Execution film mars Clinton's China trip

By Hugo Gurdon in Washington

International News Electronic Telegraph Thursday 18 June 1998 Issue 1119

THE American Congress yesterday examined photographs of ambulances at execution sites in China waiting to take away the body parts of dead convicts.

President Clinton will raise objections to the sale of prisoners' body parts for transplants when he meets Beijing's leaders next week, but he will not meet any dissidents for fear of upsetting his Communist hosts.

Embarrassments are stacking up for the President as his nine-day state visit approaches. There are suggestions that he has handled the Chinese with kid gloves by helping them to improve their intercontinental ballistic missiles, while they break promises and sell weapons technology to Iran, Libya and Pakistan.

The visit takes place against the backdrop of an investigation of evidence that China made illegal, multi-million-dollar donations to Mr Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign.

Harry Wu, a dissident and human rights activist, presented a congressional committee with slides smuggled out of China showing police shooting prisoners in the back. Behind them, vans wait to take the bodies away so that doctors can harvest organs for sale to foreigners or wealthy Chinese transplant patients.

Mr Wu told Congress members that prisoners' families were ordered to make the donations. He said: "The idea of a prisoner consenting to organ donations under these circumstances is a joke." John Shattuck, the assistant secretary of state, confirmed the practice, dismissing Chinese denials.

There is increasing disquiet in Washington over Mr Clinton's trip because the White House is seen as having relinquished control over it to the Chinese, who are milking it for symbolism. Mr Clinton's formal, red-carpet reception at the 1989 massacre site in Tiananmen Square is seen as an outrage.

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