Chinese authorities are collecting genetic data from the country’s Muslim Uyghur minority as part of a forced organ-transplant program marketed to Muslim medical tourists from Gulf states, experts told a U.S. congressional committee hearing on Wednesday.
The medical tourists are willing to pay premiums for organs from fellow Muslims who abstain from pork and alcohol, the experts said, with DNA-matched Uyghur “donors” being rendered brain-dead and flown from Xinjiang in the country’s west to hospitals in the east.
Chinese authorities insist that forced organ harvesting of executed prisoners has been banned in the country since January 2015.
Testifying to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Ethan Gutmann, a research fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and the author of “The Slaughter”, a book about forced organ harvesting, said Uyghurs aged in their mid-20s to early 30s are being taken from mass internment camps and killed for their organs.
While China’s organ harvesting industry began a decade ago using adherents of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, he said, it switched focus to Uyghurs and other Muslims interned in Xinjiang around 2017 due to demand from Middle Eastern medical tourists.
“On the assumption that Gulf state organ tourists prefer Muslim donors who don’t eat pork, [China] has tried to capitalize on the switch from Falun Gong to Uyghur sources,” Gutmann said, noting that “transplant hospitals” advertised Muslim prayer rooms and halal menus.
But the researcher said there was a “logistical challenge” in keeping the organs viable when switching from Falun Gong adherents in heavily populated coastal areas of China to instead target Uyghurs some 4,000 kilometers (about 2,500 miles) to the west in Xinjiang.
To solve that problem, Gutmann said, medical personnel started to use portable “ECMO machines,” which can oxygenate an incapacitated person and their organs for hours. That allowed them to keep Uyghurs in a state of brain-dead “suspended animation” for long enough to be transported east for transplants to paying foreign customers.
The machines, he said, also allowed surgeons to “harvest as many as four healthy organs from a single person” instead of only one, he said, “turning a person from $100,000 into half a million or more.”
DNA collection
Medical authorities also established databases of Uyghurs whose organs could one day be forcibly harvested, the experts said.
Texas state Rep. Tom Oliverson, a doctor who now chairs his state’s House Committee on Insurance, said his own work with Uyghur and Falun Gong survivors of “Chinese detention camps” stemmed from his efforts to prevent Texans accessing forcibly harvested organs.
“They spoke of undergoing a series of medical tests not for their benefit, but to assess their overall health and tissue type,” Oliverson said, explaining that both groups believed they were targeted “because of their healthy lifestyles and abstinence from alcohol.”
The medical tests were often promoted as free “health check-ups,” he said, but those who were tested never received any results.
Meanwhile, the tests doubled as genetic-sequencing opportunities, said Matthew Robertson, a doctoral candidate at the Australian National University in Canberra and the co-author of “Execution by Organ Procurement: Breaching the Dead Donor Rule in China.”
That allows doctors to determine which forced “donors” have organs least likely to be rejected by their recipients’ bodies, he explained.
“Beijing has conducted mass blood-typing and DNA testing on vast parts of its Uyghur population under the banner of ‘health checkups,’” Robertson told the hearing. “There is no institutional constraint on this data being put to predatory uses, such as organ matching.”
He said an analysis of thousands of hacked files from the Xinjiang police revealed that more than 200,000 of about 500,000 Uyghurs registered in two regions of Xinjiang had blood samples taken for DNA collection up until 2018, when the leaked files were dated.
“But blood type is a necessary precondition to organ matching, and DNA data allows for better organ matches,” he said, calling the practice of sequencing genetic data of Uyghurs “highly concerning” given China’s “history of killing prisoners for their organs.”
Big business
Organ transplants can be lucrative, the commission was told.
Maya Mitalipova, the director of the Human Stem Cell Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, testified that China’s DNA database was “the world’s largest” and had cost “billions of dollars” to build.
She said she believed there was a clear reason for investing so much money: The country’s organ-transplant industry carries out at least 60,000 operations a year, with the “least expensive” kidneys costing about $70,000, and other organs fetching up to $500,000.
“In free countries like the USA and in Europe, organ-donor recipients are on wait lists for years … for matching donor organs,” Mitalipova said. “In China, matching donors can be found in a few weeks.”
Crucial to that was DNA testing “at just a few specific locations in the genome of the transplant recipients and their organ donors,” she said, with the fewest amount of genetic differences meaning there is a “better chance of long-term acceptance of the new organ.”
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment from Radio Free Asia. However, China formally banned the harvesting of organs from prisoners in January 2015, and authorities say that all transplants since have involved volunteer donors.
Rep. Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey who chairs the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, said Wednesday he did not believe the reports of continued organ harvesting are “all lies” and reiterated a plea to be allowed to visit Xinjiang to investigate.
“We have repeated that offer over and over and again today at this hearing,” Smith said. “I’m asking the Chinese Embassy to allow me to lead a [congressional] delegation to Xinjiang immediately.”
