CHINA:On Death Row, China's Source of Transplants

Sitting in a dimly lit Russian hotel room last month, Huang Peng, a Chinese prison official who had fled across the border just hours before, spoke matter-of-factly about the supply of human organs for the vast majority of transplants in China.

 "Executed convicts are basically the only source for transplants," Mr. Huang said, explaining how hospitals and government detention centers work with courts to coordinate the killing with life-saving operations so that organs are transplanted fresh from the condemned.

 The practice is so common and demand for organs so pressing that few checks exist to ensure that the executed are even dead before their organs are removed. One Chinese doctor claims to have witnessed the removal of a prisoner's kidneys while the man was still breathing.

 The Chinese government denies involuntary harvesting organs. But credible and detailed accounts from Mr. Huang and others interviewed sketched the outlines of a vast system in which kidneys, livers, lungs, corneas and other organs are stripped from executed prisoners and then transplanted into wealthy patients in operations that bring Chinese hospitals tens of millions of dollars a year.

 There were more than 5,000 reported kidney transplants last year in China, where such an operation costs about $6,000 for Chinese residents - 1/10 of the price in the United States. Foreigners are charged anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000.

 Mr. Huang did not have a direct hand in turning prisoners into unwilling donors, but he worked with people who did. He said the practice was common knowledge among people in the police and the penal system of Liaoning Province, where until last month he was an official at the province's largest penitentiary, Shenyang No. 2 Prison.

 He left China because he feared arrest for his role in falsifying documents to help another person leave the country. He is now in Russia hoping to find a safe haven in the West.

 While there is no evidence that the high number of death sentences handed down by Chinese courts are linked to the high demand for organs, the organ supply is growing.

 China executes more prisoners each year than all other countries combined, and by some estimates 10,000 people will be put to death this year as the government pursues one of its most intense crackdowns on crime in the last 25 years.

 Many of those who die and become unwitting donors may be innocent, human rights groups say, because they are convicted after hurried trials based on confessions extracted under torture.

 Families are rarely told that their loved ones' organs may be removed, and prisoners are not asked for their consent, Mr. Huang says. Voluntary donations are rare in China, because of a lack of public education about organ donations as well as traditional beliefs that say the body must be kept whole after death.

 "Definitely, there is no family willing to have their loved ones' organs taken," Mr. Huang said. "And there is no such thing as a prisoner who volunteers."

 Once organs have been removed after an execution, the body is cremated immediately, before the family has a chance to see what has been done.

 That is what appears to have happened to Zhao Wei and Wan Qichao, executed in the central Chinese province of Henan in August 1999 for the murder of Mr. Zhao's estranged wife 10 months earlier.

 Mr. Zhao's mother, a frail white- haired woman with horn-rimmed glasses and an educated air, said court officials had visited both families and asked for consent to use their sons' organs, but that the families had refused. The executions took place months later without warning. "It was like a knock on my head," Mr. Zhao's mother wrote later of the shock when a friend called to say he had just seen her son in the back of a truck bound for the execution ground. "How could it be that I wasn't notified?"

 Lu De'an, a friend of the condemned men, rushed to the execution ground on a sidecar motorcycle with his wife and saw Mr. Zhao's body and Mr. Wei's being loaded into a white van. A 3rd body was put into an ambulance. Both vehicles had white paper covering their license plates, Mr. Lu said.

 He drove alongside the ambulance and van as they crept toward the local crematory. He could not see into the ambulance or the van's side windows, which were covered. But through the van driver's window he could see men and women wearing surgical gloves working in the back.

 "I didn't know what they were doing," he said, recalling the scene in an interview this month. "I saw one man, stripped to the waist and pulling off surgical gloves. His face was big and swarthy and sweating profusely, and the driver gave him a towel to wipe the sweat away."

 Later, when Mr. Lu returned to a spot on the road where he had seen things being thrown from the van, he found bloody cotton wool, an empty box of surgical gloves and several empty plastic bags. His wife gave him a tissue to pick up one of the bags. It was labeled "kidney preservative fluid."

 "Now I know their kidneys were taken," Mr. Lu said.

 The prison official, Mr. Huang, says that families of the condemned are often asked in advance whether they want to claim their family member's body after the execution, but that many decline because they are told that they would have to pay large fees.

 That makes the harvesting legal under central government rules that allow organs to be taken from executed prisoners whose bodies are not claimed.

 Military and paramilitary hospitals dominate the harvesting and transplanting, because they have close ties to the prosecutors and court officials who supervise executions. The hospitals obtain the organs almost free, usually by paying court officials a nominal sum, and charge thousands of dollars per transplant.

 It is a boom industry. The number of transplant operations has soared in the last decade, and modern new transplant centers have opened around the country. One center established earlier this year in Hang zhou, south of Shanghai, specializes in multiple organ transplants for individual patients.