Chapter Four：Organ Transplants did not Decrease after 2006

Summary:This chapter addresses the problem of carefully crafted misinformation by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the common belief that the amount of organ transplants in China has declined since 2006. Yet all official numbers in China are essentially calculated for their political effect, and none more so than in an extremely sensitive number such as transplants per year. The evidence that we have gathered from inter-medical communication and hospital records actually shows evidence of an increase in the number of organ transplants after 2006 rather than a decrease.

Contents
I. Intensive Organ Transplants Emerged after the Disclosure of the CCP’S Massive Organ Harvesting from Live Falun Gong Practitioners (see Chapter III Section V for details)
    1. Working overtime for intensive organ transplants
    2. Hospitals slash prices to increase sales of organ transplant operations
II. Organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners continued
III.  The CCP will not decrease the number of organ harvesting cases, as long as its political purpose is to eliminate Falun Gong
    1. The persecution continues to this day
    2. The murderous nature of the CCP dictates that organ harvesting will not stop
IV. The CCP will Not Slow Down Harvesting
    1. Evidence shows that live organ donor pools of Falun Gong practitioners still exist in large scale
    2. The CCP will not allow any detainee to come out alive as witness to its crimes, and would prefer to accelerate the pace of murder to destroy evidence
V. The CCP designated 169 hospitals as qualified to transplant organs to make organ harvesting faster, more discreet, and better controlled
VI. The CCP created the false appearance of declining organ transplant numbers after 2006 through the following three methods
    1. The total quantity of organ transplants released by the CCP Health Ministry is a piece of evidence attesting to its own crimes
    2. The CCP official media parroted the line that China’s organ transplant number had declined since 2006, when live organ harvesting was exposed but the reports are contradictory and unpersuasive
    3. The CCP’s organ transplant hospitals falsified data, deleted webpages and even their entire websites to try to create a false appearance that the number of transplants has declined since 2006

I. Intensive Organ Transplants Emerged after the Disclosure of the CCP’S Massive Organ Harvesting from Live Falun Gong Practitioners (see Chapter III Section V for details)

Organ harvesting from live Falun Gong practitioners in Sujiatun concentration camp by the CCP on a large scale was exposed on March 9, 2006. Facing the allegations of massive live organ harvesting, the CCP kept silent for three weeks, and then the Foreign Ministry spokesperson denied the existence of Sujiatun concentration camp. Meanwhile, “Interim Provisions to Manage Clinical Applications of Human Organ Transplant Technologies”[274] was introduced, and start screening qualified organ transplant hospitals from July 1, 2006. Since May 1, 2007 unqualified hospitals can no longer carry out organ transplants.

After the introduction of the Interim Provisions, hospitals and major organ transplant centers in China not only resumed their organ transplant surgeries, but the amount of organ transplants also increased substantially, forming a peak period for organ transplants. The hospitals nationwide suddenly had a large number of organs available, and the medical staffs had to work overtime to transplant organs. The national transplant rush last at least until May 1, 2007, for up to 1 year.

1.Working overtime for intensive organ transplants

In 2006, Minghui.org received many reports from inside China with a similar message: the quantity of organ transplants in many hospitals had suddenly increased. For example, starting from March 2006, Tianjin Hospital of Armed Police Forces had kidney transplant surgeries every day, 6 surgeries per night:[275] Patients were discharged early, literally as soon as their condition turned slightly better. The reason given is that “since recently there are a lot of kidney transplant patients, there are abundant donors, as well. Patients were told that those donors are “criminal youths”.

According to our investigation, which wasfurther confirmed by our investigative phone calls, medical staffs in hospitals and transplant centers in Heilongjiang Province, Liaoning Province, Jilin Province, Beijing, Tianjin, Guangdong Province, Henan Province, Hebei Province, Hubei Province (particularly Wuhan City), Hunan Province, Shanghai, Zhejiang Province, Yunnan Province, Anhui Province, Shaanxi Province Xinjiang Province and other provinces and autonomous regions were working overtime to intensively transplant organs in batches[276].

