What Are These So-Called “Conventional Organ Sources?”

(Minghui.org) Jinan Times, one of the largest newspapers in Shandong Province, ran an article on March 12 titled “Organ Transplants Renew the Hope—A Documentary on Organ Transplants at Qianfoshan Hospital in Shandong.”

Within the article is a rather peculiar sentence – “Transplant organs have become scarce since the conventional organ sources were banned in recent years.”

What, then, are these “conventional” organ sources? And how did something so “conventional” become banned?

In order to have a successful transplant, the blood and tissue types from a donor must be compatible with those of the recipient. Among non-genetically related donors and recipients, this chance of “matching” is only 6.5%.

On top of that, the matched donor also has to agree to donate the specific organ that the recipient needs. These two factors together make finding a compatible donor an often-difficult and very lengthy process.

The United States has large national databases of donors and recipients as well as efficient data-sharing networks. In America, there are currently about 100 million registered organ donors ready to be matched.

But even so, the average waiting times for an organ in the U.S.A. are still long: eight months for a heart, two years and two months for a liver, three years and a month for a kidney.

China, despite having a larger population than the United States, has a much smaller pool of willing organ donors due to cultural taboos and a lack of legal regulations.

In the last few decades, there had been only 61 donations in China, all of which came from brain dead patients. Meanwhile, donations from family members only made up 1.1% of all the organ transplants.

However, even though donations are scarce, Chinese hospitals never seem to have to worry about getting ready organs. According to the data collected from their websites and published literature, over 170 thousand kidney transplants, 40 thousand liver transplants, and 137 thousand cornea transplants had been conducted in China before September 2014.

Take Qianfoshan Provincial Hospital for example. According to the article in Ji'nan Times, a provincial heart transplant center was founded in this hospital in 2011. Chief cardiologist Liu Tanqi said that the center has conducted 55 surgeries since then.

The article also quoted the chief of the hepatobiliary surgery department, Teng Mujian, who confirmed that more than 300 liver transplants have been handled by the hospital since 2002. Men Tongyi, the chief of the urology surgery department, added that they have done 103 kidney transplants in 2014 alone.

Moreover, the deputy chief of the ophthalmology department, Wang Xu, said that his department conducts 30 cornea transplants every year on average.

Nationwide, the number of organ transplants in China leaped from 5000 to 10,000 in 1999, and reached the peak of 20,000 between 2003 and 2006 after a period of steady increase. But if donations are at such low numbers, where are these organs coming from?

The state-sanctioned organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners, exposed to the public in 2006, may offer the answer.

This “form of evil yet to be seen on this planet” has not only been an important approach applied by the Chinese Communist Party to “eliminate” Falun Gong practitioners, but kills two birds with one stone: It is an easy way to make extra money for the Party's military, police, and government officials.

Mounting evidence solidifies allegations of this state-sanctioned crime, to the point that it has become an elephant in the room for the Chinese government and media. Though the Jinan Times does address the organ trade, it dances around the fact that these so-called “conventional organ sources” are actually the Party's innocent prisoners – Falun Gong practitioners and the Party's many, many other dissenters.