Kidney exchange scheduled to begin in Hong Kong

The South China Morning Post has the story:

New kidney donation scheme starts in October after change in Hong Kong law allows strangers to donate organs to patients
This is aimed at speeding up the long waiting time for a suitable organ and surgeries will be done at four of the city’s 43 public hospitals

"The paired organ donation arrangement, made legal after Hong Kong passed an amendment to its Human Organ Transplant Ordinance last month, allows a donor-patient pair who may not be a match for each other to donate organs to another donor-patient pair and vice versa, so that patients on both sides get the transplants they need.
...
"There is a huge supply-demand gap for kidney transplants in the city. As of June 30 this year, there were 2,214 patients on the transplant list in Hong Kong but each year there are only about 80 living or deceased donors. Two years ago the average waiting time for a kidney was over four years.
...
"Before the change in the law, strangers could not make live donations to transplant patients. Couples had to be married for more than three years and friends needed to obtain approval from the Department of Health’s Human Organ Transplant Board for live donations.

"Professor Philip Li, the chairman of the authority’s Central Renal Committee said in the UK and the Netherlands, the paired kidney donation programme was very mature and they were now having a very large number of successful matchings.

 “In Hong Kong, we are just starting, it will be quite a while before we actually see a significant effect,” Li said."

Ant financial

When I visited Hangzhou recently I learned a bit about Ant Financial, the offspring of Alibaba and the proprieter of AliPay.  Here's a story from the WSJ about how big they've grown, and the attention it is starting to bring them from Chinese regulators:

Jack Ma’s Giant Financial Startup Is Shaking the Chinese Banking System
Ant Financial is transforming how Chinese run their daily finances, drawing flak from big banks and warning shots from the government

"It handled more payments last year than Mastercard , controls the world’s largest money-market fund and has made loans to tens of millions of people. Its online payments platform completed more than $8 trillion of transactions last year—the equivalent of more than twice Germany’s gross domestic product.

"Ant Financial Services Group, founded by Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, has become the world’s biggest financial-technology firm, driving innovations that let people use their phones for buying insurance as easily as groceries, enabling millions to go weeks at a time without using physical cash.

"That success is also putting a target on the company’s back. China, even more than the U.S., is now under pressure to reckon with the disruptive power of a financial-technology giant."

Two recent trips to China, in pictures

From Hangzhou, with Alibaba's Jack Ma, and overlooking West Lake, with the pagoda from the story of White Snake barely visible in the distance (but see Beijing Opera, below):

From Qingdao (where the beer comes from both Factory 1 and Factory 2),  at Lao Shan, and from the HiSense building:

In Beijing: Tsinghua conference (with Ed Hopkins, Jacob Goeree and Ben Roth), Beijing Opera (Madam White Snake), Temple of Heaven, and at DiDi with Will Cheng:

Chen Yusun Memorial Lecture at Tsinghua. 陈岱孙纪念讲座

Monday, at Tsinghua University I'll have the honor of delivering the
Chen Daisun Memorial Lecture, 陈岱孙纪念讲座

From Google translate:
"In order to celebrate the centennial birthday of Tsinghua University and the 85th anniversary of the Department of Economics of Tsinghua University, the Tsinghua School of Economics and Management launched the "Chen Yisun Economics Memorial Lecture" in April 2011.

Professor Chen Yusun was born in 1900. He graduated from Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1920. After earning an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Wisconsin in 1922, he went to Harvard University for further studies and received his Ph.D. in economics in 1926. Among his classmates studying at Harvard University's Department of Economics, Bertil Ohlin, one of the Hecksell-Ohlin international trade models, and Edward Chamberlain, known for his theory of oligopolistic competition. (Edward Chamberlin). In 1928, Professor Chen Yisun returned to China. In the same year, he served as professor and department head of the Department of Economics at Tsinghua University. Until 1952, the Department of Economics of China's higher education institutions was merged into other universities. Professor Chen Yisun died in 1997 at the age of 97. Professor Chen Yusun is recognized as the father of modern economics education in China. Under his leadership, the Department of Economics of Tsinghua University became one of the best economics departments in China at that time. During his tenure, Professor Chen Yisun was the most undergraduate student at Tsinghua University, accounting for about one-fifth of all undergraduate students in the university.

