China Moves to Stop Transplants of Organs After Executions
By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: March 23, 2012
HONG KONG — China said on Friday that it planned to end within three to five years the practice of transplanting organs from executed prisoners, a step that would address what for decades has been one of the country’s darkest and most criticized human rights issues.
A wide range of official media ran apparently coordinated articles describing the merits of voluntary organ donations by the public instead. They cited Huang Jiefu, the vice minister of health, as telling a conference in the city of Hangzhou on Thursday about the plan to stop harvesting organs after executions.
“The pledge to abolish organ donations from condemned prisoners represents the resolve of the government,” he said, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
Dr. Huang did not acknowledge any ethical issues involved in taking organs from prisoners. Instead, he raised a medical issue, saying that the rates of fungal infection and bacterial infection in organs taken from executed prisoners were often very high, so the long-term survival rates of organ transplant recipients in China was consistently below the survival rates of recipients in other countries.
Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch, welcomed the policy announcement, which the human rights group has campaigned for since 1994. But he noted that Mr. Huang, who turns 66 this year, is about to retire, along with most of the country’s top political leadership.
That means the next generation of political leaders and health ministry officials will have to deal with the thorny problem of how to obtain enough voluntary organ donations to offset the country’s heavy dependence now on prisoners.
“It’s not clear to me the government is going to have the political will to fulfill this promise,” Mr. Bequelin said.
A health ministry official in Beijing declined to take questions about the new policy over the phone, asking that questions be submitted by fax instead. There was no immediate reply to a fax.
For many years, China resisted even passing national legislation for organ donation or for establishing when brain death had occurred. The worry was that particularly in poorer areas of China or areas with lax or particularly corrupt law enforcement, doctors would be tempted to act prematurely in declaring a person to be brain dead.
China’s cabinet, the State Council, issued regulations in 2007 for voluntary organ donations. But it has struggled to popularize the practice. Traditional Chinese customs call for people to be buried or cremated with their organs intact.
People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, said that China has 150 people who need organ transplants for each organ that is donated voluntarily. The newspaper did not say how much of the difference is made up from executed prisoners.
China has 300,000 patients with end-stage liver diseases, but in the first 11 weeks of this year there were only 546 transplants of livers and other major organs, the newspaper said, adding that, “The majority of the sufferers die while waiting agonizingly to receive them.”
The Dui Hua Foundation a human rights group in San Francisco estimated in December that China executes 4,000 people a year. That was down from 8,000 a year in 2007, the year that the Supreme People’s Court regained the authority to conduct a final review of any death sentences approved by lower courts, but the current total is still more than the rest of the world combined.
The Chinese government does not release official statistics on executions. Official media reports of executions appear to suggest that the death penalty is used heavily against drug traffickers and gangsters, with rare cases of government officials and business executives who are executed in extreme cases of corruption or endangering public safety, such as during recent scandals over faulty pharmaceuticals and contaminated milk.
Dr. Darren Mann, a consulting surgeon with experience in organ transplants in Hong Kong, a former British colony that was returned to Chinese rule in 1997 but retains an autonomous health care system, said that people with histories of intravenous drug use are likely to be overrepresented in prison populations and would be more likely to have fungal and bacterial infections. Organ transplant recipients are treated with powerful immune suppression drugs to prevent them from rejecting transplanted organs, but these drugs also leave the recipients very vulnerable to any infections that the donor’s immune system may have been keeping in check.
“The pledge to abolish organ donations from condemned prisoners represents the resolve of the government,” he said, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
Dr. Huang did not acknowledge any ethical issues involved in taking organs from prisoners. Instead, he raised a medical issue, saying that the rates of fungal and bacterial infection in organs taken from executed inmates were often high, so the long-term survival rates of organ transplant recipients in China was consistently below that of other countries.
Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch, welcomed the policy announcement, which the human rights group has campaigned for since 1994. But he noted that Mr. Huang, who turns 66 this year, is about to retire, along with most of the country’s top political leadership.
That means the next generation of political leaders and health ministry officials will have to deal with the thorny problem of how to obtain enough organ donations voluntarily to offset the country’s heavy dependence now on prisoners.
“It’s not clear to me the government is going to have the political will to fulfill this promise,” Mr. Bequelin said.
A health ministry official in Beijing declined to take questions about the new policy over the phone, asking that questions be submitted by fax instead. There was no immediate reply to a fax.
For many years, China resisted even passing national legislation for organ donation or for establishing when brain death occurs. The worry was that in poorer areas of China or areas with lax or particularly corrupt law enforcement, doctors would be tempted to act prematurely in declaring a person to be brain dead.
China’s cabinet, the State Council, issued regulations in 2007 for voluntary organ donations. But it has struggled to popularize the practice. Traditional Chinese customs call for people to be buried or cremated with their organs intact.
People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, said that China has 150 people who need organ transplants for every organ that is donated voluntarily. The newspaper did not say how much of the difference is made up from executed prisoners.
