Oct 25/11 Yang Yanming was slowly led from his cell by two burly uniformed guards in Beijing’s central prison to a waiting van in the courtyard guards, his hands cuffed behind him and his head bowed. Once in the vehicle, he was strapped to a gurney, hooked up to an IV, and given a highly concentrated injection of sodium pentobarbitol. Minutes later, a technician checked his pulse, and pronounced him dead. He then pulled out a scalpel, made a long vertical incision down Yang’s abdomen, and deftly harvested his organs. Placed in ice chests, they were rapidly sold off on China’s booming organ market.

The unfortunate Yang was a former stock trader convicted of embezzling $9.52 million from Galaxy Securities during 1997 to 2003. Once arrested, his trial, conviction, and execution were carried out in rapid fire succession in a matter of months. No hanging around death row for decades here, as is common practice in the US. Yanming never revealed where the money went, according to the Beijing Evenings News, possibly because he never committed the crime. We, and Yang’s family, will never know.

The move was part of a broader effort by regulators in Beijing to crack down on rampant corruption in the securities industry. Still, the more people they execute in the Middle Kingdom, about 10,000 this year, the more they remain the same. Great for the human organ business, but not so good for white collar crime prevention