The lecture was titled Professor Chen Yusun and is the highest level academic lecture for teachers and students. Previous speakers include: 1997 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Myron Scholes, Professor of Finance, Stanford Business School, 2007 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Professor of Harvard University, USA Eric Maskin, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics, Robert C. Merton, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics, University of Chicago professor Lars Peter Hansen."

I'll speak on "Repugnant transactions and forbidden markets"

Tsinghua Conference on Behavioral, Experimental and Theoretical Economics (BEAT), July 9-10

Tsinghua Conference on Behavioral, Experimental and Theoretical Economics

(Tsinghua BEAT 2018)

July 9-10, 2018

Keynote speakers:

Jacob Goeree, University of New South Wales

Ed Hopkins, University of Edinburgh

Alvin Roth, Stanford University (2012 Nobel Laureate in Economics)

We are pleased to announce the 2018 Tsinghua Conference on Behavioral, Experimental and Theoretical Economics (shortened as Tsinghua BEAT). The conference will be held on the campus of Tsinghua University, at the School of Economics and Management, in Beijing on July 9-10, 2018. 

Program Overview:

Detailed paper schedule: Tsinghua BEAT 2018 (PDF)

Conference website: http://tinyurl.com/tsinghuabeat

Monday July 9th

Session Chair:  Tracy Xiao Liu

09:00 – 10:00    The Favored but Flawed Simultaneous Multiple Round Auction, Jacob Goeree*(joint with Nick Bedard, Philippos Louis, and Jingjing Zhang)

Information and Communication

10:15 – 10:45   Costly Miscalibration in Communication, Yingni Guo* (Northwestern) and Eran Shmaya

10:45 – 11:15   Robust Persuasion of a Privately Informed Receiver, Ju Hu and Xi Weng*

11:15 – 11:45   Ambiguous Persuasion, Dorian Beauchêne, Jian Li* (McGill) and Ming Li

Market Design

13:00 – 13:30   Core of Convex Matching Games, Xingye Wu* (Columbia/Tsinghua)

13:30 – 14:00   A Dynamic College Admission Mechanism in Inner Mongolia: Theory and Experiment, Binglin Gong and Yingzhi Liang* (Michigan)

14:00 – 14:30 Obvious Mistakes in a Strategically Simple College Admissions 

Environment: Causes and Consequences, Ran I. Shorrer and Sándor Sóvágó* (Groningen)

Search and Information Preference

14:45 – 15:15  Sequential Search with a Freeze Option - Theory and Experimental Evidence, Emanuel Marcu and Charles N. Noussair* (Arizona)

15:15 – 15:45  Information Avoidance and Medical Screening: A Field Experiment in China, Yufeng Li, Juanjuan Meng, Changcheng Song* (NUS) and Kai Zheng

Chen Daisun Lecture, Main Auditorium, Weilun Buiding, chaired by Yingyi Qian, Dean of School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University

16:15 – 17:30  Repugnant Transactions and Forbidden Markets, Alvin Roth, Stanford University, 2012 Nobel Laureate in Economics

Tuesday July 10th

Session Chair:  Alexander White

09:00 – 10:00   Price Dispersion and Cycles: Theory and Experiment, Ed Hopkins* (joint with Tim Cason and Dan Friedman)

Development

10:15 – 10:45   Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design In The Field, N. Rigol, R. Hussam and Benjamin Roth* (Harvard)

10:45 – 11:15   Prosocial Compliance in P2P Lending: A Natural Field Experiment, Ninghua Du, Lingfang Li* (Fudan), Tian Lu and Xianghua Lu

11:15 – 11:45   Does Haze Cloud Decision Making? A Natural Laboratory Experiment, Soo Hong Chew, Wei Huang and Xun Li* (Wuhan)

Reputation and Risk

13:00 – 13:30   Reputation Effects under Interdependent Values, Harry Di Pei* (MIT/Northwestern)

13:30 – 14:00   The Persistent Power of Promises, Florian Ederer* (Yale) and Frédéric Schneiderz

14:00 – 14:30   Intertemporal Consumption with Risk: A Revealed Preference Analysis, Joshua Lanier, Bin Miao* (SUFE)， John Quah and Songfa Zhong

Cognitive Biases

14:45 – 15:15   Motivated Framing Effects, Christine L. Exley and Judd B. Kessler* (Penn)

