- 12.03.01

China's Organ 'Harvest': Executed Man's Brother Recounts

His Horror Craig S. Smith New York Times Service Monday, March 12, 2001 SHANGHAI When Qiu Xuanming's body arrived at the crematory from the execution ground last June, his brother recognized it by the clothes it wore. Mr. Qiu's head, which had been shot in the back at close range, was a tightly wrapped ball of white gauze, but the clothes were the same he had worn at his final court hearing a little more than an hour before."The pants were undone, and the striped shirt was open and the shirt he was wearing inside was pushed up," his brother said in a long cathartic interview at a nearly empty Irish pub in one of Shanghai's new office towers, chosen for the privacy it affords."There was blood on his shirt and when I saw the blood I realized what had happened and pulled it open. His belly was cut open, the intestines were spilling out.""He had gained a lot of weight in prison." the brother said. "The fat was this thick," he said, holding his thumb and forefinger several inches apart. "I had never seen anything like that.""I didn't know that's what it looked like," he added, his eyes wide with the horror of recollection. "It was a foot-long gash. I had blood on my hands. I saw it and started shouting, 'You've messed with him!'"Mr. Qiu, executed for tax evasion, had become one of hundreds, or even thousands, of condemned people in China whose organs have been "harvested" minutes after their death by gunshot to the back of the head. China executes more people each year than the rest of the world combined, although the exact number is a tightly guarded state secret..Amnesty International counted 18,194 executions reported in the state-run press in the 1990s, with 1,263 in 1999. Robin Munro, a London-based China scholar and human rights advocate, said the real total is much higher because many executions are never reported. Official law journals have sometimes reported figures approaching 1,000 executions a year in individual cities, Mr. Munro said.Many of the executed become organ donors. The practice is permitted under 1994 rules, but only with the written consent of the prisoner or his or her relatives. Because of the need to remove organs immediately after death, corpses may be dissected at the execution site. The practice of using prisoners' organs is widely acknowledged by doctors in China, though few people will discuss the subject on the record.Whether most condemned prisoners donate their organs willingly is a matter of debate; Buddhist and Confucian beliefs dictate that the body be kept whole after death, meaning that voluntary donations are rare. It is not clear whether Mr. Qiu was a willing donor. But his case is particularly chilling given the offense for which he died. Press reports at the time put the amount of tax evaded by him and two accomplices at about $2 million, $1.2 million of which was never recovered.His brother contends that Mr. Qiu was an unwitting victim of a larger scheme in which local government officials promised businessmen tax breaks they had no authority to give. China checked the practice, widespread in the mid-1990s, with a wave of executions.China is again in the throes of a campaign against tax evasion that has led to death sentences for seven people in Guangdong Province. Many more are expected to receive the ultimate penalty as the campaign sweeps the country. So Mr. Qiu's story provides a glimpse of what might lie in store for those people, and their relatives.After the hearing, Mr. Qiu's brother and a cousin hailed a taxi, hoping to follow Mr. Qiu to the execution ground."We took the wrong turn," he said.The taxi driver later drove to the county crematory."Shortly after we asked, a van arrived," Mr. Qiu's brother said. "I recognized the shoes first."