TIANJIN, China — A few weeks after receiving a lifesaving liver transplant, Pakistani businessman Shaukat Javed shuffled slowly around a specialty hospital ward chatting up fellow organ recipients.

Patients from around the globe mingled in the fourth-floor ward of the First Tianjin Central Hospital, some of them with nurses bracing their steps.

In the last few years, several Chinese hospitals have done a soaring business in liver, heart and kidney transplants. They charge barely half as much as in the West, advertise through intermediaries abroad and pull in a steady stream of patients who are unable to find donors in their home countries.

"About every nation is here," said Javed, who owns a soap factory not far from Lahore. "There are Korean, Japanese, Arabs, the whole (Persian) Gulf region. ... There are a few guys from Israel as well."

Javed's mood turned sour only when he was asked about the donor of the liver that now was sewn firmly into his own abdomen. Did he know anything about the person?

"It isn't nice to look into these matters," he said tersely.

A variety of human rights groups say donated organs in China often come from executed prisoners, and there are concerns that prisoners' wishes aren't always respected.

China's hospitals have a seemingly endless supply of organs because the country applies the death penalty more freely than any other nation. By harvesting from executed prisoners, hospitals receive a steady stream of organs and can match donors' compatibility with recipients ahead of time.

Authorities don't hide the fact that executed prisoners are a source for some organs, but say it isn't rampant.

But the rule of law is weak in China, courts aren't independent and many gray areas exist around informed consent for organ donation.

A number of social and political issues intersect in the matter of China's organ transplants. First, there's a rising level of medical sophistication. The country is among the world leaders in the number of organ transplants each year. Secondly, as China veers toward a free-market economy, institutions such as hospitals are grasping at income-generating opportunities.

Moreover, as in many aspects of the Chinese state, secrecy shrouds the execution of prisoners. China doesn't say how many prisoners it kills each year, but legal scholars say it's probably between 3,000 and 8,000.

Accusations were revived in recent weeks with reports of a secret labor camp containing Falun Gong detainees who were to be executed for the purpose of providing organs that the state would sell for a profit.