Put international pressure on China’s transplant industry

The China Winter Olympics will be held in February 2022. Legislators in the United States,

Canada, and Australia, along with more than 180 human rights organizations worldwide, have called for a boycott to protest China’s human rights abuses. However, the expectation that an

Olympic boycott will change Chinese behavior is naive.

Instead of making a broad, symbolic gesture that will harm primarily our own athletes, specific action can be taken now to mitigate one of China’s most egregious human rights abuses: the extrajudicial execution of prisoners of conscience to supply Chinese nationals and medical tourists with organ transplants.

In the United States, consenting donors supply organs for transplant. It is illegal to buy or sell solid organs. They certainly cannot be excised from the unwilling. While our organ allocation system has flaws, it precludes the human body becoming a receptacle of saleable parts.

China does things differently. Two recent reports reveal in harrowing detail how the Chinese government sanctions forced organ harvesting: “Medical Genocide,” a 2018 publication

of the U.s.-based China Organ Harvest Research Center, and the 2020 China Tribunal report, an independent judicial investigation issued by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China.

In 2000, China’s modest transplant industry grew exponentially, precisely when the government began detaining adherents of the spiritual practice Falun Gong. Zheng Shusen, a prominent Chinese liver transplant surgeon and chair of the Zhejiang Province Anti-cult Association, described Falun Gong as an “evil religion” and a “virus.” Such attitudes rendered adherents enemies of the state — and a reservoir of organs worth millions of dollars. Falun Gong detainees have described undergoing regular imaging and medical examinations typical of pre-transplant work-up.

Bowing to international pressure in 2015, Chinese authorities created a system of voluntary organ allocation, though data are neither transparent nor comprehensive. China’s official annual transplant volume hovers at 10,000. However, its massive transplant infrastructure belies this figure. By 2006, China had 500 hospitals performing transplants. A single hospital that focuses mostly on liver transplants, the Tianjin Oriental Organ Transplant Center, has 500 dedicated transplant beds, which corresponds to roughly 6,000 transplants a year. This is almost how many liver transplants the entire United States performs in a year.

Moreover, wait times for organs are

measured in days or weeks, not months or years. The Chinese actor Fu Biao received a liver just one week after his cancer diagnosis. When this rejected, he received another a month later. Such a quick turnaround is unheard of in a donative system. In fact, China provides on-demand transplants for medical tourists. In one welldocumented case, an Israeli patient flew to China in 2005 for a heart transplant that had been scheduled two weeks prior. The only way to plan a heart transplant is to have a victim selected in advance.

Instead of relying on governments to take action, the international medical community can take measures to compel China to live up to human rights standards. Until China proves it has stopped profiting from the harvest of its “undesirable” citizens’ organs, transplant researchers can refuse to share medical information with their Chinese counterparts. Journals can choose not to publish transplant research from China unless researchers prove the organ came from a willing donor. Professional societies can reject Chinese transplant surgeons unless they can prove they adhere to internationally accepted ethical standards. Some countries have already taken action. Israel, Italy, Spain, and Taiwan have passed laws prohibiting transplant tourism. In 2006, two major transplant hospitals in Queensland, Australia, banned joint research programs into organ transplantation with China.

Such robust actions as these on a fully international scale would go a long way to pressure China to open its transplant industry to scrutiny and, perhaps one day, reform. Until then, China’s surgical community will operate under a dark cloud.