In Chapter III Section 6 of the “Report on Harvesting 2 Million Live Organs”, we have listed evidence from 12 hospitals. For example, Dongguan Taiping People’s Hospital transplanted the same amount of organs in the first quarter of 2006 as they did in the entire year of 2005[277].

The following is the script of the telephone conversation taking place in 2006 between one WOIPFG investigator and a liver transplant surgeon, Dr. Wang, at the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University.

Investigator: How long do I have to wait for donors?
Dr.Wang: ...... try to (get the donor) before May!
Investigator: Is it a living kidney donor?
Dr.Wang: There are also living liver donors.
Investigator: There are also living liver donors?
Dr.Wang: Yes, yes, there are.

Investigator: It is cut off from someone, right?
Dr.Wang: Yes! Correct!
Investigator: Some labor camps detain some Falun Gong (practitioners), and then harvest organs alive......
Dr.Wang: Yes, yes! Our concern is the quality of the organ, not its origin, what do you say? Now that thousands of liver transplants have been performed (in China), almost every patient got (organs from Falun Gong practitioner), you see, it is impossible to stop doing it only because of some leakage of information right now.
Investigator: Do you have absolutely healthy kidneys from Falun Gong practitioners? ...

Surgeon at the Liver Transplant Center in Shandong Qianfoshan Hospital: Well... anyway, there certainly will be more of such donors in April (2006)...

Investigator: April, why more available in April?
Doctor: I cannot tell you why, because it involves...I don’t have to explain this to you, this issue cannot be explained...
Investigator: Are you all working overtime to perform transplants?
Doctor in Shanghai Changzheng Hospital: Yes, there are 30 patients waiting in line. Several batches operated in 24 hours. We have four teams doing it.

2. Hospitals slash prices to increase sales of organ transplant operations

Following the Sujiatun revelation there was a fire-sale effect throughout the Chinese transplant industry.

For example, after major hospitals in Jilin City held an emergency meeting on April 12, 2006, these hospitals became guarded by police, and ambulances frequently came in and out of the hospitals at night. The Jilin Heart Hospital then reduced the majority of heart transplant fees in a special “promotion”, charging only 50,000 RMB for the first 5 heart transplants[278]. As we have previously mentioned, On April 28, 2006, Hunan People’s Hospital even advertised 20 cases of liver and kidney transplants for free (10 liver transplants and 10 kidney transplants)[279].This may be an indication that at that time if the donor organs couldn’t be utilized, they would have to be destroyed anyway. And the hospital would be better off using these organs for advertisement.

II. Organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners continued

Our investigation of more than 1,000 transplant surgeons in 30 provinces and (central government) directly-controlled municipalities shows that even during the period between March and September 2014, when allegations of organ harvesting abuses was widely known by the international community, almost all organ transplant hospitals in China were still actively soliciting business. In general, they claimed that they had sufficient high-quality organs from young and healthy living donors[280].Hospitals across China still claimed to have Falun Gong practitioners as donors, but they made such claims in a more obscure way than they did a few years ago.

For example, Zeng Wen, deputy chief physician at Beijing Anzhen Hospital’s Surgical Department, stated that the caller (i.e. WOIPFG investigator) and he both knew very well the source of donors, and it was impossible for him to provide the investigator with the donors’ information. When pressed to answer whether these donors were Falun Gong practitioners, Zeng did not deny, simply saying that “let’s stop talking (about this) (click here to download this recording: MP3).

Shen Zhenya, director of Cardiovascular Surgical Department and Research Lab at the First Affiliated Hospital of Suzhou University, stated, |Now we have donors every month, you come, wait for a little bit more than 2 weeks, we should be able to find a donor. Falun Gong (practitioners)......, we also have, one donor this year (click here to download this recording: MP3).

Zheng Shusen, president of the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine and director of Multiple Organ Transplantation Key Research Laboratory, Ministry of Health, said, “(In) a week or two, we will have (living organs) available, dozens (of organ transplants) every month ...”[281]

The investigation results prove once again that since 2006, when the CCP’s organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners was exposed, even under the intensive attention of the international community, the CCP denies the allegations on one hand but continues to murder of Falun Gong practitioners with the other.

