A New York-based news website that specializes on human rights violations in China is questioning the source of body parts that a top Chinese hospital used to perform 1,600 liver transplants.
The surgeries covered the 13-year period 1994 through 2006. Dr Shen Zhongyang performed his first liver transplant in May 1994. The patient was a 37-year-old migrant worker suffering from liver cirrhosis. Shen eventually went to Japan and took a medical course. When he returned to China in 1998, Shen brought home $15,000 that served as the seed money to begin a small transplant unit at Tianjin First Central Hospital.
Using his new medical skill, the number of liver transplants increased to seven in 1999, to 24 in 2000, 209 in 2002 and 1,000 in 2003, according to Epoch Times which based its data from a report from Enorth Netnews, published by the Tianjin government.
Epoch Times, in an exclusive report, pointed out that the number of liver transplants Shen performed do not match with the source of the “donated” livers because according to Tianjin First, it uses only organs of prisoners formally executed by the state.
The newspaper compared the city’s headcount with the total number of convicts executed across China, which was only about 40 inmates yearly. Epoch Times ruled out voluntary donation because of lack of an organ donation system in China.
Epoch Times believed that the livers came from Falun Gong prisoners. It based its suspicion on “The Slaughter,” a 2014 book authored by Ethan Gutmann. According to Gutmann, there was execution of Falun Gong members whose organs were possibly harvested and sold for profit, reported LifeNews.
The Transplantation Society, an NGO of the World Health Organization, wrote to China in 2014, taking the Asian giant to task for permitting the use of body parts of executed inmates in transplants. Acquiring an organ in China is relatively easy compared to other countries, according to the film "Human Harvest" exhibited at the 2015 Justice Film Festival in Red Deer College in Alberta, Canada.
As Tianjin First became known for organ transplants - throat, cornea, lung, heart, stem cell, hair, bone, pancreas, kidney and liver - the Tianjin Municipal Bureau of Health allocated $20 million in December 2003 to construct the 17-storey organ transplant building, the Orient Organ Transplant Center, which has 500 beds.
Meanwhile, in 2013, Sydney University academics sought the stripping of the honorary professorship the school had given to another Chinese transplant surgeon, Huang Jiefu, over his alleged involvement in China’s controversial organ harvest system. The Chinese allegedly harvest the body parts from a death row convict and then kills the prisoner. But the Australian university defended Huang whom it said was reforming China’s organ transplant system.