Chinese inmates had hearts or lungs removed during executions, study says
businessinsider.co.za
businessinsider.co.za
Her justification: this guy was going to die anyways, why not save someone's life in the process?
Rumor is also that SF Chinatown politician Rose Pak[1] got such a procedure done as a favor from the CCP government. She was extremely powerful, and CCP wanted to curry favor with her. When she got back from her "treatment", the entire who's who of SF ruling class showed up at the airport to receive her [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Pak
[2] https://www.sfexaminer.com/photo-galleries/chinatown-communi...
1. isn't verified ("rumor"), and
2. mentions many points entirely incidental to the operation itself and doesn't materially contribute to the topic of organ harvesting from inmates.
So then nobody asks questions.
This is in itself nothing sinister and cause for questioning. I don't know about the regulations in mainland China that govern organ donations, so I am not equipped to argue in this specific case.
Just the fact that one received a transplant doesn't mean that there is suspicious activity involved.
The CCP will move you to the top of this list if you're powerful and well-connected, as she was.
And China has an extremely well documented practice of doing exactly what OP said: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...
Not authoritative, but I thought this was interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JaPzJKycxc
https://web.archive.org/web/20200526081806/https://www.lamag...
Honestly, who cares? IMHO, Fulan Gong is only notable as an example of the kind of insane persecution the Chinese government can conduct against a group. They probably weren't the most sensible to begin with (which is no excuse for their persecution), and the level of persecution they've received it probably enough to make anyone an nut (e.g. going all in for Trump). Focusing too much on that mainly has the effect of distracting from the persecution.
And I do believe they're persecuted. Besides all the documented stuff, the (Chinese) mother of one of my friends can't travel outside her hometown because she was (mistakenly) put on some list of Fulan Gong people.
It clearly says she had gone to China for a kidney transplant: https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Rose-Pak-SF-political-po...
“Pak was an overseas executive director of the China Overseas Exchange Association (COEA), an organization overseen by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (OCAO) of the State Council of the People's Republic of China.”
“At various times she spoke out in favor of the Chinese government's views, e.g. in 2012 calling all "overseas Chinese" to "defend the homeland” in the conflict about the Diaoyu Islands, and in 2008 opposing a resolution of the SF Board of Supervisors that criticized China for the Tiananmen Square massacre and other repression measures, passed on occasion of the Beijing Summer Olympics torch relay reaching San Francisco.”
“As revealed in a 2018 Politico report after Pak's death, among U.S. intelligence officials "there were widespread concerns that Pak had been co-opted by Chinese intelligence". These also extended to her work in organizing many "junket" trips to China for leading Bay Area politicians.”
Regardless of that, or the source of her kidneys, Pak is a textbook case of political cronyism, and how one person who never held elected office can use financial connections, backroom dealmaking, and sheer force of will to shape elections and policy for decades and steer the direction of a major city.
because, like private "for profit" prisons, it incentivises bad things.
Sci-fi short story on this topic, 1967: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jigsaw_Man
For example, "A Gift From Earth" was about a bloody revolution on a colony planet where the ruling class oppressed the working class via executions through organ harvesting.
See also the movie Repo Men based on The Repossession Mambo by Eric Garcia:
> In 2025, advancements in medical technology have perfected bio-mechanical organs. A corporation known as The Union sells these expensive "artiforgs" on credit, and when customers are unable or unwilling to pay for their artiforgs The Union sends "repo men" to locate and forcibly repossess the organ - invariably resulting in the death of the owner. […]
> The 71 cases in question all occurred between 1980 and 2015, an important cut-off date as it was also the year China officially banned organ harvesting from condemned prisoners. Before then, most organ transplants in China were believed to have come from executed convicts because voluntary organ donation was extremely limited.
It’s really simple. There’s been decades of opportunity to hold Nike accountable, but people continued to support sweatshop labor. Sweatshop labor is not directly related here, but it supports a system that does not value human lives.
Offshoring labor, out of sight out of mind, to countries like China is a negative externality. Suddenly now China is the only one to blame when the externality is no longer external ( microplastics ).
It would not be hypocritical if countries “internalized their negative externalities”, or maybe just not create negative externalities or internalities in the first place. e.g. demote consumption, but that would not be very American. Just look at the public / self storage industry. Americans have two door garages and that’s still not enough. That part is really not China’s fault, even though they are the enabler.
