An Update (2016) | Video Summary

All right, today we're diving into a 2016 investigative report. It's called Bloody Harvest slash The Slaughter, an update. Now this is a follow-up to some earlier research and it takes a really deep look into the world of organ transplantation in China. So let's get right into the evidence they lay out. Okay, so the first thing that just jumps right off the page is this absolutely massive gap in the numbers. Officially, the Chinese government was saying they performed about 10,000 organ transplants a year. But when these researchers started piecing together data from individual hospitals, a totally different story started to take shape. They found evidence suggesting the real number was somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 transplants every single year. That huge gap is really the central mystery here. And you know, that immediately brings up the most basic question you can ask. If the official numbers are just the tip of the iceberg, where on earth are all the organs for these tens of thousands of extra transplants coming from? That is the question this entire report tries to answer. So here's our roadmap for this. We're going to start with the incredible scale of the transplant industry itself. Then we'll look at the unbelievably short waiting times. After that, we'll investigate where these organs could be coming from, see how the report links it all back to the state, and then we'll explore the profound human cost that's alleged in these findings. First things first, let's just look at the physical evidence on the ground. I mean, to do that many transplants, you'd need a gigantic, well-oiled machine. And according to this report, that's precisely what the authors found. And look, the researchers were incredibly methodical about this. This wasn't just a glance at a few big hospitals. No, they tracked 712 different liver and kidney transplant centers. They were scraping data from official websites, digging through medical journals, even looking at state-run media reports to build this picture from the ground up. To make this feel a little more real, let's just zoom in on one of these hundreds of hospitals. The report uses the new surgery building at Wuhan Union Hospital as an example, and it's described as one of the biggest of its kind in all of Asia. So this one building has 1,050 beds just for its surgery ward. That is a staggering capacity for just one part of one hospital. But the numbers get even more wild. That same building can handle 200 surgeries a day. Now just think about that for a second. In just 50 days, that one hospital could, in theory, perform 10,000 surgeries. That's the entire official annual number for the whole country. And remember, this is just one of 712 centers that were looked at. So what does all this industrial-scale capacity actually mean for a patient? Well, it enables something pretty much unheard of anywhere else in the world. Getting an organ transplant on demand. The report is filled with these kinds of first-hand accounts from people who went to China for transplants. Take this one case. A patient called Mr. L gets his blood tested. Just four or five days later, he gets a call. They've already found him a matching kidney. That kind of speed is a complete medical anomaly. And this chart just lays it out perfectly. In places with established voluntary donation systems like the US or the UK, you wait for years. But the report details cases in China or waiting times were a matter of weeks, sometimes even just days. This implies there has to be a huge pool of living donors ready to be accessed at any given moment. So if the system is this big and it's this fast, it all comes back to that one huge question. Who are the donors? The report goes through the official explanations one by one and basically finds they just don't hold up. For years, voluntary organ donation just wasn't really a thing in China, for cultural reasons. The report notes the number of voluntary donations was basically zero until around 2003. The government then said executed prisoners were the main source. But even if you take the highest possible estimates for executions, the numbers just don't add up. It leaves this massive unexplained gap. So the report's authors offer a different conclusion, and they base it on a few lines of evidence. First, they point out that the explosion in the transplant industry happened right around the same time the state began its persecution of the spiritual group Falun Gong in 1999. They also cite eyewitness accounts, reports of strange medical exams given only to Falun Gong practitioners in labor camps, and even recorded phone calls where hospital staff seemed to confirm that organs from this group are available. Now, something on this scale, according to the report, couldn't just be the work of a few rogue doctors. The evidence points towards a highly coordinated, very profitable, and state-driven system, with the military right at the center of it. You know they always say, follow the money? Well, the report found that organ transplants became a huge moneymaker. For instance, the transplant center at the People's Liberation Army's number 309 hospital, their revenue went up almost eight times in just four years, jumping from 30 million to 230 million RMB. The investigation also dug up some research that seems to really blur the line between state security and medical science. The report highlights the work of a high-profile police chief, Wang Lijun. He was in charge of a research center that focused on, get this, organ preservation after lethal injections. And when he was accepting an award for this research, Wang Lijun himself said, and I'm quoting here, our technological achievement is the result of several thousand on-site intensive trials. The report asks a pretty logical question. How could a single third-tier city possibly provide thousands of subjects for these kinds of experiments? And that brings us to the final, and frankly, the most disturbing part of this entire report, the alleged mechanics of how the organs are actually taken. The report analyzes these obscure Chinese medical journals. In one paper about heart transplants, the procedure it describes is to open the donor's chest and then use a solution to stop the heart. The authors of the report argue, this is clinical proof of taking an organ from a living person because it means the heart is still beating when the surgery starts. That clinical language is then backed up by some truly harrowing eyewitness testimony that's cited in the report. An armed police officer gave a detailed account of standing guard during a live organ extraction back in 2002. He testified that he watched military doctors remove organs from a living female Falun Gong practitioner, right there on an operating table. So, to just quickly recap the report's main findings, you've got this huge, unexplained gap in transplant numbers. You have an industrial-scale system that allows for on-demand surgery. The official sources for organs just can't explain the sheer volume. And the report presents evidence pointing to prisoners of conscience, mainly Falun Gong practitioners, as the primary source for a profitable, state-driven industry. So, we'll end this explainer pretty much where we started, with a question. The findings in this report paint a deeply disturbing picture, and it leaves us with one final, chilling thought to consider. When medicine and the state work together to create a profitable industry built on human organs, who becomes the raw material?