Examining China’s Organ Transplantation System: The Nexus of Security, Medicine, and Predation / Part 1

 SOURCE:

https://jamestown.org/program/examining-chinas-organ-transplantation-system-the-nexus-of-security-medicine-and-predation-part-1-the-growth-of-chinas-transplantation-system-since-2000/

 China’s Organ Transplantation System: The Nexus of Security, Medicine, and Predation / Part 1

                               By

              : Matthew P. Robertson

image: "The Chen Jingyu team anxiously proceeds with a double lung transplant surgery for a coronavirus pneumonia patient" at the Wuxi People’s Hospital near Shanghai (February 29). The lungs used in the procedure were reportedly obtained from a healthy donor in Guizhou Province within five days. (Source: China News, March 1).

May 1, 2020 

Editor’s Note: 

For many years, stories have circulated about alleged instances of involuntary organ harvesting in the People’s Republic of China—to include alleged instances of prisoners of conscience being first medically screened and then executed for their organs, with senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials acting as either the medical or financial beneficiaries of organ transplant procedures. Many, though not all, of these accounts have been connected to alleged abuses directed at members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, or other groups repressed by state authorities. Due perhaps to the lurid and disturbing nature of these accounts, and the difficulty of confirming them amid government suppression of information on the issue, the veracity of these alleged accounts of organ harvesting has long been left as an unresolved question.

Matthew P. Robertson, research fellow with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) and a PhD candidate in political science at the Australian National University, is engaged in an effort to direct analytical rigor towards this controversial topic, which has long been a marginalized issue on the sidelines of diplomatic and human rights discourses connected to the PRC. Mr. Robertson is the author of a detailed report on the topic published in March 2020 by VOC, available here.

In this article, the first part of a planned three-part series in China Brief, Mr. Robertson details the development and expansion of China’s policy architecture and medical infrastructure for organ transplants over the past two decades. The second part, to appear in our next issue, will examine the available evidence as to whether prisoners of conscience and targeted ethnic minorities in the PRC have been made subject to extrajudicial killing as part of this system of organ harvesting and transplantation. The third and final part, to appear in a near-future issue, will examine the ways that PRC authorities have sought to leverage influence over international medical organizations in order to suppress broader exposure of this issue.