Over the last 18 years, Laogai Research Foundation has amassed an immense amount of historical and present day documents, photographs, video, and other artifacts related to Chinese human rights issues, with a particular emphasis on the Laogai. In order to preserve these resources and make them available to the public, LRF is building a digital archive to house our collection. While a limited amount of material will be made available in the fall of this year (and the online collection will grow as our resources permit), we wanted to give you a sneak peak at one item that will be available: video from a BBC investigation into the profitable harvesting of Chinese prisoners' organs for sale.

In a BBC broadcast from November 15, 1994 a news team traveled to China to investigate claims that prisoners who were executed in China were then harvested for their organs  for transplants to both Chinese and foreigners. In China, sentencing prisoners to death is often publicly televised (though this is less so today given international criticism) and quite often the crimes that people could be put to death for were ones that one wouldn’t normally think would be severe enough to warrant execution (i.e. robbery). According to reports, criminals under the age of 25 were those most “sought after” for organs, since they would likely be the most healthy. Chinese officials were reported as saying that the harvesting of prisoner organs allowed condemned men to repay a “debt” to society since they would be used for a “greater purpose.”

After being executed, the prisoners’ organs would be extracted quickly in order for them to be as fresh as possible upon reaching the hospital where the transplant would be performed. According to a doctor who was taped without his knowledge while being questioned by LRF founder Harry Wu, who posed as a business man looking to have a kidney transplant, these surgeries had less wait and surgery time than in the West since there was less red tape to go through to get the organ to the hospital. This certainly seems to be the case since many foreigners are traveling to China to receive transplants faster than they could at home and often for less money. According to the report, many hospitals are receiving vast improvements in the form of better rooms and equipment due to the influx of money from foreign transplant recipients (at the airing of the BBC report people were paying around 30,000 US dollars for a kidney transplant). 

This great need for organs, particularly in China itself which has no system for voluntary organ donation, is causing a disturbing trend; there appears to be a correlation between the rise of need for organs and the increased amount of executions that are carried out per year. According to a former Public Security Bureau official, prisoners are often shot in different parts of the body depending on what they are being harvested for (i.e. head if a heart is needed, heart if corneas are needed). According to the official, although the law states that either the prisoner or family members have to give consent to allow the organs to be harvested, they were rarely asked. In fact, families were sometimes placed under house arrest to avoiding interfering and could only collect the body after they paid for the urn. Organs could also be harvested if no one collected the body. Harry Wu pointed out a loophole to this: often families do not want to be associated with the criminal so they refuse to collect the body out of shame or they are simply too far away if, for example, the criminal was a rural laborer who was executed for a crime committed in a city. This video may be found in the archives of the Laogai Research Foundation when it is available to the public in the fall.