III. The CCP will not decrease the number of organ harvesting cases, as long as its political purpose is to eliminate Falun Gong:

1. The persecution continues to this day

Through our phone investigation (of people including five members of the CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee, one committee member of the Politburo, one Central Military Committee member, one direct manager of the military’s health division, multiple former Political Affairs and Legal Committee officials, over 20 hospitals’ transplant surgeons), we draw the following conclusion: organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners is a criminal act of the state led by the clique loyal to the CCP’s former leader Jiang Zemin, in order to “physically eliminate” Falun Gong practitioners. Since 1999, the CCP's genocide against Falun Gong practitioners has never stopped. Thus all parts of the CCP are implicated in a crime against humanity, and it is difficult for the CCP to stop or reduce organ harvesting, regardless of which clique is ascendant.

2. The murderous nature of the CCP dictates that organ harvesting will not stop

The international community should understand that instead of an ordinary dictatorship, the CCP is an extremist group similar. The primary goal of existence is to preserve power and to do so, it will periodically incite hatred and slaughter specific groups of people. However, unlike ISIS or the Nazi Party of Germany, the targets of the CCP’s hatred and slaughtering have continuously changed, from landlords to capitalists to former KMT soldiers and government officials to intellectuals to veteran cadres to students to Falun Gong practitioners and petitioners (see chapter IX for details). Elimination of specific groups is part of the CCP’s nature. Therefore, it is highly unlikely to take the initiative to reduce the number of organ harvesting cases for transplant.

IV. The CCP will Not Slow Down Harvesting

1. Evidence shows that live organ donor pools of Falun Gong practitioners still exist in large scale

1) Huang Jiefu said that he was worried about the insufficiency of surgeons and hospitals, not that of organ donors during his interview in 2015[282]. (For details, please refer to Chapter VI Section 3 of Report on Harvesting 2 Million Live Organs)                                                 

2)WOIPFG investigated Zhang Gaoli, an incumbent member of the CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee in June 2015 about organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners. He promised to “deal well with the rest of Falun Gong practitioners”, which validated the fact that live organ pools of massive numbers of detained Falun Gong practitioners still exist today, and that there are still Falun Gong practitioners who are at the risk of being killed for their organs at any time[283]. (For details, please refer to Chapter VI Section 2 of Report on Harvesting 2 Million Live Organs)

3)Our more than 1,000 investigative phone calls taking place in 2014 show that the average wait time for organ transplant operations in Chinese hospitals is still 2 weeks, and the maximum is 4 weeks. This would be impossible to sustain if the organs were all taken from executed prisoners.

2. The CCP will not allow any detainee to come out alive as witness to its crimes, and would prefer to accelerate the pace of murder to destroy evidence

V. The CCP designated 169 hospitals as qualified to transplant organs to make organ harvesting faster, more discreet, and better controlled

1. Many of the hospitals designated by the Health Ministry would each transplant 2,000-8,000 organs each year. (For details, please refer to Chapter VI of Report on Harvesting 2 Million Live Organs)

2. The 169 hospitals were selected by the CCP from approximately 1,000 hospitals, which had been participating in live organ harvesting and transplantation prior to 2006, when the CCP’s crimes of organ harvesting was exposed. The CCP’s relevant rules and regulations became effective on May 1, 2007. Afterwards, no hospitals without the designation are supposed to perform organ transplants.

3. The CCP’s organ harvesting from live Falun Gong practitioners is an act of the state. With such background, we’ve drawn a conclusion: these 169 hospitals were selected by the CCP, as they were considered more reliable and easier to control than the undesignated ones. The CCP has been completing their live organ harvesting “mission” through these hospitals.

VI. The CCP created the false appearance of declining organ transplant numbers after 2006 through the following three methods:

1) Huang Jiefu, the former vice Health Minister, publicly released the so-called total quantity of organ transplants, which showed the false appearance of declining quantity.
2) The CCP official media released news that the number of organ transplant donors were declining.
3) Organ transplant hospitals stopped releasing data, systematically falsified evidence, modified webpages and deleted websites.

