China killing religious, ethnic minorities, harvesting their organs, UN is told | Hacker News Reader

China killing religious, ethnic minorities, harvesting their organs, UN is told

independent.co.uk

44 pointsdeogeo17 comments

I hear a lot about the prisoner organ harvesting in China, but something seems off. There are more that 1m prisoners in China. About 7,000 people on the organ donor list die each year. I would think that if the organ harvesting was as real as the news makes it seem, it would be common for people on the donor list to go to China and get the surgery. I am pretty confident that using the dark web and Bitcoin I could buy drugs, wives, weapons and other illegal products. Yet I can't see how to buy organs. My guess is because the organ harvesting is much less common than the news makes it appear.

(PS, just in case someone reads this wrong, I don't think it is good that China does any amount of forced organ harvesting.)

How common does the news make it seem? This doesn't seem to refute any specific figure.

I would imagine that people requiring pretty much urgent organ transplants, or those who are recovering from transplants, would not be fit to fly. If you need to spend an extended amount of time in a foreign country, that is probably quite hard to juggle with existing obligations like family and job.

You have to be a genetic match. And people do go to china for organ transfer. It literally typically takes a week to find one based on reports which is why people became suspicious. They kept asking where the organ kept coming from.

If fully true, how terrible. If only partially true (or partially accurate), still terrible and confusing to know how to respond.

My money is on "partially true". China is killing lots of people, be they Han or not, religious or not. So it's "technically correct", but saying it as if they exclusively targeted minorities is misleading.

Perhaps legislation needs to be passed so people found having gone to China for organ transpants would be charged with murder

How could you discover and prove that without cooperation from Chinese law enforcement?

Home-country medical records indicating the need for a transplant, travel records, financial records, signs of surgery, and finally, biopsy of organ in question.

If if caches on ..

- It would just shift the transplant location to Russia, Myanmar, Thailand or Vietnam.

- People would transfer money into bitcoin and pay Chinese organ harvesters with Bitcoin.

- Hospitals will start offering plastic surgery to remove signs of surgery.

- People will shift or retire to places which won't prosecute them for murder.

Fundamentally people will do anything to stay alive.

Requires a whole lot more criminal energy and risk. Laws don't work by making it impossible to commit crime, they make it hard (by regulating what you can do) and risky (by setting up punishment if you get caught).

Adding hurdles won't get rid of the phenomenon completely, but it will certainly decrease it.

It would be more appropriate to charge China with murder (crimes against humanity in this case). Besides, it's far more effective to attack people providing an illegal service than those patronizing it.

Supposedly they would need the organ transplant to stay alive. Saying that they should have the common decency to just die already without bothering us or China and labeling them "murderers" (instead of China) strikes me as incredibly tone deaf and unethical.

If I'd pay a hit-man to kill a donor I wouldn't get away with it, despite the urgency. If I knowingly visit a country who kills people for donation I am an accomplice. Where I come from this has the same term as the deed itself.

Outside being attacked you can't kill people for self-preservation.

Or you could tariff and punish china for doing it.

Is this not a forbidden topic of discussion on HN?

When I brought it up a few months ago, I got flagged, downvoted, and lectured by a mod [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20032085

There are 168 hours in a week, and there appear to only be two moderators. So there are probably large windows of time during which various forbidden topics can make their way to the front page.

Having said that, I find HN to be enjoyable because there aren't many political or religious discussions here. Presumably there are many subreddits for topics like these (I say presumably because I spend almost no time on reddit).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com