Rare Chinese Newspaper Exposé Details Prisoner Organ Harvests
Report by Small Weekly Posted on State-Run Paper's Web Site
By John Pomfret, Washington Post Foreign Service
Originally published in The Washington Post, July 31, 2001
JINXI, China — On the afternoon of Sept. 29, 1999, a former soldier in the Chinese army flew into a rage, raped his girlfriend and killed his newborn son and the mother and grandfather of his girlfriend. He then turned himself in to the police.
Fu Xinrong was executed with a bullet to the head on May 30 last year. In a country that puts more people to death than all other nations combined, his case would have passed largely unnoticed but for what came next: He became the focus of what appears to be the first exposé in the Chinese media about the practice of selling executed prisoners' organs without their permission.
According to the report—"Where Did My Brother's Body Go?"—that appeared in the April 11 edition of Today Family Weekly, a small newspaper in Jiangxi province, where the crime occurred, Fu's body was immediately placed in a van and driven away. The van's license plates were traced to a hospital in Nanchang, the provincial capital.
The newspaper quoted unidentified government investigators as saying that officials from the Pingxiang county court, where Fu was sentenced, had sold his corpse to the hospital for an undisclosed sum. There, his kidneys were extracted and transplanted to unidentified patients, the newspaper said.
Though the Beijing government has attempted to suppress discussion of organ-harvesting, the article was picked up by the People's Daily Online, the main Web site of the most powerful official newspaper in China, where it remains posted. Several other newspapers in China also reprinted it.
"There are people who are against this practice," said one journalist, who was trying to explain how such an article could have appeared on the newspaper's Web site. "Sometimes in China, things sneak through the cracks."
Meanwhile, in a sign of another change in China—people's increasing willingness to seek justice through courts—Fu's sister, Fu Mulan, said she wants to sue the government for selling her brother's organs without his permission. Her lawyer, Wei Liyuan, said he is building a case. And at least one court official in the county where the alleged organ-harvesting took place has been removed from his position, local sources said.
Chinese journalists who have investigated the case say numerous other organ deals have been made in that courthouse in the past few years.
"This is a bad practice," said a local official in Jiangxi province with knowledge of the case. "People like me want it stopped."
A Growing Phenomenon
The illicit trade in organs is a worldwide phenomenon brought on by a shortage of donors and a threefold increase in demand in the United States alone, according to the United Network for Organs Sharing, which coordinates American organ donations. Taiwan also harvests organs from executed prisoners, and says it does so with their consent. In India, and now China, poor people routinely sell their body parts.
In the United States, doctors report an increased number of patients seeking medical help after they have received transplants in China. Many of those are assumed to be from executed prisoners. Amnesty International says that China executed at least 1,781 people between April and June, more than all other nations combined in the past three years.
Chinese criminal lawyers, journalists and doctors say the practice of extracting organs from executed prisoners without their permission has been going on for years. Most recently, Wang Guoqi, 38, a doctor from the Tianjin People's Armed Police General Brigade Hospital, told the U.S. Congress on June 27 that he helped remove corneas and skin from more than 100 executed prisoners.
China's government has denied this practice occurs. A few days after Wang's testimony, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue called Wang's testimony "sensational lies" and "vicious slander" against China. "With regard to the trade in human organs, China strictly prohibits that," Zhang said. "The major source of human organs comes from voluntary donations from Chinese citizens."
The parents of one boy who died in a traffic accident are suing a hospital that removed his corneas for transplant without their permission. One recent report quoted a Chinese police officer as saying that black-market activity—and even kidnapping—related to human organ-trading is commonplace in less-developed areas of western China.
Most organ sales, according to the Chinese media, appear to involve voluntary sales of kidneys by poor farmers to wealthier urban residents. (The body can function with only one of its two kidneys). A report in October 2000 in the Yangcheng Evening News said that middlemen had posted advertisements on China's auction Web sites.
Pursuing the Leads
Jiangxi is one of the poorest and most corrupt provinces in China. Nanchang's police chief was recently involved in a scandal involving attempts to pilfer a large amount of cash from a Hainan Island restaurant in which his department had invested. Senior provincial officials were fired after 42 people, mostly schoolchildren, died in an explosion in March in a fireworks factory where they had been forced to work. Earlier this year, thousands of farmers in the province rioted against heavy taxes imposed by local officials.
Against this backdrop, Fu Xinrong's sister, Fu Mulan, received an anonymous call in August—at a phone in a store down the street from her unfinished, ramshackle home—saying that her brother had been executed and his body sold for organ-harvesting.
Fu contacted journalists in Nanchang, requesting help. A group of reporters from Today Family Weekly went to Pingxiang, 180 miles away, to investigate. They determined that on the day Fu was executed, he was driven to execution grounds closer to Nanchang than prisoners usually are, and that a van was waiting there.
After Fu was shot in the back of the head, four attendants got out of the van and picked up his corpse, the newspaper account said. A government prosecutor attempted to stop them, but they explained that they were from Nanchang and that they had a deal with the court. The paper said one of its sources wrote down the van's license plate number, which the reporters traced to a Nanchang hospital.
"We found the hospital's director and confronted him with the evidence," one reporter said. "In the beginning, he refused to say anything about it, but when he saw what we had, he had to admit it on the condition that we did not release the hospital's name in our report."
Further investigation indicated that a senior court official, whose surname is Yang, had sold the body to the hospital, the report said. Contacted in Pingxiang, Yang declined to comment.
The reporters attempted to persuade provincial court officials to investigate, but got no response. They then passed the information to reporters from the People's Daily and the Legal Daily, hoping that they would write an internal report to the Chinese leadership—a common method used by China's media to deal with sensitive subjects. But instead, the People's Daily put the story on its Web site at the same time the provincial newspaper published it.
After the story appeared, Fu Mulan said she received a call from a Pingxiang county official, saying her brother's body had been in the county morgue all along. "I don't believe them," she said. "The official told me to collect the body, but I don't have any money to travel anywhere.
"Anyway," she added, "Why did they suddenly call me? It was because of the newspaper story. My brother's body has been missing for more than a year and suddenly they found it? We may be poor but we are not stupid."
