Causes of Underreporting

“Problems with the Organ Sources”

Wu Mengchao revealed in an interview with iNewsweek.cn on February 23, 2006, “There are problems with the organ sources, so it’s hard to organize cases after performing [transplants], and we can’t publish papers.”¹

Financial Interests

Tax evasion has become a common practice for enterprises and institutions in Mainland China. In addition to the financial aspect, transplant centers also maintain two sets of books when it comes to transplant volume.

In the industry’s early period of growth after 2000, because transplant volume was limited by technology and the cost of immunosuppressant medications, hospitals and doctors engaged in high-profile publicity to attract patients. Transplant volumes increased with the quick resolution of these obstacles. For self-financed hospitals, protecting themselves from the tax consequences of this surge in profits became a practical concern. Underreporting of transplant volumes became a way to evade taxation.

As mentioned earlier, the Oriental Organ Transplant Center performs thousands of transplants per year but reported only 7 liver transplants to the National Liver Transplant Registry in 2010.

We also examined such practices at Peking University People’s Hospital. As of July 16, 2014, its website stated that the hospital had carried out a total of 600 liver and 510 kidney transplants since 2000. After becoming an approved transplant center in 2007, it claims to have performed “80 to 90 transplants per year.”²

In other words, as of 2014, Peking University People’s Hospital has publicly reported that is has performed fewer than 1,200 liver and kidney transplants in over a decade.

However, in an interview with China Economic Weekly, Zhu Jiye inadvertently revealed entirely different numbers: “Before the pilot [donation] program started in 2010, all of our organ sources came from death-row prisoners. Our hospital once did more than 4,000 liver and kidney transplants in one year. These organs all came from death-row prisoners.”³

Zhu was describing events before 2010. The hospital’s transplant center moved into its new 470-bed surgery building in December 2005. Its website now claims it performs 120 to 130 liver and kidney transplants per year,⁴ a mere 1/33rd of the number stated by Zhu Jiye. It is unlikely that a transplant center with 470 beds would perform only 120 to 130 surgeries per year.

In another example, a senior military doctor who belonged to the General Logistics Department of the Shenyang Military Command wrote to the Epoch Times on March 31, 2006:

“The number of underground transplants performed in China exceed the public figures by several times. For example, if the official number is 30,000 cases, then the actual number would be 110,000. This is also the root cause of plummeting prices of organ transplants in China … Because there is a huge pool of available living organs, many military hospitals report their transplants to their supervising authorities. At the same time, they also carry out organ transplants on a large scale in private. This leads to the fact that the actual numbers are much higher than the official statistics.”⁵

References