China has 300,000 patients with end-stage liver diseases, but in the first 11 weeks of this year there were only 546 transplants of livers and other major organs, the newspaper said, adding that “the majority of the sufferers die while waiting agonizingly to receive them.”
The Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights group in San Francisco, estimated in December that China executes 4,000 people a year. While that is still more than the rest of the world combined, it is down from the 8,000 executed in 2007, the year the Supreme People’s Court regained the authority to conduct a final review of any death sentences approved by lower courts.
The Chinese government does not release statistics on executions. Official news media reports appear to suggest that the death penalty is used heavily against drug traffickers and gangsters, and rarely for government officials and business executives in extreme cases of corruption or endangering public safety, like during recent scandals over faulty pharmaceuticals and contaminated milk.
Dr. Darren Mann, a consulting surgeon with experience in organ transplants in Hong Kong, which retained an autonomous health care system after the British returned the territory to Chinese rule in 1997, said that people with histories of intravenous drug use are likely to be overrepresented in prison populations and would be more likely to have fungal and bacterial infections. Organ transplant recipients are treated with powerful immune suppression drugs to prevent them from rejecting transplanted organs, but these drugs also leave the recipients highly vulnerable to any infections that the donor’s immune system may have been keeping in check.
“Many of the transplant units on the mainland are very well organized,” Dr. Mann said. “They take pride in their work, so they would like to have internationally comparable outcomes.”
Dr. Huang is himself a surgeon and has served as director of a hospital for hepatic surgery, as president of one of the country’s top medical schools and as vice president of the Chinese Medical Association, according to China Vitae, an online database of biographical information on Chinese officials.
Human rights groups have long criticized organ transplant procedures in mainland China for not following the World Health Organization’s recommendation that organs only be taken from people who are brain dead. China allows organ harvests from people whose hearts have stopped.
“You can definitely imagine situations where the heart stops beating but the brain is not cognitively dead and they start removing organs — corneas have to be removed very quickly, for example,” Mr. Bequelin said.
Another concern has been whether prisoners and their families give informed consent, without inappropriate pressure from prison officials, for the use of organs. Families of executed prisoners sometimes complain that no one gave permission but they were given back bodies that were sewn up after the removal of various organs; Chinese prison officials have contended that these prisoners may have been the subject of autopsies.
China only started setting up a system last year asking people who apply for a driver’s license whether they want to donate their organs in the event of death. And in February 2011, China’s legislature adopted changes to the country’s criminal code to specifically ban the forced removal of organs or any removal of organs from juveniles, and a spate of recent prosecutions in mainland China indicates that the black market in organs is still a problem.
Dr. Huang said this month that as long as the demand for organs far outstrips supply, it would be hard to stop the black market.
China Moves to Stop Transplants of Organs After Executions
Re: China Moves to Stop Transplants of Organs After Executio
Beijing Switches Sides in the Race for Hong Kong’s Chief Executive
By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: March 21, 2012
HONG KONG — China’s leaders have begun actively supporting a populist to become the next chief executive of Hong Kong in elections this Sunday, abandoning their previous private support for a wealthy civil servant whose candidacy has been plagued by scandals, local politicians and political analysts said Wednesday.
Active backing from Beijing makes it increasingly likely that Leung Chun-ying, a real estate surveyor who advocates more construction of public housing, will defeat Henry Tang, the wealthy scion of a Shanghai textile manufacturing family who was Hong Kong’s second-ranking official, chief secretary, until he stepped down last autumn to run for chief executive.
Only 1,193 people are eligible to vote in the election, as representatives of various sectors of society. Sectors deemed to be friendly to Beijing, like traditional Chinese medicine, have far more electors relative to their share of the population than do sectors deemed hostile, like social workers or lawyers.
Pro-Beijing newspapers here have begun giving prominent, enthusiastic coverage to Mr. Leung. Beijing’s representative office here, the Liaison Office, has been taking vanloads of electors across the border to Shenzhen for meetings with Liu Yandong, the only female member of the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo, to discuss the advantages of Mr. Leung’s candidacy, political activists in Hong Kong said.
Regina Ip, a lawmaker and the chairwoman of the New People’s Party, which has stayed neutral in the race so far, said that invitations to the Shenzhen meetings had become sought after among pro-Beijing lawmakers. “Some people are disappointed that they have not been invited to Shenzhen,” she said.
Officials at the Liaison Office and with Mr. Leung’s campaign would not comment. Mr. Leung has consistently led in public opinion surveys, with Mr. Tang coming in second and Albert Ho, the chairman of the Democratic Party, a distant third.
Mr. Leung has won a reputation as a populist by challenging the dominance of a handful of large real estate groups and suggesting that the government should build more housing. That campaign platform has been popular at a time of very high rents and high apartment prices, partly because of an influx of investors from mainland China.
