The central government has a hard time getting rid of this practice because they aren’t as omnipotent as they appear, there is a lot of vested interests that localities continue the practice.
Given the very low percentage of organ donors in Chinese culture, you’ll know they’ve stopped harvesting organs when their turn around time for organ transplants goes up by a lot.
What is alleged here is much worse: Prisoners of Conscience (and not drug traffickers or murderers) are particularly selected for their histocompatibility and executed "on demand".
Therefor I think these allegations need further proof. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and that's why I suggest a cautious approach to this story.
One would think that even China has some compunctions about "creating" capital crimes in order to have enough organ donors. One of the problems with the underlying story is that the non-consenting donors must have been killed somewhat "extrajudiciarily", that is, outside of the "normal" way death sentences have been administered in China.
Therefore the allegations point to an industrial scale process of matching living prisoners to organ recipients, and lacking a judicial death sentence.
I am completely against the death penalty, in all circumstances.
I still believe that the allegations against China made here are orders of magnitude worse than "just" harvesting organs from executed donors. That would be mainly a violation of the victims post-mortem rights or dignity.
The alleged practice involves doctors and hospitals cooperating in the preparation and execution of the death penalty. That is a fundamental violation of medical ethics. In the US, doctors are forbidden to participate in executions.
And apparently at least the timing of the executions in China, if not even the decision whether to execute a prisoner or not, seems to be affected by the demand for organs.
It's always hard to make a judgement about what wrong is worse, but I'd say here we have a clear "winner".
Also, the particular crime charged here is that not only are organs harvested from prisoners / execution victims, but prisoners are specifically killed in order to harvest their organs, including a pre-execution check for histocompatibility.
There is a distinction to be made between small scale criminal behavior on the part of the hospitals and prisons, and a large-scale state-sanctioned practice of illicit organ harvesting.
When they say "Worst Fears [...] Were Just confirmed" they are at best misleading.
There has been a notable dearth of reporting by traditional journalistic media about this topic, and so I am still somewhat skeptical. The evidence presented so far is not as conclusive as with the Uyghur suppression.
The practice described in the article would undoubtedly be a crime against Humanity, and among the biggest in history. But I can't tell right now if the process of its discovery is just slow-moving or if there is just nothing that big to discover. I'd appreciate any pointers to more information either way.