China accused of selling organs of executed prisoners

The Daily Mail ^ | September 28, 2006 | JULIE WHELDON

[MadIvan]

Shocking new evidence of the trade in human body parts has revealed how British patients could be buying organs from executed prisoners for £50,000.

An undercover investigation has found doctors in China are willing to sell organs from death row prisoners to foreigners in need of a transplant. The grisly practice add to mounting evidence of how human organs are being traded around the globe.

Only last week it emerged at least 40 British patients may have been given transplants using body parts stolen by a corpse-snatching gang. More than 1,000 bodies including that of veteran broadcaster Alistair Cooke, were stolen from US funeral parlours by the Mafia and sold for use in bone grafts.

The UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency revealed that 25 UK hospitals bought tissue that could have been taken from these potentially-contaminated corpses.

Now a BBC team have exposed how foreigners can travel to China to buy themselves a new organ from executed prisoners.

A reporter posing as a man looking for a liver for his sick father, was told a matching organ could be made available within less than three weeks for £50,000.

Officials at the hospital in Northern China openly admitted where the organs came from. 'It's true we use a lot of organs from executed prisoners,' one official admitted.

'The prisoners on death row have done many bad things and before they die they give their organs as a present to society.'

He even advised the reporter to try to get his sick father to the clinic in time for China's National Day on October 1 as there would be an increase of executions in the run up to the event, which would lead to an abundance of available organs.

It is not clear whether any Britons have visited the hospital to buy an organ, but according to the undercover team the cafeteria was buzzing with foreign visitors.

Some 95 per cent of organs transplanted in China come from executed prisoners and the authorities insist each freely gives their consent prior to death.

However campaigners have raised questions over whether they are truly free to make their own decisions.

Earlier this year it was claimed some of the organs were harvested from prisoners while they were still alive.

Human rights groups said execution dates are being made to fit in with the needs of wealthy foreigners who want the prisoner's organs.

The British Transplantation Society has condemned the practice of using organs from executed prisoners as 'unethical' and 'unacceptable.'

It has warned: 'An accumulating body of evidence suggests that the organs of executed prisoners are being removed for transplantation without the prior consent of either the prisoner or their family.'

In response to the latest investigation, the Chinese Ministry of Health said it does not deny that executed prisoner organs are used in donations but would review the system to see if it should consider tightening the regulations.

[cweese]

That many posters on FR would love to see organ harvesting of the condemned?

[Screamname]

I`m suprised they don`t eat the organs considering what they qualify as food over there. The Chinese are the "Mikeys" of the world, they`ll eat anything, I`ve seen it first hand. Years ago I use to deliver fish for a fish market and everyday they use to give me fish heads in a bag to give to these Chinese restuarants along with the regular fish. I didn`t know what it was for until one day I drove around the back to turn around and found a bunch of Chinese workers eating the heads RAW, I mean straight from the bag! Ewwwww! Ewwwww!

[Screamname]

Now that is a sick demented kind of torture! Where is amnesty international? Look at that poor woman being forced to dress like Hillary, the humiliation, you can just see the horror in her face.

[Mac1]

nothing specific; it just strikes me as ironic whenever a 2nd/3rd world country does what appears to be what a lot of posters would like to have happening in their country, it comes in for criticism as being barbaric.

[azhenfud]

A note sent to me by a pengyou:

---

China: Giant Contradictions

Long-time China watcher/author Orville Schell spoke at a seminar
recently. Here are some edited extracts ...

China is the most unresolved nation of consequence, defined by its
massiveness -- the margin of error in the estimates of its 1.25-1.3
billion population is greater than the population of France! -- and
massive contradictions.

No society has more millennia in its history, and for most of that
history China looked backwards. Then the old dynastic cycles were
replaced by one social cancellation after another until 1949, when
Mao set the country toward the vast futuristic vision of Communism.
That "mad experiment" ended with Deng Xiaoping's effective counter-
revolution in the 1980s, which unleashed a new totalistic belief,
this time in the market.

So what you have now is a society in search of another way to be,
focussed on the future. These days you cannot think usefully about
China and its potential futures without holding in your mind two
utterly contradictory views: a robust and awesomely growing China;
and a brittle China, parts of it truly hellish.

ROBUST CHINA:
- Peaceful borders in all directions
- Economic, non-threatening engagement with the entire world
- 200 million Chinese raised out of poverty
- Private savings rate of 40 percent (it's 1 percent in the US)
- 300 million people with cellphones; best service in the world
- Superb freeway system, built almost overnight
- New building construction everywhere
- 160 cities with a population of 1+ million (the U.S. has 49).
- 130 million people online
- 350,000 engineering graduates a year
- 30+% of the world's direct investment
- Huge trade surplus; $1 trillion in foreign currency reserves
- Economic growth rate of 9-12 percent a year, for 3 decades.