15:15 – 15:45   Are People Aware of Their Inattention: Evidence from Credit Card Repayment, Jiajun Jiang, Yi-Tsung Lee, Yu-Jane Liu and Juanjuan Meng* (Peking)

15:45 – 16:15   Competing by Default: A New Way to Break the Glass Ceiling, Nisvan Erkal, Lata Gangadharan and Erte Xiao* (Monash)

Organizing Committee:

Chong-En Bai

Yan Chen

Ming Gao

Audrey Hu

Tracy Xiao Liu

Alex White

Jie Zheng

Xiaohan Zhong  

Visiting Hangzhou

I'm on my way to Hangzhou, via Shanghai, for a meeting called by Alibaba.  I'll only be there for two busy days.
Read all about it:

问大家！和诺奖获得者面对面聊人类未来你来不来?

Here are some others who are coming

1.Patrick Bolton （帕特里克·博尔顿）：哥伦比亚大学教授，美国艺术与科学院院士、英国科学院院士、美国金融学会院士，当代最著名的金融学家之一。

2、Markus Brunnermeier（马科斯·布鲁纳米尔）：普林斯顿大学Bendheim金融中心主任，美国国家经济研究中心和经济政策研究中心成员，撰写有大量关于金融危机和货币政策的著作。

3、Bengt Holmstrom （本特·霍姆斯特罗姆）：麻省理工学院教授，美国人文与科学院院士，契约理论的奠基人之一，2016年获得诺贝尔经济学奖。

4、Josh Lerner （杰斯·勒那）：哈佛商学院教授，100位对私募行业最有影响力的学者之一，研究主要集中在风险投资机构的结构和作用。

5、Preston McAfee （普斯顿·麦法宜）：前谷歌战略技术主管、微软首席经济学家，重视根据微观经济学基础，提出商业战略和竞争解决办法。

6、Christopher A. Pissarides（克里斯托弗·皮萨里德斯）：伦敦经济学院教授，英国社会科学院院士，2010年因在市场搜寻理论和宏观经济方面的突出贡献获得诺贝尔经济学奖。

7、Yingyi Qian（钱颖一）：清华大学经济与管理研究院院长，制度经济学的代表人物，2012年当选为世界计量经济学会会士、2018年当选为清华大学首批文科资深教授。

8、Alvin E. Roth（阿尔文·罗思）：哈佛商学院教授，美国文理科学院院士，美国经济学会主席，在博弈论、市场设计与实验经济学取得卓越贡献，2012年获得诺贝尔经济学奖。

9、Thomas Sargent（托马斯·萨金特）：纽约大学教授，理性预期学派的领袖人物，擅长总体经济学、货币经济学、时间序列等领域，2011年获诺贝尔经济学奖。

10、Michael Spence （迈克尔·斯宾塞）：美国社会科学院院士，提出的信息不对称理论为广泛的市场理论奠定了基础，形成了现代信息经济学的核心，2001年获得诺贝尔经济学奖。

11、Steve Tadelis （史蒂文·泰迪里斯）：加州大学伯克利分校哈斯商学院教授，研究致力于理解企业和市场的契约机制如何影响价值创造，著有《博弈论导论》等。

12、Neng Wang（王能）：美国哥伦比亚大学商学院教授、上海财经大学金融学院院长，研究领域包括公司金融学，宏观经济学，资产定价理论，私募及对冲基金等。

13、Shangjin Wei（魏尚进）：美国哥伦比亚商学院金融学经济学教授，美国国民经济研究局中国经济研究组主任。主要研究领域为国际金融、国际贸易、政府治理和改革、中国经济以及宏观经济学。

14.、Wei Xiong （熊伟）：普林斯顿大学教授，香港中文大学（深圳）经管学院院长，国际顶级期刊《Journal of Finance》联合主编，研究领域包括投机泡沫、金融危机、行为金融学等。

15、Chengang Xu (许成钢)：长江商学院教授、香港大学经济学教授，中国政府治理研究的基石，2013年获孙冶方经济科学奖。

2018 BEIJING INTERNATIONAL AUTOMOTIVE EXHIBITION

I am on my way to the auto show in Beijing as a guest of NIO, the Chinese electric car company.

