by HAIYUN MA for ISLAMiCommentary on JUNE 28, 2013: * Update 8/24/13 (Senior Chinese official Huang Jiefu said China will phase out the practice of taking organs from executed prisoners starting in November, and will now rely on using organs from voluntary donors under a new national donation system.)
Haiyun Ma
Like many other religions, Islam places importance with both spiritual cultivation and physical cleanliness. When a Muslim dies, the body must be purified, cleansed, shrouded, and buried within 24 hours.
And many Muslims have no problem with donating their organs after death.
With increased demand for organs in China, for example, and modern medical advancements, the bodies of Chinese Muslims can save lives. (The Muslim World League in Mecca, the Organization of Islamic Conference in Jeddah, and the Islamic Juridical Academy of India have encouraged organ donation upon death as being a noble act, provided that a person has already left specific instructions before his death in his will or has provided his/her legal heirs to make this choice.)
So accounts of prisoners in China being executed then carried half-dead into a medical van where their organs are removed for sale, without their permission, to the wealthy — are the kinds of stories that haunt families, including China’s Uyghur Muslims, who have lost track of their relatives in the Chinese prison system.
Interest groups, journalists, scholars and policy-makers who have attempted to document the Chinese practice of harvesting organs from executed prisoners have suggested that these inmates include political prisoners — Muslim Uyghurs from China’s Uyghur Autonomous Region as well as Falun Gong practitioners.
But getting first-hand proof that the practice is being carried out without the prisoners’ consent, and/or that it’s being done to prisoners who are wrongly imprisoned, and/or that it’s being conducted on prisoners while they are still alive, and/or under other inhumane conditions, is complicated.
That said, in the face of mounting evidence, today (June 27) U.S. Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) and Rep. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) introduced House Resolution 281 in the House Committee on Foreign Affairs that calls on China to immediately stop the practice of organ harvesting from its prisoners, particularly from Falun Gong prisoners of conscience and “members of other religious and ethnic minority groups.”
Chinese Promises 
Chinese prison, Xinjiang, 2011
The idea of harvesting organs from prisoners came into practice in 1984 when the Chinese ministries of justice, public security, health and others issued an interim provision on “using executed prisoners or their organs.” (It should be noted that, according to this provision, the implementation of this internal law in minority regions needs to respect the local burial customs.)
China admits death row organ use and is trying to move away from the use of executed prisoners as its major source of organs for transplants, and has, in recent years done more to encourage voluntary donations.
There is a huge demand for organ transplants in China. It is estimated that about 1.5 million people in China need transplants, but only about 10,000 operations are performed annually, according to China’s health ministry, reported the BBC in 2009.
According to a 2009 article in China Daily, a state-run English-language newspaper published in Beijing, experts estimate that executed prisoners account for more than 65 percent of total donors.
At least 1,718 people were given the death penalty in China in 2008, according to Amnesty International, and these are the latest figures available. So, based on the percentage of the prisoner donors (figures from previous paragraph) and the annual number of the executed prisoners — in 2008 alone, we could estimate that 1116.7 (65% of 1718) executed prisoners donated their organs.
The Chinese government, which in 2006 first admitted to the sale of organs from executed prisoners, passed a law in 2007 banning the trafficking of organs as well as the donation of organs to unrelated recipients, according to this BBC article.
The government has since been forced to respond to international calls to ban altogether the practice of harvesting organs from prisoners.
Speaking at a national conference of transplant surgeons in Guangzhou in November 2006, Vice Minister of Health Huang Jiefu admitted, “Apart from a small portion of traffic (accident) victims, most of the organs from cadavers are from executed prisoners.”
In 2009 he acknowledged that executed prisoners “are definitely not a proper source for organ transplants,” and in 2012 Jiefu pledged to abolish the practice “within three to five years.”
This indicates that the practice of harvesting organs from executed prisoners could continue until 2017, if China takes that promise seriously.
Organ Harvesting Practices Investigated
Chinese prison, Xinjiang, 2011
The Chinese government has consistently denied it is engaged in organ harvesting aimed at imprisoned dissidents, and/or improper or inhumane organ removal practices from executed prisoners. They also say that all prisoners who donate organs have willingly signed consent papers. That hasn’t stopped international hearings on the prospect.
