Myth: China performs about 10,000 organ transplants per year

In March 2015, Phoenix Satellite Television, a Hong Kong-based mandarin language station authorized by the Chinese government to broadcast in mainland China, published an interview with Huang Jiefu.¹

Responding to the reporter’s question about the number of death-row prisoners being far smaller than the number of transplants performed in China, Huang replied, “What you’re saying is too sensitive, so I can’t be too explicit with you. It will be clear to you as long as you think about it. Because your country doesn’t have a transparent system, you don’t know where the [organs] come from. How many [transplants] are done is also a secret, so in fact, many things are actually a mess, and the number isn’t clear to you.”

Our research finds that the Chinese government’s claim of 10,000 transplants per year is surpassed by only a few hospitals. For example, Director Zhu Jiye of the liver transplant center at the People’s Hospital of Peking University told China Economic Weekly in September 2013, “Our hospital conducted 4,000 liver and kidney transplants within a particular year.”² Tianjin Central Hospital has at least 500 dedicated transplant beds;³ it claimed to be running at 131% occupancy.⁴ With 20 to 30-day patient stays,⁵ this hospital alone could do 8,000 transplants per year.⁶ Beijing No. 309 Hospital has 393 beds and has the capacity to perform more than 4,000 transplants per year.⁷

More than 1,000 transplant hospitals applied for permits from the Ministry of Health in 2007 to continue performing transplants;⁸ 169 were ultimately approved.⁹ Based on government-imposed minimum capacity requirements for transplant centers, these approved hospitals could have conducted 60,000 to 100,000 transplants per year, i.e. more than one million transplants in total since 2000.¹⁰ In addition, many hospitals that had not yet been approved in 2007 also routinely performed transplants.

In January 2015, Huang Jiefu told CCTV, “I would like to quote the words of the World Health Organization that China has undertaken such a path in six to seven years whereas other developed countries building up their organ donation and transplant framework took dozens of years.”¹¹

Wu Mengchao, president of the Affiliated Eastern Hepatobiliary Surgery Hospital of the Second Military Medical University and “father of hepatobiliary surgery in China,”¹² claimed on May 11, 2011, “in terms of liver transplants, our quantity has been the largest in the world.”¹³

Since 2000, the entire United States has performed an average of about 6,000 liver transplants a year.¹⁴ This could be matched by just a few hospitals in China.

Since 2005, the regime has said that the vast majority of organs come from death row prisoners, and later, donations. However, the organ sources identified by the Chinese government account for only a small fraction of transplants performed in China. The vast majority have simply not been accounted for.^{15 16}

The official Chinese figure for annual transplant volume grew from hundreds to thousands and finally to 10,000 in 2006, after which it has remained constant.¹⁷ Our examination of hospitals showed that transplant figures claimed by the government and medical institutions have been manipulated due to financial interests and the inability to identify organ sources. This is especially true after organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience was publicized in 2006, since which time transplant data and relevant information online have been systematically removed or deflated, often by an order of magnitude.

References