Taiwan Singer’s Heart-Liver Transplant in China Draws Concerns Amid CCP’s Ongoing Forced Organ Harvesting

Medical experts are calling for transparency into the Chinese regime’s organ transplant system.

Taiwanese singer Lü Jianzhong, also known as "Tank," at a charity event in Taipei, Taiwan, on Jan. 29, 2019. The Epoch Times

A popular Taiwanese singer’s revelation of recently having received a heart-and-liver transplant in China has raised alarm, with critics viewing the celebrity endorsement as part of the Chinese regime’s propaganda effort to whitewash its state-sponsored forced organ harvesting.

Singer and songwriter Lü Jianzhong, better known by his stage name “Tank,” who has struggled for most of his life with an inherited heart defect, emerged five months after his surgery at an April 7 press conference praising doctors from mainland China for what he called a “perfectly smooth operation.” He released a lengthy post the same day on Chinese social media Weibo to update his fans, thanking mainland China—his “motherland”—for being the “most staunch backing” during his health crisis.

Images and clips of the Taiwanese singer expressing gratitude with a throng of Chinese doctors around him quickly circulated on the internet, making him the latest public figure to endorse communist China’s organ transplant system.

China’s state media and local government websites amplified the news; many carried headlines touting the case as an “Asia first,” noting the complexity of the surgery compounded by the fragility of Lü’s condition.

The glowing accounts by China’s state media marked a sharp contrast from the reactions in Lü’s birthplace of Taiwan, where many are questioning the motives behind the enthusiasm.

Many Taiwanese, including medical doctors, wrote on social media about the case, with some citing the award-winning documentary “State Organs,” which highlights the crimes of state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience in mainland China. The film is currently screening in theaters across Taiwan.

“The way mainland China gets human organs is problematic; this is well known internationally,” Huang Shi-wei, vice chairman of the medical ethics nonprofit Taiwan Association for International Care of Organ Transplants, told The Epoch Times.

It is thus not surprising that the Chinese regime would promote an operation involving a celebrity to lend credibility to its transplant industry, he said.

“As long as you go to China for organ transplantation, you are helping the Chinese Communist Party promote it.”

Torsten Trey, executive director of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, said he believes that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is making Lü’s operation into a “showcase transplant commercial.”

“They showcase a ‘regular’ organ transplant operation and present a happy patient to market it in Taiwan: ‘You see, China is not so bad,'” he told The Epoch Times.

The Taiwanese singer’s calling China his homeland, despite Taiwan’s resistance to communist control, fits right into the CCP’s agenda, Trey said, noting how the news was spread across many platforms in Asia in both Chinese and English.

No Way to Verify Alleged Donor Claims

There’s little information about the organ donor other than claims that he or she had suffered severe head trauma and became brain-dead, a criterion for organ donation to proceed.

The mention of head trauma raised more questions from experts.

“What was that severe trauma to the head?” Trey asked, alluding to the regime’s past practice of taking organs from executed prisoners, which several former Chinese doctors and medical workers have confirmed to The Epoch Times.

“China has a record of writing ‘severe trauma to the head’ as the cause of death when firing squad hit the victim with a bullet to the head.”

Huang similarly said that the claims from the mainland didn’t convince him. Even if Lü’s organs are confirmed to be from an ethical source, both Trey and Huang questioned his decision to use his brand and fame to help promote a regime known for killing prisoners of conscience for profit.

“The CCP has created a narrative around organ sources; they always claim it’s a post-trauma brain death, but no one has any way to verify it,” Huang said.

The Epoch Times reached out to the singer’s China-based agency for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

In 2022, two researchers in a joint paper published by the American Journal of Transplantation identified 71 Chinese medical papers that showed that doctors took organs from people for transplant without conducting a test to confirm their brain death. The researchers said at the time that their findings meant the Chinese doctors were effectively killing these people.

China didn’t establish a nationwide organ donation and distribution system until 2015. Still, even after that, a 2019 study found that the reported Chinese donation numbers seemed to fit a mathematical formula—an indication that they were likely falsified.

The same year, an independent tribunal in London concluded after a year-long investigation that forced organ harvesting was happening in China on a significant scale under the regime’s watch, with practitioners of the peaceful yet persecuted spiritual practice Falun Gong being the primary source of organs.

Four U.S. states have passed laws banning health coverage on surgeries that take place in China or that source organs from that country, over possible complicity in the abuses.

Additionally, Taiwan in November 2024 indicted a surgeon for sending organ transplant patients to China.

For Huang, the key issue in China’s organ transplant system is the lack of transparency.

He said that the CCP has branded its system as “transparent and traceable, but the problem is that it is completely untransparent.”

“It’s not open to the public and only known to those inside the system,” he said.

To show sincerity, he said, the regime should make its transplantation data available on the internet.

Wu Min-chou contributed to this report.