1. The total quantity of organ transplants released by the CCP Health Ministry is a piece of evidence attesting to its own crimes[284].

Figure 4.1 The total quantity of organ transplants released by Huang Jiefu in Madrid in March 2010

1)The above figure shows: the annual quantities of kidney transplants between 2000 and 2003 were 5,500, 5,500, 5,700 and 5,500respectively, with an average of 5,500; between 2007 and 2009, the annual kidney transplant amounts were 7,700, 6,274 and 6,458 respectively, with an average of 6,810. And 184 more transplants were performed in 2009 than those in 2008. The average annual quantity of kidney transplants between 2007 and 2009 is obviously higher than that between2000 and 2003, and the number is still on the rise.

2) The above figure shows: the annual quantities of liver transplants between 2000 and 2003 is 179, 297, 638 and 1,160 respectively, with an average of 568.5; the annual quantities of liver transplants between 2007 and 2009 is 1,944, 2,334 and 2,181 respectively, with an average of 2,153. The average annual quantity of liver transplants between 2007 and 2009 is obviously higher than that between 2000 and 2003, with the former being equivalent to 3.78 times of the latter.

The above figure provided by Huang Jiefu shows that the quantity of organ transplants after 2006 didn’t decline at all, but it is obviously higher than the previous periods before the organ transplant peak. And the trend is upward.

3)The data provided by Huang Jiefu shows that the quantity of kidney transplants is averaged at 5,500/year between 2000 and2003. This is obviously a lie. The medical technologies of kidney transplants in China had already matured in the 1990s. Due to insufficient donors, they never had the need to advertise their transplant services, nor could they attract organ transplant tourists. Moreover, there were a limited number of organ transplant hospitals, only a few dozen, with the annual average number of kidney transplants being around 100 in large hospitals at the time. However we’ve discovered 865 hospitals that have emerged to perform organ transplants since 2000. In the same time period, the numbers of transplants at those hospitals, which had performed kidney transplants prior to 2000, increased to 200, with some being even over 300 cases, according to the hospitals’ publicly released data. Hospitals made advertisements of organ transplants via various media all over the world. Tens of thousands of foreigners traveled to China for organ transplants. The questions are:

A. With so many hospitals performing organ transplants where did they get the organs?

B. Since 2000, the number of organ transplant hospitals has been increasing, and the numbers of organ transplants at individual hospitals have also been increasing. However, why does the total quantity of kidney transplants appears to have hardly ever increased? (4,500 cases in 1999, and an annual average of 5,500 cases between 2000 and 2003).

C. If it’s true that the annual average kidney transplant numbers increased during the period between 2000 and 2003, to be 1,000 more than that ofyear1999 (5,500-4,500=1,000), does it imply that the majority of those new organ transplant hospitals performed only one transplant case per year?

D. Intensive organ transplants took place in 2006 (Please see Chapter III for details).The outcome should be an explosive growth in the organ transplant quantity in year 2006, in comparison to that of 2005.However, this was not reflected in Huang Jiefu’s report.

3) To sum up, the conclusion we draw from the above information is that the CCP’s fabricated that the number of kidney transplants has declined since its peak in 2004, and the number of liver transplants has declined since its peak in 2005.

The CCP is very skillful at falsification. That’s why we employed a comprehensive data analysis in analyzing the organ transplant quantities and characteristics of each hospital, by gathering the released data and information from various resources in different time periods.

2. The CCP official media parroted the line that China’s organ transplant number had declined since 2006, when live organ harvesting was exposed but the reports are contradictory and unpersuasive.

The CCP’s official media ran numerous stories on Tianjin First Central Hospital (a.k.a. the Orient Organ Transplant Center), which had initially aroused the most concerns from the international community. One well-known article titled China Calls to Stop “Organ Transplant Tourism”[285]published on Southern Weekend magazine on December 18, 2007 states, “This hospital’s organ transplant number declined suddenly in 2007 due to insufficient donors. There were only 15 liver transplants in the first half of the year; and all of the organs were donated by the patients’ relatives.” However, our research and analysis shows that the article’s information has been fabricated.