From Google translate:
"

*********
Update:
Here's a picture of me speaking at the auto show, from this news story, in Chinese.

Here's another Chinese news story, and a later one.
And here's a story about NIO, from Forbes, at the Beijing Auto Show:
NIO Takes A Decisive Lead In China's Premium Electric Race
"The Shanghai- and San Jose based company got out of the blocks a little earlier and has moved faster than anyone else. Extravagant funding to recruit world-class talent is fueling startling innovation too.
Deliveries of the first NIO product, the ES8, begin this week."

Transplant diplomacy between China and the Vatican

The Global Times, a publication of the Chinese Communist Party, reports on further discussion with the Vatican on organ transplantation, in connection with an anticipated agreement on the appointment of Catholic Bishops in China:

China to attend Vatican organ trafficking meeting
Beijing, Holy See exchanges promoting mutual respect
By Li Ruohan Source:Global Times Published: 2018/3/11 2 

"Chinese scholars will join an anti-organ trafficking conference in the Vatican on Monday and Tuesday, to share the country's experience and boost people-to-people exchanges between Beijing and the Vatican. 

"This is the second time China has been invited by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (PAS) to attend a meeting in the Holy See, as China's reforms on organ transplant have increasingly received papal and global recognition.

...

"In 2017, more than 5,100 deceased Chinese citizens had voluntarily agreed to donate their organs after death, saving, or improving the lives of more than 16,000 people, according to official data obtained by the Global Times on Sunday. 

"China criminalized unauthorized trading of organs in 2011, a crime for which the death penalty can be handed down in severe cases. From 2007 to 2016, 174 people were arrested in China for organ trafficking.
...
"China and the Vatican have no diplomatic relations. Lately there has been widespread speculation the two sides are close to a consensus on the appointment of bishops in China, a positive sign for improving relations between Beijing and the Vatican."
********

HT: Frank McCormick

Here's a story in the Washington Post about the larger diplomacy:
A Catholic bishop and his rural Chinese parish worry about a deal between Beijing and the Vatican   

By Emily Rauhala March 11

Fake peer reviews appear to be a problem in some fields

Scientific publishing is full of challenges, but fake peer reviews are an issue which as far as I am aware is not a significant problem in Economics, although it appears to be in some other fields.

E.g. here's a post from Retraction Watch:
Major publisher retracting more than 100 studies from cancer journal over fake peer reviews
"Springer is retracting 107 papers from one journal after discovering they had been accepted with fake peer reviews. Yes, 107.

"To submit a fake review, someone (often the author of a paper) either makes up an outside expert to review the paper, or suggests a real researcher — and in both cases, provides a fake email address that comes back to someone who will invariably give the paper a glowing review. In this case, Springer, the publisher of Tumor Biology through 2016, told us that an investigation produced “clear evidence” the reviews were submitted under the names of real researchers with faked emails. Some of the authors may have used a third-party editing service, which may have supplied the reviews. "

And this:
Can you spot a fake? New tool aims to help journals identify fake reviews
*************

Here's a related NY Times article:
Fraud Scandals Sap China’s Dream of Becoming a Science Superpower

"Having conquered world markets and challenged American political and military leadership, China has set its sights on becoming a global powerhouse in a different field: scientific research. It now has more laboratory scientists than any other country, outspends the entire European Union on research and development, and produces more scientific articles than any other nation except the United States.

"But in its rush to dominance, China has stood out in another, less boastful way. Since 2012, the country has retracted more scientific papers because of faked peer reviews than all other countries and territories put together, according to Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks and seeks to publicize retractions of research papers.
...
"In April, a scientific journal retracted 107 biology research papers, the vast majority of them written by Chinese authors, after evidence emerged that they had faked glowing reviews of their articles. Then, this summer, a Chinese gene scientist who had won celebrity status for breakthroughs once trumpeted as Nobel Prize-worthy was forced to retract his research when other scientists failed to replicate his results.

"At the same time, a government investigation highlighted the existence of a thriving online black market that sells everything from positive peer reviews to entire research articles."

An optimistic view of transplants in China from the Washington Post

I've written a number of posts linking to optimistic stories about China's move away from using executed prisoners as sources of organs for transplants, and others expressing some skepticism. The Washington Post has some elements of reporting that indicates that they explored and discounted some of the reasons for skepticism, so I think this is the most credibly optimistic assessment I've seen to date.

Here's the Washington Post story:
China used to harvest organs from prisoners. Under pressure, that practice is finally ending.