The organ harvesting issue was first raised in the U.S. by Wu Hongda (who later changed name as Harry Wu) — a self-described “political prisoner” who was held at a Chinese forced-labor camp for nearly 20 years. There are, however, conflicting reports on what he was imprisoned for. (Some sources cite rape as the charge, including this account in a Chinese web magazine)
A geologist by profession, Wu first came to the U.S. in 1985 as a visiting scholar at U.C. Berkeley. After publishing a book cataloguing the Chinese labor camp system, he portrayed himself as a victim of China’s labor camps and actively sought to testify in political hearings on Chinese forced-labor prison camps. In 1990 he was asked to testify before the U.S. Senate on his experiences.
In 1995 Wu gave testimony at a hearing on “China, Illegal trade in human body parts” held by the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
Six years later, Wu introduced Chinese Dr. Wang Guoqi at a 2001 hearing entitled “Organs for Sale: China’s Growing Trade and Ultimate Violation of Prisoner’s Rights,” which was organized by the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights of the U.S. House Committee on International Relations.
(Here’s an excerpt from Wang Guoqi’s testimony, page 57-58 of the hearing transcript) “Before execution, I administered a shot of heparin to prevent blood clotting to the prisoner. A nearby policeman told him it was a tranquilizer to prevent unnecessary suffering during the execution. The criminal responded by giving thanks to the government. At the site the execution commander gave the order, ‘‘Go,’’ and the prisoner was shot to the ground. Either because the executioner was nervous, aimed poorly or intentionally misfired to keep the organs intact, the prisoner had not yet died, but instead lay convulsing on the ground. We were ordered to take him to the ambulance anyway where urologists Wang Shifu, Zhao Qingling and Liu Qiyou extracted his kidneys quickly and precisely.”
Wu also assisted ABC News’ 1997 Primetime investigation: “Blood Money: Black Market for Kidneys from Chinese Prisoners,” and participated in a 2008 ABC 20/20 investigation into where the bodies from “Bodies…the Exhibition” had come from. There was speculation, in the 20/20 piece, that the bodies in this touring exhibition of preserved corpses were executed prisoners, but this was ultimately never proven, as the documentary’s key witness later recanted his testimony and Wu and his Laogai Research Foundation ended up issuing an apology for providing inaccurate information. In the meantime, authorities in China and New York launched their own investigations.
There have since been questions about the validity of Wu’s personal credibility and motivations, (see this RFA article which casts suspicion on Wu and Wang Guoqi, and this New York Times article regarding Wu), and Wu has gotten mixed reviews from human rights groups who look at China.
More reliable sources and reports on China’s organ harvesting practices (from executed prisoners) come from researchers on the Falun Gong organization and its jailed practitioners. Falun Gong is a spiritual discipline that was first introduced in China in 1992 by its founder Li Hongzhi. It combines the Buddhist practice with a moral philosophy that highlights the cultivation of key virtues such as truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.
The Falun Gong practice initially enjoyed nation-wide popularity and the support of the Chinese government for promoting people’s health and spirituality. However, the growth in popularity of Falun Gong and its millions of supporters concerned the Chinese government, which finally suppressed it in 1999.
Human rights groups report that thousands of Falun Gong practitioners were subject to imprisonment, forced labor, torture, and even execution. These groups began to be concerned that organs were being harvested from Falun Gong prisoners.
One of the chief studies on this was conducted by Canadian lawyer David Matas and a former member of the Canadian parliament, David Kilgour, who co-authored an independent investigation into the practice — “BLOODY HARVEST: Revised Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China” — that comprehensively documents organ harvesting of executed Falun Gong prisoners.
Published in 2007, this research lists 2995 dead (appendix 10, names of the dead) and enumerates the corpses believed to be missing organs together with family testimonies on organ harvesting. The research details “only a few instances of such mutilated corpses” whose condition is consistent with organ harvesting; in the “corpses with missing organs” section.
However, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak said in an interview with a German journalist in March 2007 that the chain of evidence Kilgour and Matas documented showed a “coherent picture that causes concern.”
“It’s a fact that Falun Gong is being suppressed since 1999. It is incontestable that since the beginning of the repressions against Falun Gong the number of organ transplantations has increased massively. Even the official Chinese Organizations of Medics shows in its Statistics that there have been 60,000 organ transplantations between the year 2000 and 2005,” Nowak said.
In addition to their research on organ harvesting from executed Falun Gong practitioners, Matas and Kilgour also mentioned the physical mistreatment of Uyghur prisoners.
Quoting from Nowak’s report on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment — based on 2005 field research in China and presented in this report by the U.N. Special Rapporteur (document file, www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/chr/docs/62chr/ecn4-2006-6-Add6.doc) — Matas and Kilgour wrote that the victims of alleged torture and ill-treatment in China include Falun Gong practitioners (66%), Uyghurs (11%), sex workers (8%), Tibetans (6%), human rights defenders (5%), political dissidents (2%), and others (persons infected with HIV/AIDS and members of religious groups (2%).
Chinese prison, Xinjiang, 2011
The U.N. Special Rapporteur’s report also makes particular mention of the Urumuqi No. 1 and No. 4 Prisons that alone respectively housed 1056 and 689 Uyghurs.
A November 2008 article by Ethan Gutmann for The Weekly Standard titled “China’s Gruesome Organ Harvest: The whole world isn’t watching. Why not?“ generally supported the findings of the Kilgour-Matas report. Gutmann was doing research for a book on the clash between Falun Gong and the Chinese government. In the course of his research he discovered that organ harvesting had “spread even beyond” Falun Gong prisoners.
Gutmann, at the time of writing, was also an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and received research support from the Earhart Foundation and the Wallenberg family of Sweden.
In 2011 he wrote another article for The Weekly Standard: “The Xinjiang Procedure, Beijing’s ‘New Frontier’ is ground zero for the organ harvesting of political prisoners.” For this article Gutmann spent two years interviewing Uyghur witnesses including police, medical, and security personnel in Europe and America:
Among the many witnesses Gutmann interviewed, was a former Uyghur police officer Nijat Abdureyim, who worked at Regiment No. 1 in the Urumqi Public Security Bureau where he witnessed interrogations and executions of Uyghurs and saw harvesting vans at a killing field in early 1990s.
The second witness that Gutmann interviewed was a Uyghur doctor, Enver Tohti, who used to work at an Urumuqi hospital. Mr. Tohti confessed that he actually participated in a team in 1995 to remove muscle, soft tissue, kidneys, and other organs from executed prisoners who were still alive.
Dr. Murat, whom Gutmann also interviewed, was working in a large hospital in Urumuqi in 1999 and testified about organ harvesting from Uyghur prisoners in Xinjiang.
According to Murat’s account (paraphrased here), his superior informed him that five Chinese officials had checked into the hospital with organ problems and he was ordered by his instructor to go to the Urumqi prison to take blood samples and to map out the different blood types. More specifically, Murat was asked to go to “the political wing, not the criminal division” to conduct blood tests,which indicated to him that the organs would be harvested from Uyghur political prisoners.
Murat then took blood samples from about 15 political prisoners; most of them tough-guy Uyghurs in their twenties. Once they found a matching blood type, they would move to tissue matching. Then the political prisoner would get a bullet to the right side of the chest. Murat’s instructor would visit the execution site to match up the blood samples. Patients—all Chinese officials — would get organ transplants.
For more of Gutmann’s interviews see here
Recent Reports and Hearings
This May, according to an article in World Net Daily, a conference was held at Israel’s Knesset — organized by Knesset Member Moshe Feiglin, the deputy speaker in parliament from the ruling Likud party — to look into China’s organ harvesting practices.
Called “The Responsibility of the State of Israel Regarding the Issue of Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China,” about 10 Knesset members, in addition to Feiglin, were in attendance.
Former prisoner Lizhi He, who said he was held for three years because he was a Falun Gong practitioner, testified before the group. Classified by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience, he said he survived more than three years in a Chinese prison despite brutal torture. He was able to leave China to join his wife (who’d escaped to Canada) with the help of the Canadian government. At the session he called for an end to Falun Gong persecution and organ harvesting from prisoners.
The Knesset organizers issued a closing statement at their conference: “We, the participants of this symposium, demand that the government of China stop the practice of organ harvesting; respect the ‘image of God’ [in humanity], which is mutual to all of us; and stop the persecution and the abuse of people for their faith,” it read. “The Liberal Lobby of the Knesset will follow-up on the issue of the severe abuse of human rights in China, and will persevere with this moral demand.”
In February 2013 the Canadian Parliament held a hearing on forced organ harvesting in China, where they heard testimony from David Kilgour and David Mattas, authors of the 2007 “BLOODY HARVEST: Revised Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China.”
The most recent reports on possible organ harvesting from Uyghur prisoners can be found on the website of the American Uyghur Association in its blog section.
Here Ilshat Hassan (a Uyghur blogger for American Uyghur Association) details the death of a Uyghur teacher, Rehmanjan, in Urumuqi in October 2012. This teacher, who worked at Military Officer’s Training School, reportedly committed suicide.
The young man’s father, a high-ranking municipal official in Ghuljan city, was “persuaded” by the military unit not to investigate his death. In return the young man was honored as a martyr of revolution and his family was compensated with a large sum of money.
The reason behind this compensation, according to the doctor’s wife, is because Rehmanjan did not commit suicide, but was murdered. She said that her husband had witnessed military doctors in his working unit taking jailed Uyghurs for various operations to do with their organs.
Rehmanjan appeared to have documented these practices in his diary but some pages in his diary were missing after his death, according to his wife.
On January 29, 2013 a forum was held at the European Parliament in Brussels on religious persecution by China. The forum, which addressed how prisoners of conscience in China are persecuted, tortured and in some cases killed for their organs, was sponsored by Edward McMillan Scott, European Parliament Vice President for Human Rights & Democracy and the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO). It included testimony from journalist Ethan Gutmann and former surgeon Enver Tohti, among others.
In an interview with NTD TV, a New York-based TV network founded by Falun Gong practitioners that’s banned in China, European Parliament Human Rights Subcommittee Member Leonidas Donskis said, ”People who are behind this are criminals. This is a crime against humanity.”
Tunne Kelam, EP Foreign Affairs Committee member, told NTD TV,”If we don’t take knowledge seriously about this practice, we have become morally and politically co-responsible for what’s going on.”
Now What?
Due to the sensitive and secretive nature of organ harvesting and of every-day prison conditions in China, it is still difficult to gain first-hand evidence on the subject.
The large number of Uyghur prisoners and the continuing disappearance of Uyghurs in China today is suspicious enough to warrant an inquiry into the existence of organ harvesting — be they criminals or political prisoners.
Ilham Tohti , a Uyghur intellectual and professor at China’s Minzu University who runs the web site Uighurbiz.net – has recently reported, based on his documentation, that some young Uyghurs who were arrested following the July 5th clashes in Xinjiang in 2009 remain missing, while others have been returned to their families, dead, with evidence of torture.
Uyghur human rights organizations based overseas can be more effective in pressing for Uyghur human rights in China, if they conduct similar initiatives like these to document the number of disappeared and and/or executed Uyghur prisoners.
The organ harvesting issue is an important issue not only for the Uyghurs or other persecuted populations, but also for rising China’s international image and reputation and the safety of its citizens abroad (especially in Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East).
Organ harvesting from executed prisoners in China has already led to hearings, forums, or resolutions (some recent0 in the United States, Canada, Israel, the European Union and other democracies.
Except for terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), who have vowed to take revenge or have already taken revenge on China for its persecution of the Uyghurs, there has been little outcry from the Middle East about China’s organ harvesting practices — likely due to the dictatorial nature of their political regimes and their close relations with China.
However, I do believe that the ongoing democratization processes in the majority Muslim countries of the Middle East and Central Asia will one day lead to more attention being paid to these Turkic Muslims and their plight.
China has already promised to end organ harvesting from executed prisoners. Let’s hope they follow through. But, the government must also promise to stop torturing prisoners and imprisoning dissidents. And, they must release information on disappeared or executed Uyghurs and other persecuted groups and return their bodies to their kin.
Haiyun Ma is Adjunct Professor of Chinese History who specializes in the study of Islam and Muslims in China at George Mason University and an expert on China-Middle East relations with the Middle East Institute. His teaching and research interests are Chinese history, Islam and Muslims of China (including Xinjiang), Sino-Middle East relations, and China-Central Asian relations.