Case Study: China International Transplantation Assistance Center (CITNAC)

On October 16, 2007, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs made a rare, high profile announcement that Hiroyuki Nagase, the CEO of a Japanese-funded company, had been arrested for illegal organ trading.¹ The Ministry indicated that, since 2004, the Shenyang-based IPC Information Service Corporation had published online information about organ trafficking under the name of “China International Transplantation Assistance Center.”

The arrest came when the center’s website attracted international attention after China’s organ harvesting program was exposed in 2006. The website contained information about organ transplant prices,² the availability of kidney transplants from living sources,³ and how the Chinese government facilitated its high transplant volume.⁴ The website was available in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and English. It was subsequently shut down after September 23, 2007:⁵

The China International Transplantation Network Assistance Center (CITNAC), which focused mainly on foreign patients, was founded in 2003 under the organ transplantation department of the First Affiliated Hospital of China Medical University. We refer to it by the name on its English website.⁶ While nominally foreign-owned, the center was established within a Chinese hospital. The government apparently used this structure, and the prosecution of a foreign national, to avoid culpability for illicit organ transplants carried out by a Chinese institution.

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