There should not be ongoing supply chain issues then.
> they would still have rotted
This sounds sinophobic. Your profile mentions you’re from London. Yes, China was doing fine for a millennia, too, then the British colonizers brought opium and drugged their people.
> have been forced to reform through economic failure.
Yes, they did that. It’s cause embracing capitalism and free trade.
May I introduce you to... colonialism? See also: how the battle of Plassey and subsequently income from India helped fund the industrial revolution. I can't speak much about Chinese colonial history (I expect it to be roughly about as brutal and violent as Indian colonial history) but boy does your comment ignore several centuries of history.
In so far that there would not be supply chain issues causing massive inflation?
How would Amazon, Apple, the world’s richest companies be so without China?
This embeds a colonialist / Western bias presuming that Americans companies are leading the charge and orchestrating everything, and the natives are incapable of self organizing. This is opposed to American companies being customers, and Chinese companies offering them a cheap all inclusive solution with implementation details ( factories / labor ) already sorted out. Since you pointed out Shen Zhen specifically.
Obviously we share theirs since we’ve shown were interested in cutting costs at the expense of quality.
Apple would be more like a Cartier or Tiffany...A few small exclusive shops around Monaco and the Cote de Azur.
But yeah, Apple would have automated things. Except the part where they pass the savings on to end customers.
Furthermore in Apple’s case, they want China to be rich, too, because that’s a big market.
We would, on average, be richer and more democratic if we had retained our wealth-generating jobs. Instead, we gave the wealth-generating part of our corporations to Chinese labourers.
As a result, China now has a rapidly-expanding middle-class and America has a rapidly-diminishing middle class.
The only Americans who truly benefited from this move are the billionaires whose corporations profited by exploiting third world slave labour.
The rust belt is struggling and the rise of Trump was direct consequence of that.
Respectfully, I suggest before telling others to re-read, some basic understanding of civics, electoral college, constituency and how elections are held would be helpful for yourself.
Countries like France and Britain didn't suddenly decide on "parliamentary democracy" as a model out of nowhere; they developed a parliament first, when they were still monarchies, and then the parliament suppressed the monarch. The second estate (nobility) of these countries, which previously favored cooperation with a monarch, changed allegiances once the newly-empowered third estate (borgeoisie) gained enough economic power. Top-down power was effectively strangled by the combination of nobles + business owners collectively bargaining, refusing to e.g. build the monarch's war machine for wars they had no say in.
Western democracies looking at this historical model of democratization, expect that the best thing to do for a country's democratic freedoms is to economically enrich the country's borgeoisie, to the point that the existing dictator-empowered oligarchs see more value in supporting the borgeoisie than they do in supporting the dictator.
These things have long been super typical of growing middle-income countries on their way to First-World country status. It's misleading to evaluate one by the standards of the other. Also, why no mention of comparative success stories like the Czech Republic?
Except these things aren't even true, at least not in Poland. Corruption in the classical sense hasn't been a problem here for decades. Nepotism at the upper level of governance (especially in state-owned companies) – true, it's re-emerged. Mixing it up with supposed wealth-amassing, however, makes even less sense because the most egalitarian shift in Poland's economic policy – with empirical observable effects – has so far, for the last 7 years, precisely coincided with the EU-sceptic right-wing populism.
> wealth amass in a tiny sliver of the population
Yeah, right. /s https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?locations=P...
> their political spectrums can be resumed as ‶corrupted right-wing guy sucking on the EU tits″
No, it can't, it's more complicated than that. I think your language alone says a lot about how much thought has gone into your statements.
In short, Poland has seen a shift in its policy towards the EU after around 2015. A lot of it can be attributed to pre-Brexit Conservative Party-style anti-EU populism (and, if that's the case, why make it appear like a post-Soviet phenomenon alone?), but a part of it is genuinely related to the general debate about the future of the EU and its policies. The last words quoted, aside from their vulgarity, are just totally inaccurate. One thing to consider is the cohesion funds (which, by the way, the European Commission has blocked, and rightly so, from Hungary) and the pandemic recovery fund (which it has barred Poland from, also rightly so), but you can't reduce the discussion to those, especially in the recent weeks when Poland has shouldered the lion share of the European cost of welcoming Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war.
