In China, it is said that there are two types of slaves: those who make Apple products, and those who buy Apple products. Shangkun—a teenage boy from Anhui province—represents the latter.
In April 2011 he let a surgeon remove one of his kidneys so it could be transplanted into another patient. His compensation: 22,000 yuan, or about $3,500, enough to buy the iPhone and iPad he was after. The man who arranged the transplant, however, received 10 times that amount from the kidney’s recipient and split the earnings with the surgeon and three nurses.
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How does Shangkun, a boy from a middle-class family, come into contact with men who operate in this black market? As it turns out, a search on Baidu—China’s version of Google—reveals that organ traders are quite open about their dealings. The search engine even shows websites listing their active locations.
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The organ traders post their phone numbers on forums popular with teens and 20-somethings, and even engage potential “donors” and recipients through chat clients. Operating in the open carries an obvious risk: These rings do get busted. However, one can access this organ underworld with minimal investigation, so I called one of them.
The first words I heard were “Blood type?” He assumed that I, like Shangkun, was ready to part with an organ. He goes by the alias Mr. Dong, and says he has developed a profitable business pairing willing young men with patients who need healthy kidneys. Most of his donors are from urban areas, in their late teens or early 20s, and unsatisfied with their factory jobs, he says. Others want a few thousand dollars so they can buy new gadgets or pay off gambling debts.
There is a shortage of healthy organs for transplant in China, and self-styled businessmen like Mr. Dong have managed to fill the gap. Like all of his donors, Mr. Dong says he has a scar on his abdomen. He says, “I owed a lot of money because of my gambling. The only way I could raise enough money to pay off my debts was by selling my kidney. But I do not regret it, because it gave me an idea.”
What Mr. Dong means is that after the transplant, he came up with a business plan. His kidney may have only sold for a few hundred dollars, but his next move was to establish an organ-harvesting network spanning 10 cities, each with a medical crew working in a public hospital or plastic surgery clinic.
To corral a donor, Mr. Dong instructs him to meet with a physician for physical evaluation. As soon as the blood work is done and it is established that the donor is in reasonably good health, he is funneled into one of the apartments rented to lodge donors—in essence, organ mills. Before his transplant, a donor is fed three meager meals and given a pack of cigarettes each day. He mainly sells kidneys but has also brokered some bone marrow.
Dong’s lieutenants keep watch, and donors are not allowed to leave the premises other than to run necessary errands, such as purchasing groceries. Even though Mr. Dong was forthcoming during our conversations over the phone, he can be dangerous. If a donor has a change of heart and decides to back out, things can get ugly.
Once, Mr. Dong says, a man approached him and wanted to call off the deal and go home. He was subdued by Mr. Dong’s henchmen, drugged and taken to a hospital. When he awoke, he found sutures on his abdomen. Mr. Dong had already taken his kidney, and he was cut loose without compensation.
Mr. Dong’s first ring was shut down in mid-2012, he says. A zealous blogger with an investigative streak posed as a donor and snuck a video camera into one of the organ mills. After amassing sufficient evidence, the blogger made a call to the Ministry of Public Security—China’s FBI—and then came the crackdown. Public security officers arrested Dong’s lieutenants, as well as most of the medical personnel involved in the harvests. Mr. Dong, however, managed to lay low, and resurfaced half a year later.
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Liu Yunlu (left) and Dong Binggang appear in Beijing Xicheng District People’s Court on Thursday to answer charges in connection with their alleged involvement in the trafficking of human organs for transplant operations.
Now he pays donors less than $5,000 per harvest, but says he can sell each kidney for over $100,000. His clientele are from all around the world, and transactions are always in cash. It seems irrelevant to the donors that they are selling a piece of themselves for gadgets soon rendered obsolete.
Even the organ-trafficking business has a seasonality to it, he explains. Typically, there is an increase in donor numbers right before Chinese New Year (typically late January or early February), when many Chinese migrants return home for three or four weeks from wherever else in the country they happen to be working. They want to be able to arrive home and say that they’ve been making some money.
Many of the people who sell their organs later suffer from renal deficiency, possibly because their operations were not performed in a safe, regulated manner. The last conversation I had with Mr. Dong was earlier this year, when he was about to bring his dealings in the organ black market to an end after more than three years. “I can still earn money doing this,” Mr. Dong told me, “but I have too much to lose now. I will build a house and retire.”
While it was Mr. Dong’s actions that brought media attention to the underground organ trade in China, he is but one of many who match donors and patients.
With little motivation for the Chinese security apparatus to enforce existing regulations, boys like Shangkun will continue to reach out to men like Mr. Dong, and the organ black market will continue to operate with impunity.
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