"China had more than 600 organ transplant centers in a sprawling, unregulated system. That number was whittled down to about 160 registered and approved centers in 2007, when legislation was also introduced to outlaw organ trafficking and ban foreigners from coming to the country to receive Chinese organs.
...
"Chinese law does not explicitly rule out using organs of prisoners condemned to death by the criminal courts, and Huang himself was quoted in Chinese media in late 2014 and early 2015 as saying prisoners could “voluntarily” donate organs.

Huang now disavows those comments, insisting there is “zero tolerance” for using any prisoners’ organs in the hospital system. But in a country of 1.3 billion people, he said at a Vatican conference in February, “I am sure, definitely, there is some violation of the law.”

Lawyer Yu Wensheng said that one of his clients had shared a Beijing prison cell with a man facing the death penalty last November and that the condemned man was given a form to sign to “voluntarily” donate his organs.

Death-row prisoners, he said, were “given the choice not to sign the forms, but they would receive much more mistreatment and suffer much more. If they sign, their last days of life would pass more easily.”

Yet the supply of organs from executed prisoners seems to have been drying up because the number of death sentences appears to have fallen dramatically after a 2007 mandate requiring the Supreme Court to review all capital cases."

...

"Transplant patients must take immunosuppressant drugs for life to prevent their bodies from rejecting their transplanted organs. Data compiled by Quintiles IMS, an American health-care-information company, and supplied to The Post, shows China’s share of global demand for immunosuppressants is roughly in line with the proportion of the world’s transplants China says it carries out.

Xu Jiapeng, an account manager at Quintiles IMS in Beijing, said the data included Chinese generic drugs. It was “unthinkable,” he said, that China was operating a clandestine system that the data did not pick up.

Critics counter that China may also be secretly serving large numbers of foreign transplant tourists, whose use of immunosuppressant drugs would not appear in Chinese data. But this assertion does not stand up to scrutiny.

Jose Nuñez, head of the transplantation program at the World Health Organization, which collects information on transplants worldwide, says that in 2015 the number of foreigners going to China for transplants was “really very low,” compared with the traffic to India, Pakistan or the United States, or in comparison with transplant-visitor numbers in China’s past.

Chapman and Millis say it is “not plausible” that China could be doing many times more transplants than, for instance, the United States, where about 24,000 transplants take place every year, without that information leaking out as it did when China used condemned prisoners’ organs.

And lawyers who have defended Falun Gong practitioners also reject allegations that those prisoners’ organs are being harvested.

“I have never heard of organs being taken from live prisoners,” said Liang Xiaojun, who said he had defended 300 to 400 Falun Gong practitioners in civil cases and knew of only three or four deaths in prison.

In China, despite state repression, family members can be determined in speaking out and seeking justice when relatives vanish.

If tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners were being executed every year, that information would emerge, experts say.

A U.S. congressional commission on China, the State Department and the Falun Gong community website have separately tried to estimate the number of political prisoners in China, and the figures range from 1,397 to “tens of thousands” — and even that upper number is significantly lower than the 500,000 to 1 million claimed by Gutmann and others."

A still-skeptical view of transplantation in China

My recent post on transplantation in China reported on optimistic assessments of the move away from using executed prisoners as a source of organs. Not everyone is optimistic: here's a recent editorial from the BMJ:

Engaging with China on organ transplantation
BMJ 2017; 356 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j665  (Published 07 February 2017)
by Wendy A Rogers, Matthew P Robertson, and Jacob Lavee

It starts with a story from the bad old days, and then turns to the current environment, saying in part:

"Since January 2015, China has vowed to halt the use of organs from executed prisoners. After a pilot in 2010-14, a procurement programme using donated organs from people who meet circulatory death criteria was rolled out nationally. There are now national transplantation registries and organ procurement organisations. Yet there is no new law or regulation in China banning the use of organs from executed prisoners. Nor have existing regulations permitting the use of prisoners’ organs been rescinded. Prisoners remain a legal source of organs if they are deemed to have consented before execution, thus permitting ongoing retrieval of organs from prisoners executed with or without due process.1

"The transplant registries are not open to public scrutiny or independent verification. Inexplicably high volumes of transplantation continue to take place in China,8 and wealthy foreigners can still obtain liver and heart transplants, booked in advance.11 The Transplantation Society’s former president Francis Delmonico acknowledged under oath at a recent US Congressional hearing that he cannot verify claims about reform in China. The main evidence for reform has simply been the public assertions of Huang Jiefu and other government officials."

