According to a Xinhua report in 2009, the People’s Liberation Army 452 (Chengdu Air Force) hospital, spearheaded by the development of kidney transplantation, leaped from a “township-level scale” to the equivalent of a large hospital within several years. It claims that it has performed the most kidney transplants in Sichuan Province.⁴⁸⁴

In 2000, the hospital had 89 vacancies for doctors, and its facilities and equipment remained at the same level as they were in the early 1990s. Additionally, the hospital owed external debts of over 6 million RMB. However as of 2008, it had increased its in-patient-bed numbers from 210 to more than 1,000; the value of its medical equipment increased from 30 million to 120 million RMB, and the hospital’s income increased from 20 million in 2000 to 260 million RMB in 2008.⁴⁸⁵

At present, the hospital has more than 1,500 beds, 78 senior professionals, 195 intermediate professionals, 26 staff with PhDs, 95 with Master’s degrees, and a large number of post-doctoral fellows. The hospital’s kidney transplant capabilities are well-known both in southwestern China and nationwide.⁴⁸⁶

Just after the CCP living organ harvesting was exposed, on April 28, 2006, a reporter from an oversea media conducted an investigation into this hospital under the guise of a relative of a patient looking for organs. Yahong Xu, the director of the urologic surgery department, said that after mid-May 2006, there would be a number of kidneys available for transplant, and also that there were some voluntary donors, and that organs would be provided by young, healthy, Falun Gong practitioners. Xu himself had conducted more than 500 transplants, or more than 100 per year over the previous two or three years.⁴⁸⁷

After this was publicly exposed, the hospital deleted pages containing transplant data from its official site. Xu’s personal web page claimed that he had a high reputation in the field of organ transplantation in southwestern China and within the entire military, but shows he has only carried out 287 kidney transplants during his nearly 20 years of experience in renal transplantation.⁴⁸⁸
During the same investigation, Honghui Li, the director of the kidney transplant center at Tsinghua University Yuquan Hospital (Second Hospital of Tsinghua University) in Beijing, said that, due to the recent lack of donors in Beijing, he had been assigned to Chengdu, Sichuan Province a couple of months ago, where there were more kidney sources in renal transplantation.⁴⁸⁹