the allegations as to prompt broader international 
censure and calls for investigation - all the more jarring. They have been 
uncurious about the question of crimes against humanity, adopting instead a 
complaisant stance, part of Kissingerian-styled bid to help the project of 
China???s organ transplant reform.

Dr. Francis Delmonico, the former head of The Transplantation Society and 
previously the key international liaison with China on transplant issues, wrote 
in an email: "My only comment is to encourage the assessment of the Tianjin 
First Central Hospital to report verifiable data." The word "only" had been put 
in bold.

Doctors like Jeremy Chapman, the Sydney-based former head of The 
Transplantation Society, and Dr. Michael Millis, a liver surgeon at the 
University of Chicago medical school who has worked closely with Chinese 
officials, have also evinced little interest in pursuing the tough questions. 
When pressed about potential Falun Gong organ sourcing, Millis remarked in an 
interview with Martina Keller, a journalist with the German magazine Die ZEIT, 
"That is not my sphere of influence. There are many things in the world that 
are not my focus or interest."

The current head of the The Transplantation Society, Dr. Philip O'Connell, and 
the World Health Organization's liaison to China on organ transplant issues, 
Dr. Jose Nu???ez, did not respond to emails. The WHO's Guiding Principles on 
organ transplantation require that the entire organ transplantation process be 
transparent and open to scrutiny - yet WHO officials have done little to make 
such public demands on China.

Responding to the relative dearth of attention afforded the question of the 
missing organs by doctors, Kirk Allison, a professor of ethics at the 
University of Minnesota, wrote in an email: "This kind of curiosity matters. 
First, because truth matters; moral hazard matters; human rights matter; and 
the lives of the exploited, even if dead, matter. They have a moral claim on 
us."

Dr. Lavee, the respected Israeli heart surgeon, wrote in an email: "I feel 
embarrassed that my colleagues worldwide do not feel, like me, the moral duty 
to request China to open its gates for an independent, thorough inspection of 
its current transplant system by the international transplant community."

He added: "As a son of a Holocaust survivor, I feel obliged to not repeat the 
dreadful mistake made by the International Red Cross visit to the 
Theresienstadt Nazi concentration camp in 1944, in which it was reported to be 
a pleasant recreation camp."

(source: The Epoch Times)