And, of course, the Polish political parties include a very significant pro-EU liberal opposition stronghold, usually just slightly trailing the populist ruling party in the election polls. So, no, your description of the spectrum is far from the truth.
I mean, even the three countries mentioned are vastly different from one another in where they stand. Today's Hungary, admittedly, has gone the farthest in terms of limiting the freedom of media and dismantling the judicial system. Poland's ruling party has not gone that far, and I would say it's very unlikely it will, for historical reasons – the anarcho-democratic political traditions are just too strong, as is the civil society.
So, in short, I'm all for being alarming when that's warranted, and there are things to be alarmed with, to various extent, when looking at last years' developments in Poland (can't speak for other countries). But one needs to stay truthful at the same time.
"As of late" we're getting democracy-flavoured populism with the governing party restricting free media and repeating divide and conquer campaigns to create a voting bloc that gives them absolute majority.
Hungary and Serbia are probably a lost cause at this point. Poland is slowly getting there.
If that is absent, criticism towards government increases and its legitimacy is questioned if it cannot provide stable growth anymore.
But I fully agree that democracy is still the most successful model and still striving. A mistake western governments often make lately is to be too afraid of it.
Historians didn't have anything to do with all the decisions that were made by politicians making deals with China. It was the financial industry and the politicians they finance who came up with bullshit PR to convince the public opinion that China would magically become a democracy if the west started free trade with China. No historian was ever consulted unless it was to give credit to that PR campaign.
Now did a significant part of the chinese population become wealthier as the result? Yes, it doesn't change the fact that China was, is and will be a bloody dictatorship, for a long time, by western standards.
The west needed to outsource slavery for economic purposes, as always, the west got them slaves.
Note, though, that the means by which overthrow occurs is mostly orthogonal to its consequences; the important thing is instead who's doing the overthrowing. Most coups are done by a small group, who become a new aristocracy after the coup succeeds. Democratization occurs when, instead, 1. the overthrow is populist in nature, but 2. no power vacuum is created for new aristocrats to step into, as the populace (esp. the borgeoisie) have managed to install a new governmental structure that doesn't require dynasty-driven statesmanship and foreign diplomacy policy.
Historians would be making the classic correlation|causation fallacy. Your French example is apt because China has created a bourgeoisie class which is also the effective monarchy. Historians might say that China has learned from history and ensured that their powerful class cannot be usurped.
I think it much more convincing that social values determine the direction in which a country allows government to rule them. Chinese values are miles apart from French values, and their citizens are just much more comfortable with submitting to authoritarian rule. I base this on living in the country, as well as cultural research such as this: https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/china/
There's some truth to this, but you can do event studies to show that economic conditions play a very large causal role too. e.g. the massive quantitative spike in Hitler's popularity 1 year into the depression (this is the main data point I want to bring up, because it's quantifiable by polling numbers), or the 1917 Russian Revolution which only was successful because of the dire conditions brought about due to WW1, or the CCP only getting into power because of Japanese occupation and degradation of the KMT.
I don’t think you understand the functional meanings of these terms.
People like the modern Russian “oligarchs” or their Chinese equivalents are, in function, nobility, whether they are granted any formal titles or not. You’re a noble in function if 1. you helped the current regime gain power; 2. you can use your ongoing necessity to the regime’s hold on power to coerce the current regime into granting you more semi-sovereign autonomous power; 3. this semi-sovereign autonomous power (the classical example being private armies; the modern example being control of state industries) could be used to topple the regime if enough of it were concentrated.
To be in the borgeoisie, on the other hand, is to be a capitalist — even a magnate — but to not have any individual semi-sovereign autonomous power over the state. Rather, the borgeoisie have such power as a block — they could, together, strangle the economy — but they are by definition not monopolists, and so none of them has any chance of starting or winning a coup on their own.
To put it another way: if Facebook was a private company with a single 100% owner, that owner would still be a member of the borgeoisie of America. However, if Boeing was a private company with a single 100% owner, that owner would be a functional noble — an “oligarch” — title or no.
As well, such a hypothetical individual owner of Boeing, together with a few other such individual owners for other military industries, could independently declare a "vote of no confidence" in their country, and "hand over" power to some foreign nation invading them, simply by cutting off war-time logistical supply at just the right time.