BRITTLE CHINA:
- Not much arable land; growing dependence on imported food
- Two-thirds of energy production is from dirty coal
- 30 percent of China has acid rain; 75 percent of lakes are polluted
- Of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, 16 are in China
- Some industrial parts of China are barren, hellish wastes
- 87,000 instances of social unrest last year
- Population aging rapidly, no pension/welfare, broken health system
- Stock markets are grossly manipulated
- Public and official amnesia about legacies such as Tiananmen Square

Can such contradictions be reconciled? The best everyone can hope
for is steady piecemeal change. For the Chinese the contradictions
don't really bite so long as they have continued economic growth to
focus on, and to absorb some of the problems. But what happens when
there's a break in that growth?

That's China: huge, consequential for everybody, and profoundly
unresolved.

[azhenfud]

"I don't mind executing criminals...I'm all for it. Harvesting their organs for sale is gruesome, however."

Gruesome, yes, but why not harvest them to help save the sick instead of allowing their rot within the earth? The criminal murderer cares nothing for voluntarily taking a life, why not force their involuntary saving of one, or two, or three?

[MadIvan]

I think you missed the "for sale" bit. Also the worries about dissidents being the victims.

Regards, Ivan

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Be sure they don't find out your particular blood type. You could be conveniently guilty of something...

[MadIvan]

Ah, another matter that should concern us - the Chinese government and business go hand in hand, rather than act as two separate entities. The Army is the owner of very profitable brothels, for example.

The government is there to dispense justice, not make a profit.

Regards, Ivan

[JamesP81]

I'm sure more than a few visitors to this site would like this thing to go on closer to home.

Don't worry; we'll be seeing them shortly.

[narses]

+

If you want on (or off) this Catholic and Pro-Life ping list, let me know!

[JamesP81]

That's because many people here support the death penalty. Why would anyone express regret for a convicted murderer's execution?

It's not that so much that a lot of FReepers seem to enjoy the spilling of another human being's blood. Some of us correctly find that disturbing. Feeling joy over death is not normal, regardless of how you may feel about it.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Reminds me of a novel by Larry Niven called "A Gift From Earth" where the traffic in body parts was so severe that the penalty for jay-walking was death.

[JamesP81]

Look at that poor woman being forced to dress like Hillary, the humiliation, you can just see the horror in her face.

I think you missed the rope around her neck.

[Mac1]

not sure what's going on here, but China did use shooting by a bullet behind the ear but recently went over to lethal injection

[Mac1]

"It's not that so much that a lot of FReepers seem to enjoy the spilling of another human being's blood. Some of us correctly find that disturbing. Feeling joy over death is not normal, regardless of how you may feel about it."

public executions both in Europe and the US used to be top spectacles within living memory with the number of spectators that would do justice to a soccer match

[Joe 6-pack]

"As much as I despise the Labour and Liberal Parties, I'm not uncivilised enough to demand we slaughter them and sell their vital organs."

Apart from that, intentionally selling defective goods is bad for business...;-)

[MelonFarmerJ]

....Robust China....Brittle China.....

China is engaging in aggressive economic warfare around the world. It is in the process of willfully destroying the manufacturing bases of most countries, starting with the USA, while maintaining a warped currency valuation and trade restrictions that make it well nigh impossible for any of its "trading partners" (LOL) to sell goods and services (except for oil, cement and metals) TO China. At some point in time, this methodology will collapse because of a worldwide recession brought on by, guess what: China's trading practices. Then, its gonna get hairy. With it's blue water navy and huge army, paid for with the rest of the world's treasure, China will go on an expansionist rampage that will emulate Japan's Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere of WWII, but this time on a global basis.

[azhenfud]

"The government is there to dispense justice, not make a profit."

In America, maybe - but not in China. I note the government's expectations of at least an 8% annual growth of China - government inclusive. I did note the "for sale", and don't see a problem with the expectation of payment to cover surgical procedures - but I do see a problem with the actual sale of the organ.

Trusted, China needs a better definition of capital offences and a tighter control of it's application by moving all death warrants to the federal level. Their form of criminal justice doesn't seem tiered enough with a non-biased appellate process - our seems too lenient at times, putting too much distance between the criminal and the committed crime. In a way, moving death warrants to federal levels is a good thing to do as local lynchings have ceased in America, but in another way it's not so good because since we've moved executions to the capital prison systems rather than return them to local executioners after sentencing we've created somewhat of a disconnect. The problem with not returning the condemned to local executioners is if the execution is meant to serve as a crime deterrent, without a close association of the criminal to the crime and the two to the area the crime was committed in, any "deterrent" aspect gets lost with time and the execution becomes more seemingly a vengeance circumstance.

But that's a different subject....

[Centurion2000]

bump ...