Organ transplants in China: an optimistic assessment

There are optimistic statements about China's progress on developing a system of voluntary organ donation (to replace the prior system of obtaining organs for transplant from executed prisoners.)   Some of these statements originate with the Chinese press. The Vatican is also optimistic.  The Vatican also has wide ranging diplomacy with China concerning quite different issues.  The stories below collectively reflect each of these things.

Here's a story in the SF Chronicle
China to lead in organ transplants by 2020

"China is on track to lead the world in organ transplant surgeries by 2020 following its abandonment of the much-criticized practice of using organs from executed prisoners, the architect of the country’s transplant program said Wednesday.
Chairman of the China Organ Donation and Transplantation Committee Huang Jiefu said the voluntary civilian organ donations had risen from just 30 in 2010, the first year of a pilot program, to more than 5,500 this year.
That will allow around 15,000 people to receive transplants this year, Huang said. The U.S. currently leads the world in organ transplants, with about 28,000 people receiving them each year.
“We anticipate according to the speed of the development of the organ donation in China, the momentum, in the year 2020, China will become the No. 1 country in the world to perform organ transplantation in an ethical way,” Huang said in an interview at his office in an ancient courtyard house inside Beijing’s old city.
China is seeking to expand the number of willing organ donors, but it has run up against some cultural barriers: Family members are still able to block a donation, even if the giver is willing, and Chinese are averse to registering as donors by ticking a box on their drivers’ licenses, considering it to be tempting fate.
Instead, authorities are partnering with AliBaba, China’s virtually ubiquitous online shopping and payment platform, to allow people to register in just 10 seconds, Huang said. Huang said more than 210,000 Chinese have expressed their willingness to become donors, although that’s a drop in the bucket compared with the country’s population of 1.37 billion.
...
"Huang said China has adhered to a complete ban on the use of organs from executed prisoners that went into effect in 2015, although some in the field outside China have called for the country to allow independent scrutiny to ensure it is keeping to its pledge.
Critics have questioned China’s claims of reform and suggested that the World Health Organization should be allowed to conduct surprise investigations and interview donor relatives. The U.N. health agency has no authority to enter countries without their permission.
Chinese officials say China shouldn’t be singled out for such treatment while other countries are not.
Further moving on from the days when foreigners could fly to China with briefcases of cash to receive often risky, no-questions-asked transplant surgeries, China has also taken measures to stamp out organ trafficking and so-called “transplant tourism,” including by limiting transplants to Chinese citizens."
*********
China’s organ transplantation reform hailed by international community

"By CGTN’s Yang Jinghao

A sensitive issue just a decade ago, organ donation and transplantation in China has seen a remarkable shift during the past few years. A total of 7,000 organs were voluntarily donated between January and July this year, according to a conference on organ transplantation held in China over the weekend.

Comparatively, the number in 2010 was just 34 for the whole year.

The conference, held in Kunming, southwest China’s Yunnan Province, gathered top organ transplant professionals from major international organizations. They reviewed the achievements China has made and discussed how to strengthen international cooperation."
**********

And here's a story from Crux (whose subhead is "Taking the Catholic Pulse")
Chinese state media highlights Vatican official at organ trafficking conference in Beijing

"In a sign of the slow thawing of relations between China and the Vatican, a Chinese state newspaper reported positively on a Vatican official’s remarks at an organ trafficking conference taking place in Beijing.
Argentine Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, the chancellor of the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences, attended the conference on Thursday, part of China’s ongoing efforts to convince the world it has reformed its organ donation procedures.
In 2015, the communist country announced it was stopping the practice of using organs from executed prisoners. In 2016, official statistics stated surgeons in China had harvested organs from 4,080 donors and performed 13,263 transplant surgeries, the second highest in the world. Officials said all donors were through a registered volunteer donor system. By 2020, China is expected to surpass the United States to take the top spot.
Last month the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization , the Transplantation Society (TTS), and the Declaration of Istanbul Custodian Group (DICG) - four of the most influential societies in promoting global ethical practices in organ transplantation - sent a letter expressing their appreciation for China’s efforts in organ donation and transplantation reform.
Despite the assurances of the government, many human rights activists are skeptical such numbers could be achieved through an exclusively voluntary system, especially after decades of reliance on the organs of prisoners."
*************

Here are comments from Chancellor Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo commending the development of the China Model

*************

And here's a story about another realm in which China and the Vatican are simultaneously engaged.

