Canadian Report Accuses Chinese Military of Large-Scale Organ-Harvesting

You will recall that last year, the Falun Gong-linked Epoch Times accused the Chinese government of harvesting the organs of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners at a hospital in a place called  Sujiatun.  The story emerged just as Chinese dictator Hu Jin Tao was packing his bags for a trip to Washington.  Eager to avoid diplomatic disaster,* the U.S. Embassy collected a team to inspect the site; after a few days, the Chinese let them in.  Initially, they reported “no evidence” for the allegations, though one supposes that the smell of cleaning fluid must have been  almost as  overpowering as the pressure to find “no evidence.” 

(* Hu Jin Tao’s visit was a disaster  anyway, mostly because of a series of State Department screw-ups.  That gave me a degree of cruel pleasure, given China’s complete defiance of international human rights law and its then-absolute lack of meaningful cooperation on North Korea.  Hu Jin Tao’s 21-gun salute and state dinner deserved to be ruined.  Hope he found a hair in his salad, too.)  

Later, a U.S. congressional committee reported that “suspected organ harvesting occurs but on nowhere near the scale claimed by Falun Gong.”  Which means we can all go back to buying their cheap shoes, right?  Not quite.

CHINA’S military is harvesting organs from unwilling live prison inmates, mostly Falungong practitioners, for transplants on a large scale – including to foreign recipients- according to a study.

The report’s authors   – Canada’s former secretary of state for the Asia Pacific region David Kilgour and human rights lawyer David Matas – implicated dozens of hospitals and jails throughout China in July, after a two-month investigation.

….

Mr Matas and Mr Kilgour’s second report, released today,  includes interviews with organ recipients in 30 countries and Canadian hospital staff who cared for more than 100 patients who had undergone suspicious transplant surgeries in China.

“The involvement of the People’s Liberation Army in these transplants is widespread,” Mr Kilgour said at a press conference.

Like many civilian hospitals in rural China, military hospitals turned to selling organs to make up for government funding cuts in the 1980s, the report said.

For its part, China denies all of this, despite a fairly wide consensus that it’s going on, based partially on reports like that of former Chinese doctor Wang Guoqi.  The main points of debate are the scale, the degree of involvement by China’s statist government, and the connection to the suppression of political dissent.  The report’s authors seem to have done some  research and produced fairly compelling evidence to support their allegations.

“Recipients often tell us that even when they receive transplants at civilian hospitals, those conducting the operation are military personnel,” the report said.

Hospitals in Canada’s biggest cities – Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto –  confirmed “a substantial number” of Canadians had travelled to China for dubious organ transplants, Mr Kilgour said.

“We’re in the three digits, up over 100 (from Canada each year), and the trend is accelerating,” Mr Matas said.

The  researchers are calling for countries to post travel advisories for medical  tourists to China, and to stop the sale of organ-rejection drugs to China.   Those ideas sound bad and terrible, respectively.  First,  I doubt that anyone who leaves Canada (and remember, Canada is a medical paradise!) for surgery China is under any illusions about why organs are so widely available there.  Halting the sale of anti-rejection drugs would undoubtedly hurt people who have a legitimate medical need for organs that may well come from ethically defensible sources.

A better idea would be for nations to approach the problem of unethical medical tourism the same way they approach unethical child sex tourism:  as a law enforcement problem.  If undercover investigation has been able to  catch child sex rings in other countries, it could do the same to the organ trade.  And when those profiteers are linked to the Chinese military, we will soon see just how serious China is about addressing this problem.

An even more obvious idea would be to make China a Tier III nation for human trafficking.

Kilgour and Matas previously reported on China’s widespread executions of Falun Gong members who refused to renounce their beliefs.  You can see their rather crude-looking site here, and read their entire report here.  These gentlemen clearly have an axe to grind, and their claims to have approached the subject from a neutral perspective lack credibility.  The writing itself is subpar, and the authors do not claim to have direct evidence for their charge (how could they?), although  they do  raise  such circumstantial evidence as online solicitations  from Chinese hospitals’ Web sites, which mysteriously disappeared almost immediately after Kilgour and Matas cited them.  Many of their witnesses, such as relatives who claim to have seen incision scars on the bodies of their loved ones,  are linked to Falun Gong.  That’s not surprising, since the allegations focus on FLG practitioners.  There’s reason to be cautious about their claims, but not to discredit them.  And of course, non-FLG Chinese witnesses may not be forthcoming out of fear of persecution by their own government.

By the way, I want to give my second hat tip of the day to James Chen, with whom I’ve debated this question:  “it is even possible to boycott China today?”  Functionally, I really don’t think it is anymore.  Like James, I buy some toys at garage sales, which means that I buy less from China.  While the kids are still little, they don’t care much, and the toys do cost less.  But for so many other products, there’s often no other choice, or no other choice except South Korea, Germany, France,  or Jordan (favorite son, Zarkawi; nuff said?).  I’ve essentially reverted to something of a preference system:  I don’t impulse-buy that much, but I never impulse-buy stuff that’s made in a country on my non-preferred list (Thailand is the newest addition).  I don’t buy any big-ticket items (cars, appliances)  made in those places, and consider travel to, say, the Beijing Olympics to be the biggest of big-ticket items.  For consumer goods  at roughly  $50 or less,  if I have a choice of products at comparable prices, I will buy the product made in a fairly benign source:  El Salvador, Guatemala, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, etc. 

But then, I read something like this, and it will cause me to boycott anything made in China for weeks at a time,  and I do so  knowing full well that, unlike the case with North Korea,  trade and capitalism are in fact gradually destroying the ChiComs’ ability to  control thought.

And with that, I turn this  topic over to the commenters to continue the flame war.