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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

It crossed my mind, because it is strongly suspected that China does that to low-level political prisoners and members of despised minority groups.

2018: https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5250

2019: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/17/china-is-harve...

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It's confirmed that, if you're executed by the state for treason there, you become an organ donor as part of that deal. Waste not and all that.

The speculative part is where people start making organs the main point of the whole thing, it has a great ick factor if you're doing nationalist flamewars.

“Deal” implies consent. But it’s also a dangerous financial incentive. Oh innocent? Humm, I can make 10k from his organs if that evidence gets lost.

Of course nobody consents to being executed.

There are numbers on how many people get executed there: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_China#...

It seems unlikely that the person making prosecution and judgment decisions is also in a position to personally acquire and sell the person's organs but hey what do I know.

There is no speculation needed - the perverse incentives are a matter of fact. Whether it has happened yet or not is academic. Sure, by some miracle the government resists them for now, but that panglossian optimistic view still leaves it a ticking timebomb.

I recall reading report of exactly this at least 25 years ago, with grainy images of soon-to-be-executed folks standing in the row on some field, blindfolded, hands behind the back. Families got receipt for the bullets. And just on the side stood ambulances ready to take whatever was good and sell it to whomever would pay enough.

I don't think they stopped, just got smarter about it, if done organized en masse the amount of money is insane for people who don't earn so in their entire lives. Nobody sane will brag how they got new kidney from shady chinese guys when this was well known.

Just to clarify, in this scenario where the state is harvesting organs for transplantation (a complicated medical procedure), you are saying that the methodology employed was to do it en-masse outdoors with guns (with cameras present), as opposed to individually in a hospital?

No, it's constantly accused of such by the Falun Gong (a religious cult that officially believes that David Copperfield is a real wizard), and a lot of western governments looking for something to attack China with amplify the accusation without any evidence. A good way to do that is to cite the conclusions of an "independent tribunal" that no one had heard of, whose only concerns are spreading the consensus about the evils of China and the Chinese, and who are mysteriously funded.

Western governments attack enemy regimes by funding religious cults (with associated militias) like MEK and Falun Gong (which are allowed to have multiple OTA TV channels while the Chinese government are banned from most of the internet.) They also fund fundamentalist Islam in northern Africa, and neo-Nazis in central Asia and eastern Europe.

It's important to dismiss "strong suspicions" from semi-anonymous sources and ask for actual evidence, circumstantial or not. Propaganda is supposed to be what we dislike about China. We shouldn't help spread innuendo if that's actually a value we have.

> It's important to dismiss "strong suspicions" from semi-anonymous sources and ask for actual evidence, circumstantial or not

I see plenty of evidence, though no "smoking gun," mentioned on Wiki, including "transcripts of telephone interviews in which hospitals told prospective transplant recipients that they could obtain Falun Gong organs" [1].

> A good way to do that is to cite the conclusions of an "independent tribunal" that no one had heard of, whose only concerns are spreading the consensus about the evils of China and the Chinese, and who are mysteriously funded.

This seems inaccurate considering the statements from from Amnesty International, the U.N. Human Rights Council, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilgour%E2%80%93Matas_report#R...

Yeah, it also crossed my mind.

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