Vatican official hints at unofficial agreement with China on bishops
"HONG KONG (CNS) -- A senior Vatican official has hinted there is an unofficial agreement between the Holy See and Beijing on the appointment of bishops, even as negotiations to formalize arrangements continue to hit roadblocks, reported ucanews.com.

Argentine Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, who attended a conference on the sensitive topic of organ donation and transplants in the southern Chinese city of Kunming, offered the hint during an interview with state-run Global Times Aug. 4.
**************
Here are my earlier posts on the positions taken by the Pontifical Academy regarding transplantation.

Frank Delmonico and the recent organ transplant meeting at the Vatican

When I was in Trento, I participated in a panel on markets for human organs, and had the chance to ask Dr. Ignazio Marino about the recent

Vatican statement on organ transplantation, which I pointed out seemed to conflate killing prisoners for their organs with much more ordinary attempts to increase voluntary organ donation.  Dr Marino replied that this had been part of the diplomacy involved with the Chinese delegation.

Here's an article about the backstory to some of that diplomacy, and the role played by my old friend Frank Delmonico

One doctor’s war against global organ trafficking
By Ryan Connelly Holmes And Dan Sagalyn May 29, 2017

"A controversy was brewing. Delmonico, a leading voice on ethical organ transplantation, had planned a February 2017 summit in Rome for representatives of more than 40 countries to discuss the ethics of transplanting organs and to sign a pledge to uphold high standards.

"But there was a hitch: A key invitee to the forum was Dr. Jiefu Huang, who has led reform of China’s organ donation practices. Critics, including some in the Vatican, wanted at the summit no representatives of China, which for years sold and transplanted organs from executed prisoners.

"Delmonico, however, saw the Chinese presence as a good thing. It was “an opportunity for them to proclaim a new day and be accountable” that the practice has stopped, he said. In fact, some of the Chinese old guard have attacked Huang because of his efforts to stamp out unethical and corrupt methods of obtaining organs.
...
"Pope Francis did not attend, but Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences did. In a significant development, China signed the summit’s statement condemning the use of organs from prisoners and advocating the creation of national laws to prosecute transplant-related crimes. Beijing’s two delegates were joined by 75 other signatories representing more than 50 institutions and more than 40 nations at the conference. Delmonico called it a “seminal event” in the fight for global reform."
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I hope that this effort at diplomacy, aimed at ending the practice of using executions as the primary source of organs in China, will not be a source of confusion regarding attempts to increase the availability of organ transplants by ethical means.

Surrogacy in China: available but illegal

The Global Times has this story:
Surrogacy to ‘remain illegal’ By Liu Caiyu  

"China will not legalize surrogacy and will crack down on the crime, China's top health authority said Wednesday, after the People's Daily published an article hinting at support for the practice for older mothers.

Surrogacy is a complex problem involving law and ethics, and most nations and regions in the world ban any form of surrogacy and punish participating institutes and personnel, said Mao Qunan, a spokesperson with China's National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), said Wednesday during a press conference in Beijing.

"The commission and the government will continue to crack down on surrogacy and ensure the public can get safe and effective assisted reproductive technology," Mao said.

Since China eased its one-child policy in 2014, allowing couples to have a second child if either parent is an only child, and further loosened it to allow all couples to have two children in January 2016, more older mothers are trying to conceive, but are finding it difficult, a People's Daily article on Friday said.

The article quoted a doctor as saying that nearly 90 percent of women cannot conceive naturally after the age of 45. The average age for a final pregnancy is around the age of 40, although the number of older women giving birth has seen a continuous increase.

Among the 90 million families in China eligible to have a second child, 60 percent of the women are above 35 years old and 50 percent are over  40, data released by the NHFPC in January 2016 shows. In 1996, only 0.4 percent of women above 45 gave birth, rising to 4 percent in 2005 and 10 percent in 2015, it said.

Although China has a huge demand for surrogacy services, from both an ethical and legal standpoint, it is not feasible to legalize it now, Xia Yinlan, a professor at the China University of Political Science and Law,  told the Global Times.

"Legalizing surrogacy could worsen the problem of trafficked women, which is not humane and would increase discrimination against women," said Xia."

Vatican conference on organ trafficking and transplant tourism

A recent meeting at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of the Vatican:
Summit on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism resulted in a statement and a number of news stories.  Here are several that caught my eye, with divergent views on the situation in China and how it is changing:

From the NY Times: Debate Flares Over China’s Inclusion at Vatican Organ Trafficking Meeting
"China has admitted that it extracted organs from death row prisoners for decades, in what critics have called a serious violation of the rights of inmates who cannot give genuine consent. Since Jan. 1, 2015, Chinese officials have said they no longer use prisoners’ organs, though doubts persist.

“We urge the summit to consider the plight of incarcerated prisoners in China who are treated as expendable human organ banks,” wrote the 11 signatories, who included Wendy Rogers of Macquarie University in Australia; Arthur Caplan of the New York University Langone Medical Center; David Matas and David Kilgour, both Canadian human rights lawyers; and Enver Tohti, a former surgeon from the western Chinese region of Xinjiang."
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From Statnews.com
China moves to stop taking organs from prisoners, WHO says
"The World Health Organization says China has taken steps to end its once-widespread practice of harvesting organs from executed prisoners but that it’s impossible to know what is happening across the entire country.

At a Vatican conference on organ trafficking this week, a former top Chinese official said the country had stopped its unethical program, but critics remain unconvinced.

In an interview Thursday, WHO’s Jose Ramon Nunez Pena said he personally visited about 20 hospitals in China last year and believes the country has reformed. But he acknowledged that it was still possible “there may still be hidden things going on.” China has more than 1 million medical centers, although only 169 are authorized to do transplants.

Nunez Pena said he had seen data including organ transplant registries and was convinced the country was now shifting away from illegally harvesting organs.

“What is clear to me is that they’re changing,” he said. “But in a country as huge as China, we can’t know everything.”
...
"Campbell Fraser, an organ trafficking researcher at Griffith University in Australia, agreed the trends over the past few years have shown a drop in the number of foreigners going to China for transplants and an increase of organ seekers heading to the Middle East.

At a press conference at the Chinese Embassy in Italy following the two-day Vatican organ conference, Fraser said migrants — including Syrians, Somalis and Eritreans — sometimes resort to selling off a kidney to pay traffickers to get them or their families to Europe.

“Egypt is where the biggest problem is at the moment,” he said, adding that it has the best medical facilities in the region and can perform the live donor surgeries.

He estimated as many as 10 such illicit transplants could be happening per week, though he had no statistics and said he based his research largely on anecdotal information from recipients, law enforcement, doctors and even some organ “brokers.”

Fraser said he has access to transplant patient “chat boards” because he himself had a kidney transplant in his native Australia in 2003.

Nunez Pena said it was likely that organ trafficking would find its way to conflict-plagued regions.

“We’re hearing about a lot of problems in Egypt, Pakistan and the Philippines,” he said, predicting that authorities were poised to break up an organ smuggling ring in Egypt in the next few weeks. “Wherever you have vulnerable people, you will see these kinds of problems.”

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From Science:

Study retraction reignites concern over China’s possible use of prisoner organs

By Dalmeet Singh ChawlaFeb. 6, 2017 , 4:15 PM

A journal has decided to retract a 2016 study because of concerns that its data on the safety of liver transplantation involved organs sourced from executed prisoners in China. The action, taken despite a denial by the study’s authors that such organs were used, comes after clinical ethicist Wendy Rogers of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and colleagues authored a letter to the editor of Liver International on 30 January, calling for the paper’s retraction in the “absence of credible evidence of ethical sourcing of organs.”

For years, Chinese officials have come under fire for allegedly allowing the use of organs from executed prisoners for transplants, including for foreigners coming to the country for so-called medical tourism. In January 2015, it explicitly banned the practice and set up a volunteer donation system, but doubts persist that much has changed.

The disputed study—published online in October 2016—analyzed 563 consecutive liver transplantations performed before the ban (from April 2010 to October 2014) at a medical center in China. Suspicious, Rogers organized the protest letter to the journal. “Publication of data from prisoners is ethically inappropriate given that it [is] not possible to ensure that the prisoners freely agreed either to donate their organs, or to be included [in] a research program,” she tells ScienceInsider.