Beijing [China], April 22 : Despite multiple attempts by doctors and human rights activists, forced organ harvesting in China thrives, reported Voices Against Autocracy (VAA).
The most recent report in the American Journal of Transplantation in 2022 by Dr Matthew Robertson and Dr Jacob Lavee, concluded that at least 71 cases irrefutably existed wherein physicians were responsible for killing the patient through the removal of organs before they were brain dead, thus violating a key donor transplant rule of not removing organs from a live body.
Reportedly, organ harvesting in China started in the 1970s from live prisoners but it only became a truly nationwide practice in the 1990s when Jiang Zemin came to power. Having established a perception of Falun Gong being a threat to the Communist Party, he set about eradicating the movement from July 1995 onwards and reportedly gave the directive to harvest their organs, reported VAA.
"The ultimate conclusion is that the Chinese Communist Party has engaged the State in the mass killings of innocents, primarily practitioners of the spiritually-based set of exercises, Falun Gong, but also Uyghurs, Tibetans, and select House Christians, in order to obtain organs for transplants," read the findings of former Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific David Kilgour, human rights lawyer David Matas and London based investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann spent more than seven years publishing a 680-page report in June 2016 titled Bloody Harvest with more than 2400 references on the issue.
For a long time in China, there has been a cultural practice of keeping the body whole after death which raises the question as to where Chinese patients are procuring their desperately needed organs, reported VAA.
In other countries, transplant wait times are generally months or years. In contrast, China is able to reduce it to days or weeks with sometimes spare organs from living recipients being continuously available during an operation.
The crackdown on Falun Gong saw an increase in hospitals performing organ transplants from 150 in 1999 to nearly 1000 in 2007.
Moreover, prison officials are collaborating with hospitals to split the transplant fees equally and the 610 office is responsible for ensuring the secrecy of the whole process and subsequent deletion of prisoner data from all hospital records, reported VAA.
Doctors have claimed to have been forced to participate in the whole process, often performing more than 20 such operations daily, suffering from PTSD-like symptoms and being forced to take several hundred thousand dollars to ensure their collaboration and willing participation.
Chinese propaganda on organ harvesting has always been denied, but 2010 saw the establishment of a voluntary organ donation system for the first time across 19 provinces.
More than a generation has passed since China started persecuting the nearly 100 million Falun Gong practitioners. The shortage of transplant donors has led to the search for a new minority to oppress, namely the Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang province.
Beijing hospitals even went so far as to make marketing videos aimed at oil-rich Middle Eastern customers promising to give them `halal' organs if they should choose to come to China for medical tourism, reported VAA.
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