Behind sci-fi claims of a 150-year lifespan, references to ‘restoring organ functions’ and ties to notorious military hospital have medical ethicists worried.
For decades, the “981 Project” was known only to Beijing’s elites and a few in the West who probe the dark corners of China’s no-holds-barred medical research.
Studded with star physicians, the shadowy project poses as the pathway to longevity, the latest in almost a century of insider health perks for the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party.
The once-obscure project came into the public eye this year after a hot mic moment between the Chinese and Russian leaders, who discussed the prospect of longevity via multiple organ transplants and made reference to a 150-year life span.
Follow that 150-year claim, and the trail leads to a top Beijing military hospital and the 981 Project. Follow it further, and alarm bells start ringing. That hospital’s history and now-scrubbed references to “restoring organ functions,” researchers say, may point to a darker story: forced organ harvesting.
Combating Death
Chinese state television captured the hot mic musings on Sept. 3 as Chinese leader Xi Jinping escorted his Russian and North Korean counterparts to an enormous military parade at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
“Earlier, people rarely lived to 70, but these days at 70 you are still a child,” Xi told Russian President Vladimir Putin, prompting the latter—who, like Xi, is 72—to reference continued organ transplants as a key to everlasting youth.
“Predictions are that in this century, there’s a chance of living to 150,” Xi said just before the audio faded.
That longevity claim harks back to a one-minute ad in 2019 promoting the 301 Hospital in Beijing, China’s top military medical center dedicated to treating those in the top political circles.
“A 150-year lifespan project to combat death,” the voiceover in the ad calls it.
The clip describes a health system decades in the making, combining the best of traditional Chinese medicine with Western technology. At one point, the voiceover touts the system for the Chinese elite as “tried and true” and first-rate, backing up the claim with a graph that depicts Chinese leaders outliving their American and British peers by at least a decade.
The bold declaration troubles medical ethicists.
“Sickness is not something that is turned on and off like a light switch,” Dr. Torsten Trey, executive director of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, told The Epoch Times. “It is one thing to talk about staying in power and becoming 150 years old. But how would they do that?”
Organs on Demand
That “how” is the very question that the state-backed 981 Project seeks to address.
Building off of “80 plus years of red health care history,” the 981 Leaders’ Health Care Project began in 2005, according to public records about the initiative. It’s a “pilot program” under military health officials, pooling together “the nation’s highest medical resource” and medical talents, according to descriptions on a Chinese information depository that have now been taken down.
The name itself denotes prestige.
Nine is a homophone for long-lasting in Chinese, and 81 is a reference to the founding of the People’s Liberation Army on Aug. 1. Eight and one add up to another nine—a double reference to longevity, founder Zhao Wei, a doctor formerly with China’s supreme military command body, the Central Military Commission, told a Beijing magazine in 2016.
The 981 initiative prescribes meticulous medical upkeep via comprehensive health screenings that vary by job—as many as 150 for astronauts and pilots in the military.
But prevention and detection have their limits—with aging, organs eventually fail. To that end, the short-lived 2019 ad provides an answer: “restoring organ functions.”
The phrase is one of six key focuses featured in the program, and, according to Trey, it could mean several things: transplants, medication, and stem cell therapies. The project has supplied scant information on what it takes to reach the goal of restoring organ function. Still, in a country with long-standing concerns about transplant abuses, the very mention of organ transplants raises concerns.
By Eva Fu
