Taiwan Singer’s Heart-Liver Transplant in China Draws Concerns Amid CCP’s Ongoing Forced Organ Harvesting

A popular Taiwanese singer’s revelation that he received a heart-liver transplant in China recently raised alarms, as the Chinese communist regime is known for backing widespread forced organ harvesting.

Critics view the celebrity endorsement of the successful organ transplant as a propaganda effort to detract from the regime’s organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience.

Singer and songwriter Lü Jianzhong, better known by his stage name “Tank,” who has struggled for most of his life with an inherited heart defect, emerged five months after his surgery at an April 7 press conference praising doctors from mainland China for what he called a “perfectly smooth operation.” He released a lengthy post the same day on Chinese social media Weibo to update his fans, thanking mainland China—his “motherland”—for being the “most staunch backing” during his health crisis.

Images and clips of the Taiwanese singer expressing gratitude with a throng of Chinese doctors around him quickly circulated on the internet, making him the latest public figure to endorse communist China’s organ transplant system.

China’s state media and local government websites amplified the news; many carried headlines touting the case as an “Asia first,” noting the complexity of the surgery compounded by the fragility of Lü’s condition.

The glowing accounts by China’s state media marked a sharp contrast from the reactions in Lü’s birthplace of Taiwan, where many are questioning the motives behind the enthusiasm.

“The way mainland China gets human organs is problematic; this is well known internationally,” Huang Shi-wei, vice chairman of the medical ethics nonprofit Taiwan Association for International Care of Organ Transplants, told The Epoch Times.

It is thus not surprising that the Chinese regime would promote an operation involving a celebrity to lend credibility to its transplant industry, he said.

“As long as you go to China for organ transplantation, you’d help the Chinese Communist Party promote it, you'd be thankful and help the Party prove it’s good,” he said.

Torsten Trey, executive director of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, said he believes that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is making Lü’s operation into a “showcase transplant commercial.”

“They showcase a ‘regular’ organ transplant operation and present a happy patient to market it in Taiwan: ‘You see, China is not so bad,'” he told The Epoch Times.

The Taiwanese singer’s calling China his homeland, despite Taiwan’s resistance to communist control, fits right into the CCP’s agenda, Trey said, noting how the news was spread across many platforms in Asia in both Chinese and English.

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No Way to Verify Alleged Donor Claims

The mention of head trauma raised more questions from experts.

“China has a record of writing ‘severe trauma to the head’ as the cause of death when firing squad hit the victim with a bullet to the head.”

“The CCP has created a narrative around organ sources; they always claim it’s a post-trauma brain death, but no one has any way to verify it,” Huang said.

The Epoch Times reached out to the singer’s China-based agency for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

For Huang, the key issue in China’s organ transplant system is the lack of transparency.

He said that the CCP has branded its system as “transparent and traceable, but the problem is that it is completely untransparent.”

“It’s not open to the public and only known to those inside the system,” he said.

To show sincerity, he said, the regime should make its transplantation data available on the internet.

Wu Min-chou contributed to this report.

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