By Wang Liang | The Epoch Times

On Feb. 23 in Dongguan City in southern China’s Guangdong Province a Mr. Shu showed up at the local hospital with a tall tale. He told a doctor in the emergency room that he had awakened in his hotel room, found one kidney missing, and 20,000 yuan (US$3,151) left on the table beside his bed.

According to Chinese media reports, police investigated and found that the man had in fact sold his kidney. The transplant doctor and seven other suspects involved in buying the kidney and then transplanting it stood trial on Aug. 31 in Dongguan.

The report of the trial, which appeared in the local Guangzhou Daily, was picked up by the Party-mouthpiece People’s Daily online, a sign that the Chinese regime wants the story of this prosecution widely known.

The Dongguan case is the most recent in a number of prosecutions for trafficking in organs. These cases, which attack one ill associated with organ transplantation in China, are making China’s hospitals even more reliant on organs harvested from prisoners of conscience.

The first organ trafficking case involved a ring of 16 from eastern China’s Jiangsu Province that was accused of earning millions of yuan by transplanting 51 kidneys between March and December 2010.

In early August China’s state-run media reported that since April police had arrested 28 groups engaged in organ trafficking in 18 provinces.

David Matas is the co-author (with David Kilgour) of Bloody Harvest, the groundbreaking investigation into the atrocity of forced, live organ harvesting in China. He says the current crackdown on organ trafficking should not be confused with any suppression of forced, live organ harvesting, which continues.

“The current [Chinese] law allows for living donor sourcing from relatives,” Matas wrote in an email. “There has been fraud in the use of this exception, which the authorities have been trying to control.”

Political commentator Zhang Tianliang told New Tang Dynasty TV that China transplants tens of thousands of organs a year, and that hospitals have to rely on a large bank of organs, not a few dozen criminal gangs, for such a large volume.

“The donor and the organ have to match,” Zhang said. “No hospital can guarantee this match. This means that any hospital that does a large amount of transplantation must have a systematic donor source.” Investigators who have analyzed China’s organ transplantation believe that the great majority of organs come from detained Falun Gong practitioners, who are killed in the process of having their organs removed.

According to Matas, the recent crackdown has made the reliance by hospitals on organs taken from Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners more acute. “The clampdown on living donor sourcing increases the reliance on deceased donor sourcing,” Matas wrote. “There is as well a decrease in the death penalty.

“The decrease in living donor sourcing and deceased donor sourcing from prisoners sentenced to death, combined with a voluntary deceased donor program, which produces statistically insignificant results, leaves us with increased deceased donor sourcing from prisoners of conscience, especially Falun Gong.”

The doctor prosecuted last week in Dongguan, Zhou Kaizhang, has performed 1,000 kidney transplants, according to the Chinese Medical Doctor’s Association.

According to the analysis of China’s organ transplantation industry in Bloody Harvest, very few of those 1,000 kidneys are likely to have come from voluntary donations of any kind. When Dr. Zhou will face sentencing for purchasing one kidney and transplanting it has not yet been announced by the court.

© Copyright 2012 The Epoch Times – Published at Set You Free News with license

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