The Chinese government is considering new legislation to regulate China’s market for transplant organs - particularly those coming from death row inmates:

The Chinese government has admitted that most human organs used for transplants in China are those of executed prisoners, and has promised to expedite new legislation that would regulate the market for those organs.

Vice Minister of Health Huang Jiefu acknowledged the use of prisoners’ organs in his remarks at the International Conference on Liver Transplants in July. He reiterated both the problem and the government’s commitment to improving oversight at another international conference in Manila earlier this month. China has finished its first draft of the regulations, Huang said, which will be submitted to the State Council for review. He told Caijing in an exclusive interview that he hopes the new regulations will help improve China’s image in the organ transplant field.

Geneva-based WHO representative Luc Noel said China’s “unequivocal commitment” was a hopeful sign. It will come not a moment too soon, as the number of organ transplants in China has soared over the last decade. China is now second only to the US, with approximately 60,000 kidney transplants, 6,000 liver transplants and 250 heart transplants since 1993.

But because Chinese medical scholars seldom publish about those transplants in internationally-recognized peer-review publications, the international community generally does not recognize China’s role in organ transplants despite the growing demand here. That is primarily because researchers cannot identify the source of the organs used in transplant procedures, because the practice of using executed prisoners’ organs is ethically questionable. But Huang argued that the Chinese protocol does in fact meet international standards of medical ethics, and that no organs are harvested without consent from either the condemned prisoners themselves or from their families (emphasis mine).

I have to admit to some ignorance on this issue because while I have heard a great deal about orgran transplants in China and the fact that the majority of those transplants tend to come from codemned inmates, I’ve never heard the stating that such transplants only taking place with the consent of either the prisoner or their family.

At any rate, I’m sure the international community will welcome Beijing’s moves to regulate China’s organ market with open arms.

Yan (Glutter) thinks the only thing Beijing seems to understand are protests. They get protests!

They get 500, 000 people on the streets shouting that they want free speech. They get a lot of people in Hong Kong standing up in the most visually stimulating way which is using what we have most, a lot of people in one very small space.

They get protests.

They really get it. The Chinese government gets it in a way that when pushed will bring tanks to break one up and spend the next 40 years hiding any traces of it having ever happened. They will spend billions of dollars blocking the internet and continue to put people in jail all over China for trying to get the truth out.

The Hong Kong government will shelve a bill that they were insulting Hong Kong people left and right by saying we didn’t understand a word of what was being said, and it was going to go through no matter what. They changed their tune when the they got half a million people walking on the streets saying, "We don’t think so."

Our government understood that, and haven’t had a peep of the word since.

Let me say it again.

They get protests.

I think the leaders in Hong Kong and Beijing feel the pressure of protests, but do they really get it?