Experts have expressed fears that the Chinese government plans to increase the forced “harvesting” of human organs from people in Xinjiang, home to a large Turkic Muslim population.
The concerns follow the announcement by the Xinjiang Health Commission late last year that it was going to develop six new organ transplant institutions in the region in the period to 2030, among other measures aimed at expanding transplant services.
Xinjiang is a large area in northwest China where the Beijing government has been operating a campaign of oppression against the indigenous population of Uyghur and other Turkic people since 2014.
The United Nations has said the campaign, which includes a vast network of camps, involves serious human rights violations that may amount to crimes against humanity. “The announcement raises concerns about the ongoing procurement of organs through human rights abuses in Xinjiang, because there is no obvious reason why the new facilities are needed,” said Wendy Rogers, professor of clinical ethics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.
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“Xinjiang has a low voluntary organ donation rate and a relatively low population and GDP compared to other provinces,” she told The Irish Times. “So why would the region need a tripling of its transplant capacity when other provinces are not seeing a similar surge?”
Members of Muslim minority groups are being wrongfully detained in Xinjiang and are at high risk of human rights abuses, including forced organ harvesting, she said. By organ harvesting, she said, she meant “the killing of prisoners of conscience to use their organs for transplantation”.
Enver Tohti, a former surgeon in Xinjiang who now lives in London, has given testimony to parliaments and politicians around the world about how he once removed organs from a prisoner in Xinjiang who had just been shot.
The man was still alive when the operation was conducted, he told the Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade in 2017. “We met at the hospital gate and headed towards the Western Mountain Execution Ground, where I was told to wait… until hearing the gun shots,” he told the committee, referring to events in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang.
“After the gun shots were heard we rushed in. An armed police officer directed us to the far-right corner where I could see a civilian clothed man lying on the ground with a bullet wound to his right chest. My chief surgeons ordered and guided me [as I] extracted the liver and two kidneys. The man was alive. He tried to resist my scalpel cut, but was too weak to avoid my action.”
People in inner China just disappear. Maybe they are accused of a crime and sent to prison
— Enver Tohti, former surgeon in Xinjiang
The former surgeon, who now works as a lorry driver, told the committee that he did not feel guilty at the time about what he had done. “I thought I was carrying out my duty to eliminate the enemies of the state,” he said.
Speaking to The Irish Times, Tohti said he believes the Chinese authorities are expanding their organ transplant facilities throughout China, and not just in Xinjiang. “Xinjiang is just part of a wider picture,” he said.
He believes the Chinese authorities began to collect biological data from people in Xinjiang in 2016 with a view to building a database that could be searched for matches when organs were needed for transplant operations. “People in inner China just disappear,” he said. “Maybe they are accused of a crime and sent to prison. In Xinjiang, they simply take the person – say they are a terrorist.”
In China, “if you are declared an enemy of the state, then an enemy is not a human being.”
Recently, at a military parade in Beijing, the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, was caught on mic discussing organ transplants with his counterpart from Russia, Vladimir Putin.
“Biotechnology is continuously developing,” Putin’s interpreter was recorded saying in Chinese to Xi. “Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and [you can] even achieve immortality.”
Xi could be heard responding in Chinese: “Some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old.”
Tohti said: “They are talking about organ harvesting. Organ transplanting in China is organ harvesting. They are not taking organs from volunteers. Every organ transplant is part of harvesting.”
In December 2014, Chinese State media reported that China was to stop using organs from executed prisoners in transplant operations.
However, Tohti said such statements are just optics. “The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) never keeps its promises. They make laws to show to outsiders. They make a constitution to show to outsiders. Inside the country, it is completely different.”
In June 2021, nine special rapporteurs with the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, in an official communication to China, expressed their “utmost concern” in relation to allegations of organ harvesting from detained members of minority groups.
The minorities cited included Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims and Christians.
The communication cited allegations that members of minority communities were being arrested without explanation and subjected to medical tests. “The results of the examination are reportedly registered in a database of living organ sources that facilitates organ distribution,” the rapporteurs said, adding that it was also alleged that some detainees had been subject to “enforced disappearances”.
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The Beijing government rejected the allegations, saying the communication was based on false information, included groundless accusations, and was “filled with malice and prejudice”.
The rapporteurs who issued the communication included Siobhán Mullally, a professor of Human Rights Law at the University of Galway.
Speaking to The Irish Times, she said the concerns were based on credible evidence and were taken seriously across the UN human rights system. “There are still continuing allegations, and they come in to different rapporteurs,” she said, when asked whether there were plans for a follow-up investigation. “We have a global mandate, so not following up is not a lack of concern. Sometimes it is just a lack of capacity.”
There are also, she said, difficulties in relation to being able to move about freely during country visits to China. “We don’t have access to Xinjiang.”
Most Chinese people cannot afford to pay for an organ transplant, and most transplants in China involve foreign recipients who pay for the operations, according to Tohti.
However, he claimed, the overall practice is driven by a programme called Project 981, which aims to increase the life expectancy of CCP leaders to 150 years and includes free access to organ transplants. “It explains why this hideous crime exists and why it is flourishing. It needs to flourish so the leaders will have a pool of organs to choose from.”
Rogers said Ireland should petition the UN Special Rapporteurs to renew their investigations into human rights abuses in China and that the media should give the issue of organ harvesting more coverage. “Despite the crimes being so horrific, public and political awareness of forced organ harvesting in China remains low,” she said.
In the Xinjiang Health Commission announcement, the institutions cited included facilities run by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC).
The latter is a hybrid paramilitary/enterprise body established by the CCP in the 1950s to operate in Xinjiang, which at the time had a more than 90 per cent non-Han Chinese population. (The Han population now exceeds 40 per cent.)
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In 2021, the XPCC was sanctioned by the US and Canada arising from concerns about the use of forced labour in Xinjiang. The European Union also imposed sanctions citing the XPCC’s security bureau’s responsibility for “serious human rights violations, in particular large-scale arbitrary detentions and degrading treatment inflicted upon Uyghurs and people from other Muslim ethnic minorities”.
A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Dublin said the claim that China engages in organ harvesting was “entirely groundless” and that the Beijing government has consistently adhered to the World Health Organisation’s rules in relation to organ transplants. “The use of organs from executed prisoners as transplant sources is strictly prohibited by Chinese law,” he said.
A new regulation issued in 2023 “clearly stipulates that organ donation must be voluntary, and no organisation or individual may coerce, deceive or induce others to donate organs”.
In China, he said, ethnic groups speaking Turkic languages such as the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, and Tatars should not be referred to as “Turkic people”. The Uyghurs in Xinjiang, he said, “are an integral part of the Chinese nation”.
The embassy would facilitate any Irish reporter who wanted to visit China and conduct interviews there, the spokesman added. “The doors of Xinjiang are always open.”
