Xiong's mother changes the boy's clothes at their home in Anhui Province on January 22. Photo: CFP

Xiong Zhengqing, the father of an 18-month-old boy who suffered brain damage in Lu'an, Anhui Province, had seen his application to euthanize his child declined, Guangzhou-based Nandu Daily reported on Wednesday.

On December 1, 2014, the boy, Xiong Junyi, was accidentally dragged into a conveyor belt at the express company where his dad worked. His chest was crushed and blood clots choked off his breathing, which led to cerebral hypoxia and subsequent brain damage.

Doctors at the Anhui Provincial Children's Hospital told the parents they could save Xiong Junyi's life, but were afraid he might be left permanently unable to care for himself.

"There is a slim chance he might be cured … I saw euthanasia as the best solution, since at the very least my child won't be in pain anymore. When he's choked by phlegm at home where there is no respirator, he has difficulty breathing, his eyes roll back, his lips tremble, his face turns blue," Xiong Zhengqing said.

However, both the hospital and the Lu'an civil affairs bureau turned down Xiong's application, saying "it is illegal."

Xiong's was one of the latest cases to trigger repeated debate over euthanasia. A couple in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province also attempted to resort to euthanasia in May 2014 for their 8-month-old child born without a cerebellum, the Yangtze Evening News reported on May 13, 2014.

Some 87 percent of 207,000 respondents surveyed online by news portal qq.com in May supported the Suzhou parents. "Unfortunately, the always high pro-euthanasia rate in China is still powerless to push forward the practice," Zhang Zanning, a law professor with Southeast University in Nanjing who was responsible for the first lawsuit over the practice of euthanasia in China in 1990, told the Global Times.

The legalization of euthanasia has made no significant progresses in recent years, nor will it within the foreseeable future, said experts and members of advocacy organizations reached by the Global Times.

A legal bottleneck

Li Yan, 36, the founder of A Call To Legalize Euthanasia, a patient advocacy organization, told the Global Times that, except for the media and families suffering same anguish, nobody seems to be interested in introducing a lawful process for euthanasia. Li was thrust into the limelight in 2007 when she begged Chai Jing, a well-known news reporter, to submit her proposal for peaceful death through deputies of National People's Congress to China's top legislature.

Li, who was born in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and has suffered from progressive muscular dystrophy since she was a year old, said "I cannot do anything without my parents, so I wanted to leave the world before them."

"I sent messages to the lawmakers on Sina Weibo, [China's twitter-like service], but nobody replied," Li said with a bitter smile. She explained that as all 20 members of her organization are unable to push forward the issue themselves due to poor health, they have to turn to others.

Liu Xiao, vice chairman of Hunan's provincial political consultative conference, submitted his proposal to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) three years ago, but they responded that "it was premature" to legalize euthanasia, Deng Wen, a Hunan-based member of the group, told the Global Times.

"The government was cautious, worrying that mercy killing may lead to intentional homicide and abandoning of the elderly," Zhang said, "however, were the euthanasia law established, rigid standards would differentiate euthanasia from homicide."

"[Nevertheless], coupled with lenient law enforcement in China, low ethical standards may cause the abuse of euthanasia," said Qiu Renzong, the first Chinese laureate for the Avicenna Prize for Ethics in Science, granted by UNESCO in 2009.

Countries such as the Netherlands and Switzerland have well established family doctor systems, in which a doctor is unlikely to collude with others to murder his/her clients on the pretext of euthanasia due to their ongoing relationship with the patients, while Chinese people and doctors are not yet civilized enough, Qiu said.

"Besides, considering the strained relations between doctors and patients in China, doctors have to do everything they can to save patients even if they are incurable, for fear they'll be blamed for the deaths," said Zhao Gongmin, a bioethics research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who proposed a pilot euthanasia project to the CPPCC in 2006.

The public is unhappy with the inaccessibility and high costs of hospital treatment, and the declining ethics among doctors, making doctors an easy target for people's anger.

Death with dignity

"Advocating patients' right to die has moved forward the legalization of euthanasia a half step in recent years, since it has at least provided incurable patients another option," Cheng Bin, another member of the group suffering from high-level paraplegia due to a 2002 car accident, told the Global Times.

Luo Diandian, 64, founded a right-to-die advocacy group in Beijing in 2013, promoting the idea of "letting the patients exert their will to remove life support and die in dignity when they have come to the point where no medical means could cure them," reported the Beijing Times in 2013.

Withholding life support is passive euthanasia, bypassing the ban on active euthanasia, which refers to the process of doctors ending a patient's life with lethal medication, Cheng said.

Without confirming the above-mentioned progress as part of the legalization of euthanasia, a senior executive in Luo's group who requested anonymity told the Global Times in an email that "the concept of 'death with dignity' is more aligned with medical ethics, advocating that death be neither postponed nor brought on ahead of time."

The executive said the concept has been widely accepted across the country. According to an online survey conducted in 2013 by news portal Sohu, about 91 percent of 3,540 respondents chose to "die with dignity."

The campaign's official website showed that, 15,863 people filled in a form of "living wills," choosing to die in dignity.

The promotion of "death with dignity" has advanced ordinary people's understanding of death, reminding them it is their choice whether or not to accept treatment, Qiu said.

Qiu noted that it will be more appropriate to discuss the legalization of euthanasia when the public perception of life and death becomes clearer, doctor-patient ties become less tense, and the rule of law is strengthened.

"But I do not have enough time or energy to wait and strive for this unforeseeable future," Li Yan said sadly.
Newspaper headline: Fighting to die