These types of power, are exactly the sorts of power that made classical aristocrats, aristocrats, rather than just courtiers.
Just need to become a donor and provide campaign contributions. You get semi-sovereign autonomous power pretty soon.
Like what happened in Nazi Germany? /s
> sown the seeds of our own destruction through our complicity
The future is unwritten. Actors behave reflexively. Imagine how bad the future looked in July of 1940 after Germany conquered France. It must have appeared as though they'd soon conquer all of Europe, with the rest of the world to follow. And yet, a few short years later, Nazi Germy was annihilated.
"'Free trade is essential for human rights'. The end of that sentence is, 'we hope... because nothing else has worked.'"
^ http://www.westwingtranscripts.com/search.php?flag=getTransc...
I don't think it's wrong, but it's worth noting that their dates to when China openly admitted to sourcing organ donations from execution victims. I wouldn't be surprised if China were continuing this practice, but I doubt that America genuinely cares about these execution victims any more than they suddenly started caring that Saddam's genocide in the 1980s before they invaded Iraq, or that Russia genuinely cares about Nazis in Ukraine.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
Perhaps you are ready to give up your car, fruit, coffee, electronics, plastics, your detached suburban home, the ability to heat it in winter... And are ready to go work in a clothing sweatshop.
But you'll have a hell of a time convincing your neighbours of this.
Which of all of these new, unregulated extraction and manufacturing jobs will you be signing up to do? Will you be doing your fifty hours in the unregulated zinc mine, or your sixty-five in the Nike jeans sweatshop?
Productivity isn't like money, you can't just turn on a printing press and make more of it.
Besides, cost of living isn’t that cheap in the west anyways.
Yes, it was just done in shining beacons of freedom like Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, with the resources to fuel it coming in large part from despotic regimes in Africa, or juntas in South America, or petro-sheikdoms.
> Besides, cost of living isn’t that cheap in the west anyways.
It can always go up further.
In the meantime, before we take drastic, widely unpopular measures, perhaps we could take baby steps, like not actively working towards creating more dictatorships..? We can do a lot on this front, by doing very little.
I'd take "Put me under and harvest all my organs" before "firing squad or electrocution" any day, but that's just me. Unfortunately for Richard Bernard Moore he doesn't live in an evil dictatorship.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/south-carolina-execute-...
> China plans to implement a new national donation system which will allow the government to phase out next year the practice of removing organs from executed prisoners to be used in transplant operations.
China’s health ministry said yesterday that a new national organ donation system is being developed after officials said using organs from death-row prisoners was neither ethical nor sustainable. [0]
[0] - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2012/11/2/china-to-cut-jail-o...
Even benevolent dictatorships?
The goal of "promotion of democracy" is a simple propaganda lie that doesn't stand up to even the most cursory examination.
Any effort to stop executions now includes the fact that potential donors recipients will die.
Even with the opt-out donation model of some European countries they usually have surprisingly short waiting lists for most organs, as unfortunately plenty of accidental deaths occur every day.
At the same time they are sexualizing and grooming kids.
It creates a motivation to find the innocent guilty.
Never underestimate how absolutely low someone will go to make a buck.
An inmate's death sentence can be commuted to as less as 12 years after this process. https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%AD%99%E5%B0%8F%E6%9E%9C
Unless of course he is a DONOR.
I'm against all organ "donations". If it is your time to die, it's your time to die. Also, the biggest issue in organ donation isn't china or taiwan supposedly harvesting a few dozen prisoners' organs. It's the illegal trafficking of organs of poor and desperate people around the world which makes up almost all of the organ harvesting/donations.
I'm going to bet that almost all of the organ harvesting in china, taiwan and most of the world is organ "donations" by poor people. Now that's what people should truly be upset about. But I'd doubt we'd see much propaganda about that.
I agree that paying for organs creates bad incentives. But I think organ donation after (non-capital punishment) death is a Good Thing, and it's hard for me to understand someone being against it.
By the way, prisoners in Taiwan can still voluntarily donate their organs to their close relatives.
Trying to mix Taiwan and China together is quite a word salad.
It would be nice to see some evidence that actually happened.
I’m not an admirer of the CCP, but it doesn’t seem trial judges are under any pressure to give death sentences simply to supply organs.
China has a very large prison population. Including many “lifers.”
Many of the prisoners have perfectly fine organs.
Yet there doesn’t seem to be pressure to move any of these prisoners to death row to get at their organs.
One good argument against it is that it stigmatizes organ donation. In fact, it really should be called “organ confiscation” or just plain “execution.”
It doesn’t set a standard of organ donation being a good thing.
The donation part, outside of specific cases like kidneys where they can be donated by a living person, is never a "good thing" if you're looking at where it came from - usually someone dying in a car accident or worse.
And besides, harvesting organs from death row inmates isn't a donation, so it wouldn't really dilute that.
fwiw, I'm not defending taking organs from death row inmates, just replying to this specific concern. Hell, I'd much rather we took organs from any dead body we can - the idea of bodily integrity for a corpse being valued so much we'd rather let people die than violate it is IMO one of our biggest failures as a society.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30921371
"Human Harvest (Film)"
In the US we don’t even need the free-organ incentive to sentence innocent people to death.
After all, it is for a good cause and in a certain moral sense to make amends for their sins against the communist body of the people. A bit like an eye for an eye, but more visceral. Scientific socialism at its best.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170207112528/https://www.hrw.o...
https://web.archive.org/web/20170207112528/https://www.hrw.o...
You might criticise that there is still a death penalty
You might criticise the justice system is not good enough
But taking the organs from prisoners that were sentenced to be executed that day doesn't sound that unreasonable, if that guarantees better organs to save someone else
Are you able to opt out?
Inaccurate, of course; the US executed something more like 100 prisoners during that time period, since most executions are not carried out by the federal government.
As much as we hate hearing about it, only the Chinese people have the power to make changes to this regime. Having met many Chinese students abroad, I'd say they are OK with this happening. Either they are apathic, or supportive of their totalitarian regime.
No one with power has done anything about it. No one with power wants to do anything about it. Instead we have world leaders praise China for its boldness in the coronavirus lockdowns, politicians and pundits who fantasize — let me use Thomas Friedman's words here — "What if we could just be China for a day? I mean, just, just, just one day. You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions ..." China has power. They envy it. They want it. They want us to be less free and more like that. It's more common than not. Your political party is not immune. If you're lucky, they're struggling to engage with the idea of China as a Major Geopolitical Risk (and it makes them somewhat uncomfortable to admit even that) or they're trying to be tough on China as a general play for Economic Protectionism, an excuse to serve the self-interest of a narrow slice of their constituency. (America First!!! Let's pay $900k/yr/job to save $100k/yr jobs in the steel industry!!! This is the only road to prosperity!!!)
You chide GP poster for his cynicism, essentially. Why shouldn't we all be cynical? I'm sorry, you're late to the show and probably missed out on the shock factor by a good decade or so, possibly longer.
I logged in to say basically this, but I will expand on this a little.
There is a steady push in US to limit the rights of its citizens. It worked to an extent and had an interesting catalyst in the form of pandemic, but it seems that people who tried to use it expand power overshot a little, because pushback was significant and is now part of midterm fight.
I absolutely agree on your take on China.
What makes you think they have any power at all? This is not what history teaches us about totalitarian regimes.
I would say it's also not clear that they want it.
Some of them are opposing to the regime, but it is possible that the majority of them is pleased for how things are going, also because things have improved a lot for the average Chinese folk over the past couple of decades.
For many aspects China is not more totalitarian or violent than many other countries, it can in fact be considered an average country in that regards, where 1.2 billion people live. that's more than US + Europe combined (almost two times that)
It is very possible that that's one of the few ways to run such a large country efficiently.
Smaller countries like North Korea for example could probably benefit from a liberal democracy and could be run in such a system, but could China?
And would Chinese people want it?
I think it's an open question.
The needs and wants of a foreigner for the Chinese government will be vastly different from those of a citizen of China. For example we are primarily concerned with human rights, their cooperation in global politics, and other things that concern us as non citizens. But to a citizen they want jobs, food, a stable local economy. These are things China historically did not have, and which can at least be partially credited to the government for providing. By our metrics, yes they do poorly, but then our wants for the Chinese government are pretty much completely detached from that of a local citizen.
