[ALBSA-Info] NYTimes.com Article: On Death Row, China's Source of Transplants

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On Death Row, China's Source of Transplants

October 18, 2001 

By CRAIG S. SMITH


 

SHANGHAI, Oct. 17 - Sitting in a dimly lit Russian hotel
room last month, Huang Peng, a Chinese prison official who
had fled across the border just hours before, spoke
matter-of-factly about the supply of human organs for the
vast majority of transplants in China. 

"Executed convicts are basically the only source for
transplants," Mr. Huang said, explaining how hospitals and
government detention centers work with courts to coordinate
the killing with life-saving operations so that organs are
transplanted fresh from the condemned. 

The practice is so common and demand for organs so pressing
that few checks exist to ensure that the executed are even
dead before their organs are removed. One Chinese doctor
claims to have witnessed the removal of a prisoner's
kidneys while the man was still breathing. 

The Chinese government denies involuntary harvesting
organs. But credible and detailed accounts from Mr. Huang
and others interviewed sketched the outlines of a vast
system in which kidneys, livers, lungs, corneas and other
organs are stripped from executed prisoners and then
transplanted into wealthy patients in operations that bring
Chinese hospitals tens of millions of dollars a year. 

There were more than 5,000 reported kidney transplants last
year in China, where such an operation costs about $6,000
for Chinese residents - a tenth of the price in the United
States. Foreigners are charged anywhere from $10,000 to
$50,000. 

Mr. Huang did not have a direct hand in turning prisoners
into unwilling donors, but he worked with people who did.
He said the practice was common knowledge among people in
the police and the penal system of Liaoning Province, where
until last month he was an official at the province's
largest penitentiary, Shenyang No. 2 Prison. 

He left China because he feared arrest for his role in
falsifying documents to help another person leave the
country. He is now in Russia hoping to find a safe haven in
the West. 

While there is no evidence that the high number of death
sentences handed down by Chinese courts are linked to the
high demand for organs, the organ supply is growing. 

China executes more prisoners each year than all other
countries combined, and by some estimates 10,000 people
will be put to death this year as the government pursues
one of its most intense crackdowns on crime in the last 25
years. 

Many of those who die and become unwitting donors may be
innocent, human rights groups say, because they are
convicted after hurried trials based on confessions
extracted under torture. 

Families are rarely told that their loved ones' organs may
be removed, and prisoners are not asked for their consent,
Mr. Huang says. Voluntary donations are rare in China,
because of a lack of public education about organ donations
as well as traditional beliefs that say the body must be
kept whole after death. 

"Definitely, there is no family willing to have their loved
ones' organs taken," Mr. Huang said. "And there is no such
thing as a prisoner who volunteers." 

Once organs have been removed after an execution, the body
is cremated immediately, before the family has a chance to
see what has been done. 

That is what appears to have happened to Zhao Wei and Wan
Qichao, executed in the central Chinese province of Henan
in August 1999 for the murder of Mr. Zhao's estranged wife
10 months earlier. 

Mr. Zhao's mother, a frail white- haired woman with
horn-rimmed glasses and an educated air, said court
officials had visited both families and asked for consent
to use their sons' organs, but that the families had
refused. The executions took place months later without
warning. "It was like a knock on my head," Mr. Zhao's
mother wrote later of the shock when a friend called to say
he had just seen her son in the back of a truck bound for
the execution ground. "How could it be that I wasn't
notified?" 

Lu De'an, a friend of the condemned men, rushed to the
execution ground on a sidecar motorcycle with his wife and
saw Mr. Zhao's body and Mr. Wei's being loaded into a white
van. A third body was put into an ambulance. Both vehicles
had white paper covering their license plates, Mr. Lu said.


He drove alongside the ambulance and van as they crept
toward the local crematory. He could not see into the
ambulance or the van's side windows, which were covered.
But through the van driver's window he could see men and
women wearing surgical gloves working in the back. 

"I didn't know what they were doing," he said, recalling
the scene in an interview this month. "I saw one man,
stripped to the waist and pulling off surgical gloves. His
face was big and swarthy and sweating profusely, and the
driver gave him a towel to wipe the sweat away." 

Later, when Mr. Lu returned to a spot on the road where he
had seen things being thrown from the van, he found bloody
cotton wool, an empty box of surgical gloves and several
empty plastic bags. His wife gave him a tissue to pick up
one of the bags. It was labeled "kidney preservative
fluid." 

"Now I know their kidneys were taken," Mr. Lu said. 

The
prison official, Mr. Huang, says that families of the
condemned are often asked in advance whether they want to
claim their family member's body after the execution, but
that many decline because they are told that they would
have to pay large fees. 

