HONG KONG — Chinese state news media and pro-Beijing newspapers in Hong Kong said on Friday that an international organ transplant conference in Hong Kong demonstrated that China’s transplant system, which for decades used organs from executed prisoners, had global backing.

That assertion was disputed on Friday afternoon by the president of the Transplantation Society, a nongovernmental organization based in Montreal that had organized the meeting.

At a conference session on Thursday, several leading Chinese medical specialists — including Dr. Huang Jiefu, a former deputy health minister; Dr. Zheng Shusen, a transplant surgeon at Zhejiang University; and Dr. Chen Jingyu, a transplant surgeon at Wuxi People’s Hospital — spoke about “a new era” of organ transplantation in China, according to the program and to several people who attended the event, which was not open to the news media.



China says it stopped using the organs of executed prisoners on Jan. 1, 2015, but doubts linger.

“Scholars say this special Chinese organ transplant meeting shows that the Chinese organ transplant world has been truly accepted by the Transplantation Society,” said Global Times, a Chinese state-run newspaper. Similar reports were published by the Hong Kong-based Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao.