Surgeons as ‘Executioners’: Chinese Doctors Committed Murder to Fuel Regime’s Organ Transplant Industry, Study Finds

Doctors prepare for a kidney transplant in a file photo. Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP/Getty Images

Hundreds of Chinese doctors and other medical workers have been acting as “executioners” for the state in order to sustain its lucrative organ transplant industry, a study published in a top U.S. medical journal has found.

The study, published in the American Journal of Transplantation on April 4, reviewed more than 120,000 Chinese-language publications on organ transplants and identified 71 papers where physicians had carved out hearts and lungs from people for transplant without first conducting a test to establish brain death—revealing that patients were killed for their organs.

A total of 348 medical professionals or researchers, including surgeons, nurses, and anesthesiologists from 56 Chinese hospitals spread nationwide, were co-authors of these 71 papers.

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The problematic papers came out between 1980 and 2015, during which period there was no official voluntary donation system in place in China and few voluntary donors. The regime had claimed that most organs taken for transplant at the time came from executed prisoners.

But in the early 2000s, reports and research emerged showing that Beijing was forcibly harvesting the organs from detained prisoners of conscience. These allegations were confirmed “beyond a reasonable doubt” by an independent people’s tribunal in 2019, which determined that such an atrocity had taken place for a long time on a substantial scale, with the persecuted faith group Falun Gong being a primary organ source.

In reaching its finding, the body, known as the China Tribunal, rejected claims by the Chinese regime that from 2015, all organs for transplant were sourced from an official organ donation system.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, features moral teachings based on truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, along with meditative exercises. Its practitioners in mainland China have been subjected to a sweeping persecution campaign since 1999, during which millions have been detained in various facilities across the country.

‘Smoking Gun’

This new research is the first of its kind to uncover a “smoking gun” proving that doctors have been killing people for their organs, according to Dr. Jacob Lavee, co-author of the report and director of the Heart Transplantation Unit at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel.

In the Chinese publications flagged by the study, the doctors declared the prisoners they performed on to be brain dead, but other information revealed in the papers shows that this couldn’t have been the case.

Confirming brain death is a lengthy process that typically takes hours, and one critical step involves turning off the ventilator to assess whether a patient can breathe on his own, a step known as an apnea test.

But the papers detail Chinese doctors pronouncing patients brain dead, but only then putting them on intubation or a ventilator, suggesting that the brain death assessment couldn’t have taken place. It also cited instances where a face mask was used for ventilation, a reversal of normal medical procedures that, the authors said, makes the absence of a proper brain death assessment even more apparent.

“They have procured organs from people who are not proclaimed dead, meaning they became the executioners,” Lavee told The Epoch Times.

A demonstration to raise awareness about the persecution of Falun Gong by the Chinese communist regime, in Manhattan on May 16, 2019. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

The findings appear to be accidental admissions on the part of the Chinese doctors, according to Lavee.

“Somehow both the authors and their editors in the respective medical journals have forgotten to take out these incriminating details, which we have found,” he said.

If these papers were sent to Western medical journals, they “would have been rejected outright because of these sentences, because no editor of any decent journal would have published a paper that incriminates the authors in such deeds,” according to Lavee.

Such admissions stopped appearing in Chinese papers dated after 2015, but the abuse very likely hasn’t stopped, according to the study’s authors.

There’s a possibility that Chinese doctors have stopped carrying out this practice. But it’s far more plausible that they’ve become more discrete, according to Matthew Robertson, a China studies fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation who co-authored the study.

He pointed to a 2014 research report by the advocacy group World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) that first highlighted alarming details revealed in Chinese medical papers, including the vast number of donors in prime health condition and how hospitals were conducting high volumes of major organ transplant surgeries in a single day.

Chinese medical leaders likely took note of this report and told all the journals to stop publishing such details, said Robertson, who previously worked as a reporter at The Epoch Times.

“They keep an eye on what dissidents are saying, especially on this issue, which is very sensitive,” he said. “And it would just take an email or some phone calls” to have those traces deleted.

Falun Gong demonstrators dramatize the illegal act of paying for human organs during a protest on April 19, 2006, in Washington, in conjunction with the visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao to the United States. JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

Out for Profit

Two years ago, Robertson and Lavee found that the official Chinese donation datasets match almost precisely to a mathematical formula, a sign that the Chinese regime likely systemically falsified its organ donation data.

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WOIPFG had made hundreds of undercover phone calls to Chinese hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, during which some doctors promised organs in as quickly as a week. The unusually fast turnaround time—unheard of in other countries with established organ donation systems—suggests that Beijing was continuing the grisly practice, according to the group.

Over the years, WOIPFG has carried out scores of undercover calls to Chinese hospitals in its ongoing probe of Beijing’s forced organ harvesting practices.

Robertson said he had previously done a study on some of WOIPFG’s call logs and concluded that they were authentic.

“They have a very distinct pattern over many years. And so I’m inclined to believe the content of the calls as well,” he said.

For the hospitals, the rationale is simple.

“It’s a very profitable industry,” Lavee said. “And if they can make profit out of it, while at the same time—as has been shown by the China Tribunal—taking care of the wishes of the Communist Party, that’s a win-win situation.”