That makes the harvesting legal under central government
rules that allow organs to be taken from executed prisoners
whose bodies are not claimed. 

Military and paramilitary hospitals dominate the harvesting
and transplanting, because they have close ties to the
prosecutors and court officials who supervise executions.
The hospitals obtain the organs almost free, usually by
paying court officials a nominal sum, and charge thousands
of dollars per transplant. 

It is a boom industry. The number of transplant operations
has soared in the last decade, and modern new transplant
centers have opened around the country. One center
established earlier this year in Hang zhou, south of
Shanghai, specializes in multiple organ transplants for
individual patients. 

Less attention is given to the procurement side of the
equation. China has never developed clear guidelines for
determining brain death, and in the rush to remove healthy
organs from executed prisoners, all standards are often
ignored. 

Wang Guoqi, a former Chinese paramilitary doctor who gave
his account to American Congressional investigators in
June, said he had twice attended executions at which
kidneys were cut out before the condemned donor stopped
breathing. 

While his accounts come from the early and mid-1990's,
there is no evidence that China has taken any steps to
reform the system. 

Standing outside the restaurant at a New Jersey mall where
he works as a sushi chef these days, Mr. Wang spoke
nervously in August of the dozen executions he had attended
and the dozens more times he had visited crematories to
collect prisoners' skin for grafts. 

In Tianjin, a major port southeast of Beijing, an official
from the High Court would notify the hospital of pending
executions, and Mr. Wang said he would go to the court and
pay the official 300 yuan, or about $45, for each cadaver. 

He said he had collected blood samples from condemned
prisoners at Xiaoxiguan Prison in Tianjin to find suitable
donors for waiting kidney patients. The prisoners did not
know the purpose of the blood sampling, he said. 

On at least one occasion Mr. Wang went to death row before
an execution to give a condemned donor an injection of the
anticoagulant heparin, which is necessary to procure
transplantable organs. The prisoner was told it was a
tranquilizer. 

Timing was everything, Mr. Wang said, because the quality
of kidneys, in particular, degrades quickly after the heart
stops beating. 

He and others were supposed to move the body into a waiting
ambulance within 15 seconds after an execution, which was
almost always performed with a gunshot to the back of the
head. 

The kidneys were to be extracted within two minutes and
soaked in ice- cooled, 0.9 percent saline solution. The
operating room would then be telephoned and told to start
anesthesia on the transplant patient, and the kidneys would
be rushed to the hospital under police escort. 

After eyes or other organs were taken out, Mr. Wang, who
worked as a burn specialist at the General Brigade Hospital
of Tianjin's People's Armed Police, would go to work
skinning the corpse. 

"We cut the skin from the upper limbs, the lower limbs, the
chest and the back," Mr. Wang said. "Skin on the head,
neck, hands and feet was generally discarded." 

In August 1990, Mr. Wang said, he watched as a court
bailiff and a prison guard "half carried, half pulled," a
condemned man shackled in handcuffs and leg irons from the
bed of a truck toward his execution site on a hillock
surrounded by barbed wire outside of Tianjin. Another
bailiff raised a semiautomatic pistol to the back of the
prisoner's head and pulled the trigger. 

Mr. Wang and a colleague rushed the body on a stretcher to
a waiting ambulance, where, as the doctors began cutting
into the abdomen, he heard one of them say, "Look, the
heart's still jumping, and the guy's still breathing." 

On another occasion, in October 1995, Mr. Wang attended an
execution in Luannan, a small town about three hours from
Tianjin, at which the executed man wriggled on the ground
after being shot. He was carried anyway into the ambulance,
where Mr. Wang watched as the man's kidneys were removed
while he was still breathing. 

China's government has denounced Mr. Wang as a fraud. But
his identity and educational credentials have been
confirmed, and some people in Luannan recalled the October
1995 execution as he described it. 

"I remember - a lot of people went to watch," said a woman
surnamed Yue at a small teahouse near Luannan's Public
Security Bureau. "It was a big event here." 

American transplant doctors who have reviewed Mr. Wang's
account find it credible, and similar accounts suggest that
the incidents may not have been unusual. 

In an article carried on the People's Daily Web site
earlier this year, one prosecutor said four men from a
hospital in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi Province, had
rushed to take a condemned man's body before he was dead. 

The head of the execution team insisted on shooting the
prisoner again before releasing his body. 

The reporter who wrote the article has since been fired and
barred from working in the news media.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/18/international/asia/18ORGA.html?ex=1004417517&ei=1&en=4237121bf8417f3a



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