This is of course orthogonal to both the topic at hand and reality. The Chinese are quite content with their government and abuse of low-status criminals virtually never causes political turmoil. (not even in bleeding heart democracies)
Also as a sidenote, it's not a totalitarian but an autocratic country. As William Gibson once remarked about Singapore, it's on its path to be Disneyland with the death penalty.
Okay, the government is also "people" in some way. But the "people" who can currently enact change are the ones who benefit from the current government, and it's silly to expect that they have a sudden synchronized change of mind.
For the billions of masses, they don't stand a chance against an organized military response. We've had a taste of that in China itself in 1984, as well as in events leading up to South Korea's Gwangju Massacre.
Parent's "only they can help themselves" quip is just a way of absolving any responsibility: "it's not my problem". I'm not saying whether we can do anything or not, but this kind of statements kill any rational thought towards solving the problem before it's even concieved.
People in power can be responsive to the people or irresponsive in both autocracies and democracies. The Chinese government is extremely responsive to popular opinion, even if its unelected. In that sense it's no different than a big company, which isn't governed by its customers but accountable to them.
The important question isn't, "is it my problem", it's "is it a problem". The Chinese are not children and we're not their parents. Believe it or not they have rational thought in China as well. Using our rational thought means taking seriously the notion that the Chinese do not want our political system, that they by and large if not support at least tolerate their state, and that it's not our problem to solve, because it is not a problem.
You might reconsider that after reading about the Gwangju uprising https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,3506.0.html?P...
TL;DR: an entire province's will was to oust the government, it ended in a massacre.
Without examples of popular will causing an overthrow of an established, well-organized authoritarian state, I'm going to remain unconvinced that it's possible, or that there's any meaningful accountability to the people from the government - after all, who'll judge or stop them unless they implode?
> they by and large if not support at least tolerate their state,
Of course they are rational, like it's rational to submit yourself to an overwhelming power you can't fight, rather than die trying. That doesn't mean that it's not a problem that would benefit from external help. Quite the contrary, just ask the people who lost their organs.
I take issue with the idea that a victimized society is responsible for its own state or that it can pull itself by the boot straps only if it wanted. If it was true, we would not have had totalitarian states at all.
The point is there is no problem. You'll continue to be popular in your own circles assuming the Chinese people are victimized, but nobody actually from there will care a whit for your paternalism. Frankly if people are going to keep opining on China there is zero excuse to be unaware of the numerous polls and studies (from respected Western organizations) on Chinese approval of their government.
How do you reconcile "Ukraine deserves self-determinism" with "we must enforce Western ideals on the rest of the world"? Moreover, how can you speak so brazenly on the heels of the utter failure of doing exactly what you preach in Afghanistan?
Also, you ignored the Gwangju one which had an entire city of hundreds of thousands. Or should I mention Hong Kong? At least that failed more peacefully.
I think you're not understanding what it means to live in a regime that tries to police your thoughts. Supporting it means nothing because it's the only way to survive.
As for reconcillation, I say: give them a real voice without fear of prosecution. It's not the case in China today.
The failure in Afghanistan is an example of jumping to conclusions and shortcuts in thinking, just like the grandparent did. I don't know how you managed to equate being thoughtful with invading though.
It is important to understand that gradient of comfort, awareness and consequence. And how that also couples with unawareness, denial. In the same or different people. In this latter regard, its the same as how you would be on any range of topics. Some topics will trigger a hyper nationalistic response from you, others you accept as unchangeable, some would be totally off limits for you to feel comfortable talking about (ie. regime change outside of the prescribed methods) but this last section is a much broader range for a Chinese citizen to feel off limits talking about and the consequences extend beyond them to their family.
Polling people for their thoughts is usually unreliable anyways because people can say anything: it costs nothing. It’s the same line of reasoning on why asking users directly how they would change a product yields crappy results.
That tells you basically nothing.
Some wealthy Chinese have a designated family member move to hedge their wealth preservation bets while galavanting around in a western country. I don't think trends in that metric reveal anything except how many are willing to play that game.
If you were to take this argument: It is nearly impossible to get an honest current thought from a Chinese citizen about that... and therefore Chinese must not served/satisfied by their government.
