How the PRC’s lucrative transplant industry kills donors by removing their organs
Beginning in the year 2000, however, China’s organ transplantation system began a period of rapid expansion: Thousands of new doctors were trained, hundreds of hospitals opened new transplant wings or constructed dedicated buildings, new patents for transplantation technologies were registered, and domestic immunosuppressant manufacturing began. A leading surgeon told Chinese media that “the year 2000 was a watershed for the organ transplant industry in China.” Another said the number of hospitals doing liver transplants after 2000 “rose abruptly like spring bamboo after rain.” The upward trajectory continued even after 2007, when major reforms to the death penalty system dramatically reduced the number of judicial executions.
Theories as to whose bodies made up the shortfall between the number of transplants and the number of officially recorded death penalty prisoners have confounded analysts since 2006. The leading hypothesis to date has been that political prisoners—mostly practitioners of Falun Gong, and more recently probably Uyghur Muslims, too—were killed extralegally, and their organs monetized.