Wednesday, October 29, 1997

Pressuring China to end abhorrent organ harvesting

Jiang Zemin's visit to America will overlap the holiday of Halloween, which should make the Chinese president feel at home. For when it comes to outright ghoulishness, nothing with fake fangs in a $30 costume can compare to the organ-selling business presided over by Jiang's government.

Recently ABC's "PrimeTime" confirmed on videotape what human-rights groups have long reported: Petty criminals, whose misdeeds would draw a short jail stay elsewhere, are being executed to supply their kidneys to rich patients in Asia, Europe and the United States.

Many of these legalized murders occur at military hospitals, and according to dissidents like Harry Wu, the Chinese army has made millions in the organ trade. So accepted is the practice in China that the macabre debate there is not over the ethics of the practice, but whether poison or a bullet produces the least damage to marketable innards. (The latter is still widely favored. Last year, reports Amnesty International, Chinese firing squads killed 4,367 convicts -- more legal executions than in the entire rest of the world.)

Utilitarian-minded Chinese authorities no doubt imagine they are serving dual goals -- "social hygiene" and national defense. Zero tolerance is the watchword. The London Sunday Times reports eight people were executed in Fujian province for stealing pigs; three others who burglarized a car were shot within a week. This fast-track bloodletting facilitates the matching of kidney types. Instead of "three strikes and you're out," in China the penological standard is "one strike and you're dead."

Pushed by Congress, the FBI is looking into the case. But the FBI can't put political pressure on Jiang. President Clinton can. There should be no treats for this monstrous practice or those who countenance it.