So the inverse of that would be "it is possible to get an honest current thought from a Chinese citizen." So since that is not something I can prove or disprove your claim tells basically nothing as well. This is because even an actual Chinese person telling you their honest thought cannot prove to you, by your standards, to have given you their honest opinion because you make hand wavy arguments that their true opinions are being suppressed already.
You've already disqualified any potential rebuttal because saying "that tells you nothing" can be literally applied to any data or stats thrown at you... because your whole argument is that the data/stats/opinions of Chinese people cannot be trusted.
> Some wealthy Chinese have a designated family member move to hedge their wealth preservation bets while galavanting around in a western country. I don't think trends in that metric reveal anything except how many are willing to play that game.
You can literally apply this as a counter argument to anything. I could claim that Americans' satisfaction with their lives is just a select few that you happened to talk to that are rich and galavanting around. The only way to counter this would be to catalogue every single person and of course also audit that every person was accounted for because any survey covering people can be discredited by saying that it didn't count everybody or that answers were given under duress.
The reality is that not even 20 years ago most Chinese who left did not have plans of returning, but given improving conditions the rate of repatriation is increasing. After the revolution people tried to escape, but that's not the case anymore. Rather than automatically discrediting any Chinese or stats that go against your pre-determined narrative, which is not something people can argue against, present evidence that can actually be proved/disproved.
Not the Americans exploiting cheaper labor in China and making China rich ?
> I would be shocked if it was Iceland or Norway doing that.
I would be shocked if you weren’t wearing made in China / Vietnam shoes or clothing.
No. Some of us have principal and is willing to pay more as to not support China, especially if we are going to speak about how evil it is to support the regime.
There is a habit of deferring an opinion to someone that appears closer to the topic - from people that believe they are being inclusive and sensitive - but on the topic of China doing that is completely incompatible. For immigrants, residents and citizens in the west with Chinese heritage this only conveniently plays on a widespread identity and racial ignorance that happens to privilege their opinions, but reduces the rest of our ability to understand and potentially shape policy. As it is a very narrow lens that already matches our opinion of imagining daily woe and oppression from every resident in China, but is simply not accurate.
Money is the real motivation here, as the harvested organs fetch quite the price.
What unlike the US or China, many countries just don't have anymore are death sentences, so it is not really that much of a discussion to kill prisoners and then harvest their organs, because these countries would just not kill people like that
I found an interesting document authored by the "German Institute for International and Security Affairs" [0] (A semi-official organization with close links to the federal government, it advises the Bundestag (the German parliament) and the federal government on foreign and security policy issues).
The document is titled "Xi Jinping Thought on the Rule of Law" [1] and describes Chinese goals for developing the rule of law in China over the next decade. I found it very interesting and IMO relevant to the discussion, to see where they want to go, even if it's not outright on topic.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Institute_for_Internati...
they are violent savages.
Pioneered by the Japanese during World War II. Also no anesthesia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
Edit: I would like to point out the reason why I said no based on this resource:
"Execution by organ procurement: Breaching the dead donor rule in China": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30921371
The practices of Unit 731 are more well documented that some of the Nazi crimes.
* We first conducted a pilot study using highly targeted keyword searches in commercial and academic Chinese-language scientific databases. These searches and the papers they uncovered are presented in Appendix 1. We qualitatively analyzed and classified the resulting 683 papers, during which we developed a criterion for problematic Brain Death Declaration (BDD), and therefore a probable DDR violation.*
We define as problematic any BDD in which the report states that the donor was intubated after the declaration of brain death, and/or the donor was intubated immediately before organ procurement, as part of the procurement operation, or the donor was ventilated by face mask only.