1) The official website of Tianjin First Central Hospital claimed that its liver and kidney transplant ranked first in China for four consecutive years from 2005 to 2008. (According to its website in April 2009, in the recent four years, both liver and kidney transplant numbers ranked first every year within China.[286]) In the same period, many other hospitals’ released data showed that their numbers of liver transplant cases were more than 200 (e.g.Renji Hospital, Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine). However, the real numbers of organ transplants far exceed the released numbers. Moreover, the actual numbers of transplants have been increasing since 2006. For details, please refer to Chapter VI Sections 6&10 of Report on Harvesting 2 Million Live Organs. If there were only 15 liver transplants performed in the first half of the year and there were insufficient donors in Tianjin First Central Hospital, then it’s impossible for its number of transplants to rank first in China.

2) Shen Zhongyang, director of Organ Transplant Center at Tianjin First Central Hospital said, the hospital had performed nearly 10,000 liver transplants by 2014. (According to an article titled About Shen Zhongyang, Liver Transplant Expert from Tianjin, and His Team[287]published by China Technology Market Newspaper on January 6, 2015, by the end of 2013, the Orient Organ Transplant Center had ranked first in surgery number and patient survival rate for 16 consecutive years. Led by Shen Zhongyang, its team had finished almost 10,000 liver transplants), while there were approximately 3,000 cases performed before 2006, that is, between 2008 and 2014, 1,000 cases of transplant were performed each year, which were 50% more than its self-claimed peak (i.e. 667 cases) in 2006, but how could there be a large increase without donors?

3) We have evidence (For details, please refer to Chapter VI Sections 5&6 of Report on Harvesting 2 Million Live Organs) to show that this hospital did 5,000-8,000 liver transplants each year between 2006 and 2013, and the transplant quantity has been increasing instead of declining. And this hospital specializes in performing liver transplants so the quantity of liver transplants at this hospital alone is suspected to have exceeded the total number of transplants publicly released by Huang Jiefu.

4)The CCP didn’t announce the end of using executed prisoners for organ transplants until early 2015, and furthermore, it never admitted using organs from Falun Gong practitioners. Instead, it claimed that it only used organs from executed prisoners and voluntarily donated organs, so how is it possible that the donors became insufficient in 2006, when live organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners was exposed? The CCP might claim that there was more attention being paid to getting consent release forms from death-row prisoners but the more likely explanations are that first, the CCP was simply trying to cover its crimes of killing Falun Gong practitioners and second, that the CCP was implicitly admitting that the organs were from Falun Gong practitioners.

3. The CCP’s organ transplant hospitals falsified data, deleted webpages and even their entire websites to try to create a false appearance that the number of transplants has declined since 2006.

In Chapter VI of Report on Harvesting 2 Million Live Organs, we pointed out that the real transplant number is very shocking. Many hospitals would each perform more than 1,000 liver transplants per year, but they publicly released numbers which are obviously much lower than the real numbers. From the data released by the 169 hospitals designated by the CCP’s Health Ministry, we could also find that they fabricated information by means of not updating data, falsifying transplant numbers and deleting webpages. We have evidence to show that more than 98% hospitals used the above mentioned methods. (For statistical analysis, please refer to the end of Chapter IV of Report on Harvesting 2 Million Live Organs.) We present here only several of the hospitals, which completely deleted the websites of their organ transplant centers, after the live organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners was exposed.

1)The First Affiliated Hospital of China Medical University deleted the website of its International Organ Assistance Center (Please refer to Chapter VI of Report on Harvesting 2 Million Live Organs)

2)The Third Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, deleted the website of its Organ Transplant Institute.

3)The PLA No.304 Hospital deleted its original website, set up a new one and changed its domain name to avoid being investigated through archived website info.

4)Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University, deleted the original website of its Organ Transplant Center (http://www.transplantation.com.cn/)

Table4.1:  Select Hospitals that have not Updated Organ Transplant Data for Many Years

Table 4.2:  Select Hospitals that Tampered with their Organ Transplant Data

References: