The mysterious disappearance of 15-year-old Hu Xinyu has sparked fear among parents that their children may one day become victims of forced organ harvesting.
For seven weeks, China’s massive digital surveillance system failed to locate a teenage boy who mysteriously vanished from his boarding school. The increasing number of missing teenagers has intensified parental panic, as they fear their children may someday fall victim to one of the most heinous crimes—forced organ harvesting.
Due to gender disparities resulting from decades of the one-child policy, China has witnessed numerous cases of young women and girls going missing, suspected victims of human trafficking, and being sold to regions where men struggle to find wives. However, the recent cases of missing teenage boys have raised suspicions of organ harvesting and trafficking.
Hu Xinyu’s Disappearance and Suspicions
Hu Xinyu was a 15-year-old boy attending a boarding school in Jiangxi province. He mysteriously disappeared on Oct. 14 when he walked from his dormitory to the classroom. His teachers remained silent; important school surveillance videos went missing. What’s hard to believe is that, for 7 weeks, China’s massive digital surveillance system, capable of tracking every citizen’s movement for COVID, hasn’t located the missing boy.
There are four suspicious events surrounding his case.
1. Hu’s dormitory is located less than 100 meters from his classroom, with most of the area covered by surveillance cameras capable of capturing his movements. Astonishingly, the surveillance video from that day mysteriously disappeared.
2. When Hu disappeared, he left behind his ID, phone, and cash in his dormitory, making it unlikely that he ran away. Those who knew him suggest he was likely summoned to a meeting by a teacher, but the school’s principal and most teachers have remained silent.
3. The school is enclosed by fences, making it impossible for people to enter or exit the campus without permission. On the day Hu went missing, 13 vehicles left the school, which should have made it easy for the police to identify them. However, little information has been provided about those who left the school.
4. Rumors suggest that Hu’s class had a physical exam a few days before his disappearance. In China, it is common for schools to conduct physical exams for students since few Chinese families have a family doctor.
Rising Concerns About Missing Teenagers
Hu’s case gained national attention only after another boy, Liu Au-Chen, went missing in Wuhan and was later found dead. Fourteen-year-old Liu Au-Chen never returned home after taking out the trash on Nov. 12. His parents pleaded with the police to use drones to search for him, but the police did not act until they received a tip. Tragically, Liu Au-Chen’s body was recovered from a lake, and there were disturbing rumors that some of his organs were missing.
Reports of missing teenagers have continued to surface, causing growing concerns among parents about their children’s safety. Additionally, there is increasing discussion about the risk of these missing teenagers becoming forced pediatric organ donors. Even some public figures within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)are openly addressing this issue in the media.
Lin Zhibo, the Sichuan bureau chief of the People’s Daily (the CCP’s mouthpiece), wrote on Nov. 18 on Weibo: “The lucrative organ transplant business is booming. This is due to the fact that the genetic data of the majority of the country’s people is controlled by capital. They can easily find a match for a transplant recipient in the vast genetic data, and then the person disappears. This is a terrifying trend.”
Multiple Pediatric Heart Transplants
It is widely known that organ donors, especially for hearts, are scarce, and pediatric heart donors are the scarcest of them all. Heart donors are especially rare because a heart transplant donor’s heart must still be beating while the brain is confirmed as dead. In the United States, patients typically wait for an average of seven months to receive a matching heart. Of the 1,789 pediatric patients waiting for a heart transplant from July 2016 to April 2019, only 65% received a matching heart.
In the U.S., 37 out of every one million people are registered organ donors, which is nine times higher than China’s rate of four per million. Chinese citizens tend to avoid organ donation due to traditional beliefs.
On Nov. 11, Wuhan’s official social media account “Wuhan News Release” reported that a medical team, led by Dr. Dong Nianguo and Dr. Xia Jiahong, successfully performed three pediatric heart transplant surgeries for three boys on the same day at Wuhan Union Hospital. This means, in this Wuhan hospital, three patients received the extremely rare pediatric heart transplant match within one day. And the donors’ parents all agreed to donate the hearts.
Scheduling multiple heart transplant surgeries on the same day is highly unusual and raises questions about organ availability. You cannot predict the accidental death of a matching donor unless there is a large, live pool of organs waiting to be matched to the patient. However, similar reports of multiple heart transplants in one day have been seen in Chinese media on several occasions.
On Aug. 7, 2020, a Sichuan newspaper reported about the same Wuhan hospital completing four heart transplant operations in one day. In January 2014, a Fuzhou official news portal reported that Fujian Medical University Union Hospital carried out four heart transplant surgeries on the same day.
In 2013, the Wuhan Morning Post reported that the same doctor Dong Nianguo of Wuhan Union Hospital performed four heart transplant surgeries on June 21, 2013. According to the report, the hospital received information that four hearts were available for transplantation on the day before the surgeries. Over a dozen doctors from the hospital then drove to the “organ donation” sites to confirm the match, and on the following day, four men received heart transplants.
Frightening Truth About Organ Harvesting
The Wuhan Morning Post revealed the disturbing truth. First, the hospital didn’t fully confirm the match until their staff had visited the location of the available organs. The hospital was only informed of the donor’s availability. It was only after the doctors went and confirmed a successful match that they removed the heart. This practice aligns with the Chinese approach of “organ waiting for a matching patient,” rather than the international practice of “patient waiting for a matching organ.”
Second, if the donor was brain-dead but the heart was still beating, it’s likely they were in a hospital. Why couldn’t that hospital conduct the organ-matching test? Why did Wuhan Union Hospital have to send its doctors to complete the test? This would make sense only if the donor wasn’t in a hospital but in a labor camp or prison.
Third, the maximum tolerance time after the heart is removed from the donor is approximately six hours. The news report mentioned that the doctors drove to retrieve the four hearts, indicating that the four donors were located no more than a six-hour drive from the hospital. The report also stated that all four hearts arrived at the operating room simultaneously, at 10:43 a.m. the next day. The four surgeries were performed simultaneously and completed within 10 minutes of each other. This implies that the donors of the four hearts were either at an identical distance from the hospital or in the same location, and the hearts were retrieved simultaneously.
The former scenario would be an extraordinary “coincidence”: Four heart transplant patients finding matching hearts on the same day at four different locations within the same driving distance from the hospital! The Wuhan Morning Post inadvertently confirmed the horrifying truth of forced organ harvesting in China. It corroborated what Lin Zhibo mentioned in his post: organ transplantation has become a lucrative industry. For ordinary Chinese citizens, the situation has become more perilous now that some individuals control their medical data.
Following Hu Xinyu’s disappearance, his parents are heartbroken. His father works as a porter at a luggage factory, and his mother is a nanny. People in lower social strata are at a higher risk of becoming victims because they lack the resources to take substantial action. The perpetrators are well aware of this. Since Falun Gong practitioners first exposed this atrocity in April 2006, over 16 years have passed, yet the crime persists and has expanded in scale. Now, the victims include not only Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghurs but also ordinary Chinese citizens.
The crimes of organ harvesting and trafficking extend beyond China and impact Western societies. Many individuals outside China have unknowingly become complicit in these crimes. Failure to act now could have grave consequences, as this is not a minor offense.
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