The Vatican came in for some flak this week for inviting a Chinese delegation to attend a conference on organ trafficking, much of it deserved considering its mealymouthed response to critics, but the invitation might turn out to have been a good thing after all.
The Pontifical Academy of Sciences’ invitation to former Chinese minister of health Huang Jiefu (黃潔夫), who is in charge of overhauling his nation’s transplant system, gave him the chance to brag that he was the highest-ranking Chinese official to ever attend a Vatican event.
The chancellor of the academy defended Huang’s invitation by saying that the Vatican wanted to “strengthen the movement for change” in China.
It is unlikely the conference had a prayer of doing that. However, while the two-day meeting did give Huang a platform to push Beijing’s propaganda — that the use of organs from executed prisoners “is not allowed under any circumstances” — it also gave doctors and other critics a chance to publicly denounce Beijing’s obfuscations and outright lies during several heated exchanges.
Given the level of security that top Chinese officials enjoy on overseas trips, it is rare for them to be directly confronted over Beijing’s policies, trips to Taiwan having thankfully proven the exception.
Huang has repeatedly claimed that China ended its prisoner harvesting program — which is basically an “execution to order” system that includes death-sentence prisoners and “prisoners of conscience” — two years ago, but in Rome he was forced to admit that harvesting from prisoners might still be taking place.
Given that China has not actually passed any new laws or regulations outlawing the practice, its continuance should be taken as a given, since Huang has previously said that about 90 percent of Chinese transplant surgeries using cadaver organs came from executed prisoners.
As the Guardian reported this week, a report published last year found a large discrepancy between China’s official annual transplant figures and the number of transplants reported by hospitals, with Beijing saying that there are 10,000 transplants, while hospital data show 60,000 to 100,000 organs are transplanted each year.
Huang told the Rome meeting that the number of voluntary organ donors increased 50 percent from 2015 to last year’s 4,080. The organs for the transplants cited in China’s official data, as well as the hospitals’, have to be coming from somewhere, and it is clearly not volunteer donors.
Huang and others in his delegation tried to plead size, saying that China is too big, has too many medical centers and doctors for Beijing to actually be able to control transplants nationwide, but that it is working to end black-market activities.
That is complete rubbish.
The Chinese delegation’s proposal that the WHO form a global task force to help crack down on illicit organ trafficking was just another smokescreen for two reasons: The coercive harvesting of prisoners’ organs has been abetted, and is conducted by state bodies, not just black-market profiteers; and China has an abysmal record when it comes to cooperating with UN organizations’ investigations.
Huang and crew clearly got more than they are used to at the Rome conference, and global coverage of those exchanges and criticism of China’s practices helps puncture Beijing’s public relations efforts.
If Beijing really wanted to end organ transplant abuses, it could. The truth is that transplant surgery is big business and the Chinese government is making too much money from it to stop the abuses.
The exposure of China’s lies and fake statistics strips away the veneer of medical respectability that Beijing has worked so hard to craft. It should also serve as a reminder to those contemplating traveling to China for transplant surgery that what they are actually paying for is the death of another human being.
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