Mr. Tang’s campaign has floundered since autumn despite strong early backing from most of Hong Kong’s real estate tycoons and from the so-called Shanghai faction in Beijing. He admitted last year that he had been unfaithful to his wife, after local news reports linked him to a series of women.
He conceded last month that he had built a basement under a villa belonging to his wife without planning permission or the payment of real estate taxes. Mr. Tang initially blamed his wife, saying he had not tried to fix the problem because of stresses in his marriage, but he later took personal responsibility.
Mr. Tang has tried to recover politically by suggesting that as chief executive, Mr. Leung might be more likely to restrict civil liberties. While still in his 30s, Mr. Leung played a large role in helping Beijing write Hong Kong’s mini-Constitution, which took effect after the British returned the territory to Chinese rule in 1997.
Mr. Leung’s early prominence has prompted suggestions that he might have been a member of the Chinese Communist Party, which functions as an underground group in Hong Kong and is believed to have no more than a few hundred members.
Mr. Leung’s campaign issued a statement on Sunday denying that he had ever been a party member, or that he had ever asked to join the party or been invited to join.
Mr. Tang said in a debate last Friday that during large pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2003, Mr. Leung had suggested during a top-level government meeting that it might be necessary to deploy riot officers or tear gas.
Mr. Leung, Mrs. Ip and several other prominent Hong Kong politicians who were in the government at the time have denied that he made this suggestion and have pointed out that top officials take an oath of secrecy about their deliberations.
Mr. Tang responded that the public interest should be more important than secrecy.
By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: March 21, 2012
HONG KONG — China’s leaders have begun actively supporting a populist to become the next chief executive of Hong Kong in elections this Sunday, abandoning their previous private support for a wealthy civil servant whose candidacy has been plagued by scandals, local politicians and political analysts said Wednesday.
Active backing from Beijing makes it increasingly likely that Leung Chun-ying, a real estate surveyor who advocates more construction of public housing, will defeat Henry Tang, the wealthy scion of a Shanghai textile manufacturing family who was Hong Kong’s second-ranking official, chief secretary, until he stepped down last autumn to run for chief executive.
Only 1,193 people are eligible to vote in the election, as representatives of various sectors of society. Sectors deemed to be friendly to Beijing, like traditional Chinese medicine, have far more electors relative to their share of the population than do sectors deemed hostile, like social workers or lawyers.
Pro-Beijing newspapers here have begun giving prominent, enthusiastic coverage to Mr. Leung. Beijing’s representative office here, the Liaison Office, has been taking vanloads of electors across the border to Shenzhen for meetings with Liu Yandong, the only female member of the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo, to discuss the advantages of Mr. Leung’s candidacy, political activists in Hong Kong said.
Regina Ip, a lawmaker and the chairwoman of the New People’s Party, which has stayed neutral in the race so far, said that invitations to the Shenzhen meetings had become sought after among pro-Beijing lawmakers. “Some people are disappointed that they have not been invited to Shenzhen,” she said.
Officials at the Liaison Office and with Mr. Leung’s campaign would not comment. Mr. Leung has consistently led in public opinion surveys, with Mr. Tang coming in second and Albert Ho, the chairman of the Democratic Party, a distant third.
Mr. Leung has won a reputation as a populist by challenging the dominance of a handful of large real estate groups and suggesting that the government should build more housing. That campaign platform has been popular at a time of very high rents and high apartment prices, partly because of an influx of investors from mainland China.
Mr. Tang’s campaign has floundered since autumn despite strong early backing from most of Hong Kong’s real estate tycoons and from the so-called Shanghai faction in Beijing. He admitted last year that he had been unfaithful to his wife, after local news reports linked him to a series of women.
He conceded last month that he had built a basement under a villa belonging to his wife without planning permission or the payment of real estate taxes. Mr. Tang initially blamed his wife, saying he had not tried to fix the problem because of stresses in his marriage, but he later took personal responsibility.
Mr. Tang has tried to recover politically by suggesting that as chief executive, Mr. Leung might be more likely to restrict civil liberties. While still in his 30s, Mr. Leung played a large role in helping Beijing write Hong Kong’s mini-Constitution, which took effect after the British returned the territory to Chinese rule in 1997.
Mr. Leung’s early prominence has prompted suggestions that he might have been a member of the Chinese Communist Party, which functions as an underground group in Hong Kong and is believed to have no more than a few hundred members.
Mr. Leung’s campaign issued a statement on Sunday denying that he had ever been a party member, or that he had ever asked to join the party or been invited to join.
Mr. Tang said in a debate last Friday that during large pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2003, Mr. Leung had suggested during a top-level government meeting that it might be necessary to deploy riot officers or tear gas.
Mr. Leung, Mrs. Ip and several other prominent Hong Kong politicians who were in the government at the time have denied that he made this suggestion and have pointed out that top officials take an oath of secrecy about their deliberations.
Mr. Tang responded that the public interest should be more important than secrecy.