And then later in the discussion:
* The complete list of these 71 papers and excerpts with problematic BDD are in Appendix 2. Examples include:*
“The heart donor was a brain trauma patient. By the time of heart procurement, breathing had ceased. Endotracheal intubation was performed and artificial respiration [established]. The heart beat well. The donor heart was procured …”43
“The donor was intravenously injected with heparin 3mg/kg 1h before the operation… The heartbeat was weak and the myocardium was purple. After assisted ventilation through tracheal intubation, the myocardium turned red and the heartbeat turned strong… The donor heart was extracted with an incision from the 4th intercostal sternum… This incision is a good choice for field operation where the sternum cannot be sawed open without power.”44
“After donor brain death, tracheal intubation was performed as soon as possible for artificial ventilation. The chest was opened quickly, and the ascending aorta and pulmonary artery were infused with cold cardioplegia…”45
“After the donor was confirmed brain dead the trachea was intubated, artificial respiration was established, rapid median sternal incision…”46
“2.1 Obtaining and protecting the donor organs. After the donor's whole body is heparinized, donor is supine, endotracheal intubation is performed through the mouth, and the anesthesiologist intermittently gives oxygen to the lungs by manual balloon pressure. Split the breastbone in the middle.…”47 [0]
I'm a bit shocked that the vast majority of commenters in this thread seem to have at best skimmed the article then went to comment some really ill-informed opinions.
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ajt.16969
Does this study suggest that they removed organs before that?
edit: yes that documentary link below.. This post is getting downvoted, but I will add.. revenge and unresolved anti-justice sentiment are prime motivators for WAR. I ask people who have never seen this up close, to think very well before adding nationalistic accusations to a public forum. Personally I am a friend to the Tibetan People and this is nothing new to me, so do not mistake kindness for weakness. It is a stronger stance to firmly refuse antagonizing strong emotions, and find a path forward that includes justice and individual human rights, for all beings I might add.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Harvest_(film)
To them it is taboo to have their bodies altered, similar to other Christian religious groups elsewhere which don't accept blood transfusions
But anyhow, these days it has become more and more obvious for the Falun Gong members that they are inside a big cult [1]
[1] https://ben-d-hurley.medium.com/information-is-beginning-to-...
I don't know if you can say where it goes exactly, but just bear in mind that there is at a billion dollars' worth of anti-China stuff sloshing about somewhere in "the media" that was funded directly, and purposefully, from Congress, and who knows how much from less direct sources.
If this is sloppy anti-China propaganda as asserted, it should be easy to dismiss. Does it make sense that everyone involved in the review process of the American Journal of Transplantation all share the same political beliefs?
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ajt.16969 [2] https://www.eacts.org/faculty/jacob-lavee/
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/18/1073846967/arkansas-inmates-i...
> Four inmates at an Arkansas jail have filed a federal lawsuit after they say medical staff gave them the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin to treat COVID-19 without telling them what it was. The inmates said they were told the medicines they were taking were "vitamins," "antibiotics" or "steroids."
The document:
At the end, when digging a little bit few years ago, it turned out that this "China Tribunal" was itself not a "real group", but a spin off of ETAC[2], which is a small group that is against "End Transplant Abuse in China", itself stacked with Falun Gong practitioners, so ETAC reached out to doctors, lawyers, whom would go and oppose organ harvesting in China and added them as members of the "Tribunal"[A1], then financed/rented the halls which the "China Tribunal" would use to do their decree to oppose the Chinese organ harvesting of Chinese death row inmates, but, most of their pieces are not per-se dedicated to oppose the Chinese organ harvest methods in general, but focused on shedding light of Falun Gong's victims [3]
Then to get the word out of their Tribunal, they invited Reuters Foundation, not Reuters, the NGO politically active foundation of the same name, and then Reuters proper, published a Reuters Foundation article on their website [4]
Now days, we have new Uyghur groups, which will be doing similar schemes such as declaring these tribunals, these Uyghur groups themselves, being funded by the National Endowment For Democracy [5][6]
[1] https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ChinaTr...
[2] https://chinatribunal.com/about-etac/
[3] https://endtransplantabuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Bl...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-china-rights-idUS...
[5] https://endtransplantabuse.org/?s=Tribunal
[6] https://www.ned.org/wp-content/themes/ned/search/grant-searc...
[A1] Note that several of the people involved with this China Tribunal, were themselves involved on the older "Iran Tribunal" dedicated to highlight the crimes of the People's Republic of Iran, that tribunal itself also had several of their members financially benefiting from US National Endowment for Democracy grants and payments, and these same people are highly regarded members of this new "China Tribunal" [7]
Mind you, that this post is not to deny the situation of China harvesting the organs of death row inmates, but rather to shed light on just how murky the funding of all these groups is, and how incestuous they are on the people orchestrating them, note that EndTransplantAbuseInChina (ETAC) doesnt have a "who funds us" page