NP PRC-related

[Doug Millison]

Hair-raising story in The Village Voice
(http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0118/baard.shtml) about the marketing of
human organs from the PRC. 

FWIW, in the year (1986) I spent at Xian Medical University (Xian is the
capital of Shaanxi Province), the building where I helped the schools
English teachers develop curriculum and improve their own English skills
(and which housed the hall where I thrilled hundreds of freshman and
sophomore med students with lectures on daily life in America to improve
their English listening comprehension and develop vocabular and cultural
context - they especially loved the talk I gave on American car culture), is
also the building that housed the morgue where they brought the bodies of
criminals who had just been executed on a parade ground across town. The med
students performed autopsies and harvested organs for transplanting. The
blood-spattered elevator they used to carry the bodies to the basement
morgue was a creepy place indeed.  The Voice story quotes Wei Jingsheng, the
Chinese democracy activist I had the opportunity to meet last year when he
came to speak at UC Berkeley. You could do worse than read his book, The
Courage to Stand Alone, which includes letters that he wrote to Deng
Xiaoping (he had to hide them and smuggle them out for later publication, an
audacious and courageous act) from the camp where he was held, beaten, and
mistreated as a political prisoner following his outspoken activism and
leadership of the 1979 Democracy Wall movement.

Here's how Utne Web Watch described the story the other day:

"Fresh human kidneys $10,000 -- guaranteed to come from healthy young
donors." Does that sound like something out of a futuristic horror movie,
something along the lines of "Soylent Green"? Well according to Dr. Thomas
Diflo, director of the renal transplant program at the New York University
Medical Center, such merchandise is being marketed in the organ-hungry,
transplant underground.

The venerable New York weekly The Village Voice recently published an
article by writers Erik Baard and Rebecca Cooney accusing The People's
Republic of China of marketing affordable human organs from questionable
sources. What's wrong with providing the world's ailing masses with such a
valuable commodity at an economic price? Well to start with, the donors
don't have any say in the matter.

The People's Republic leads the world in the number of official executions
each year -- estimated to be as high as over 4000 in 1996. Execution is the
primary punishment not only for capital crimes, but is also routinely meted
out to those found guilty of such heinous transgressions as theft, tax
evasion, and taking bribes, and of course, being a political dissident. One
human rights investigator says this practice of execution is known as
"killing the chicken to scare the monkey" and is used to intimidate and
control society.

This is where black market kidneys come in to play. Though being professed
Communists and leery of the tenets of Capitalism, it appears that Chinese
prison officials, hospitals, judges, and the military have found a way to
earn a little side income with the healthy young corpses they have laying
around. You guessed it -- doctors are on hand to extract organs such as
kidneys and retinas from the fresh stiffs, which are then rushed to
hospitals and inserted into waiting donors. Along the way every
participant's palm gets greased, even the judge who can be persuaded to
order and schedule an execution to coincide with the recipient's arrival at
a particular surgery room.

Just how did Dr. Diflo happen upon this revenue stream of human goods?
During the course of his practice he began seeing transplant patients whose
new organs couldn't be accounted for. But wait, there's more.