
The Nightmare of Human Organ Harvesting in China - ycombonator
https://outline.com/H63avJ
======
pcurve
I actually know someone who got one done in 2006. From what I remember, it was
one of those don't ask don't tell deal. However it was understood that the
organ came from executed prisoner. It saved her life. I don't know anything
about what goes into ensuring donor's organ is a reasonable match, but I'm not
too sure if the waiting period for her was that long. Anyway I do remember it
became much more difficult for foreigner to get transplant shortly afterwards
but this article seems to indicate the trend is reversing with institional
practice.

~~~
Teever
I always wondered why Steve Jobs waited around so long for his liver
transplant instead of just getting one from China.

And before you say morals don't forget he gamed the waiting list in the US to
get the too-late liver and he had no qualms seeing slave labour build his
companies products.

~~~
dpark
Steve Jobs didn’t need a Chinese organ. He just needed to decide he was ready
to get the transplant instead of trying to cure his cancer with a special
diet. Once he realized he wasn’t curing himself with his diet, he got the
transplant quickly because, as you noted, he gamed the system.

~~~
Teever
But once he was on the transplant list he still had to wait and he still gamed
it to shorten that wait.

Which makes me wonder why he didn't just get a Chinese liver at that point.

~~~
dpark
Possibly because he didn't want someone killed for his liver. Also it's not
clear how long Jobs actually waited. In addition to the geographic system
gaming, there was some shady stuff with the doctor who gave Jobs the
transplant.

[http://fortune.com/2013/12/08/the-surgeon-who-gave-steve-
job...](http://fortune.com/2013/12/08/the-surgeon-who-gave-steve-jobs-a-new-
liver-and-two-more-years-faces-new-questions/)

------
ycombonator
_Where are the organs coming from? China claims it has the “largest voluntary
organ donation system in Asia” and stopped using prisoners in 2015. But the
country has no tradition of voluntary organ donation._

~~~
reaperducer
_stopped using prisoners in 2015_

"Congratulations, Prisoner #289,349 — you've been paroled. You're no longer a
prisoner!"

"You mean I'm free to go?"

"Well, most of you is. Step this way..."

------
aetherspawn
Interesting; I had only heard the other day from a bizarre discussion with a
Chinese friend who has a family member in government back in China that the
price of an organ can increase if the donor is from a clean Christain
denomination, because it is feasible that the organs are better kept (ie not
an alcoholic, not a drug taker, not a smoker etc) before their donor was
deceased.

Supposedly there is a market for the healthiest organs to the highest bidder.
I guess they hit the jackpot!

------
Leary
There are 36,000 organ transplants performed in the US every year, does anyone
know how many occur in China?

~~~
disillusioned
The article touches on this momentarily:

>In 2010 China’s official number of voluntary donors was 34. In 2018 China
still had only about 6,000 official organ donors, who are said to donate more
than 18,000 organs. Yet the “Bloody Harvest” researchers find that figure is
“easily surpassed by just a few hospitals.” Tianjin First Center alone
performs more than 6,000 transplants a year, and the report’s authors
“verified and confirmed 712 hospitals which carry out liver and kidney
transplants.” Dr. Huang claims China will perform the most transplants in the
world by 2020—more than America’s 40,000 a year.

------
yodon
I confess I fail to see how outline.com (which is currently where this link
leads) is anything but a massive content piracy machine masquerading as some
kind of tech startup.

I find it incredibly hard to believe HN would allow submissions of warez sites
and links to cracked app downloads, and fail to see the difference between
that and the way outline is used here. I get that it's convenient to have free
access to paywalled content, just like it's convenient to have free access to
tons of cracked apps.

~~~
door5
Piracy actually rules

~~~
fouric
This comment adds absolutely nothing of value to the conversation whatsoever.

~~~
door5
Sure it does. The OP assumed that piracy was bad and compared outline.com to
piracy to attempt to argue it is bad. Their premise is false, because actually
piracy rules and is good.

------
door5
>Mr. Rogers is East Asia Team Leader at the human-rights organization CSW,
deputy chairman of the U.K. Conservative Party’s Human Rights Commission

Hm, I wonder what the political motives of the author are.

~~~
_bxg1
Unless you're suggesting he's part of a grand conspiracy to fabricate this
data, I find his politics extremely irrelevant.

~~~
coldtea
Why wouldn't he be "part of a grand conspiracy to fabricate this data"? It's
called promoting their country's national interests, and it's part of the job
description for such roles.

Conspiracy doesn't have to include loonies, aliens, and illuminati. Nation
states do conspiracies perfectly well, they just call them "foreign policy",
and include presenting the data as they like, painting the pictures to fit the
politics of the day, having cosy relations with journalists, getting selective
people on the other side (e.g. opposition leaders) to give the kind of
statements they like, and so on.

~~~
_bxg1
Seriously?

"In 2006 Chinese-speaking researchers posed as organ buyers and directly asked
if organs from Falun Gong practitioners could be arranged for transplant.
Hospitals throughout China confirmed they had such organs available, no
problem.

The stories are brutal. Dr. Enver Tohti, a former surgeon from Xinjiang,
testified in the British, Irish and European parliaments to removing organs
from a prisoner forcibly in 1995. “We had been told to wait behind a hill, and
come into the field as soon as we’d hear the gunshot,” he recalled. “A moment
later there were gunshots. Not one, but many. We rushed into the field. An
armed police officer approached us and told me where to go. He led us closer,
then pointed to a body, saying, ‘This is the one.’ By then our chief surgeon
appeared from nowhere and told me to remove the liver and two kidneys.”
According to Dr. Tohti, the man’s wound was not necessarily fatal. But Dr.
Tohti went ahead and removed the liver and kidneys while the man’s heart was
still beating.

Experts around the world have testified to China’s crimes. Israel, Taiwan and
Spain have banned “organ tourism” to China. United Nations rapporteurs have
called China to account for the sources of their organs but received no
response."

This isn't just some rogue pundit, this is a major geopolitical topic.

I swear, parts of HackerNews recently have been reading more like InfoWars.

~~~
coldtea
Well, it can be totally true, and it possibly is. Chinese government did kill
and torture several million people during the "Cultural Revolution", so
there's that.

But it's not true because some organization or high ranking official couldn't
possibly be lying or presenting a fine-tuned picture.

Whole trillion dollar wars were supported on false testimony and lies or
exaggerations.

E.g. it could just be part of the "China is suppressing Falun Gong" (including
executing prisoners they consider leaders etc, and then using their organs) as
opposed to "Chinese are so evil that they routinely kill Falun Gong members
just to get their organs" (which I find harder to fathom).

I'm skeptical because a lot of times very official testimonies are very
official BS (WMDs, "collision", Nayirah testimony, Iran-Contra, and lotsa
others), so bullshitting the population and spinning the media is not some
unique habit of undemocratic countries.

E.g. one basic pillar of this China-organ story is the so-called "Kilgour-
Matas" report. Matas was on the board of the International Centre for Human
Rights & Democratic Development, which is not unknown to controversy itself
(basically funding radical organizations and R&D to covertly promote foreign
interests out of line with its stated purpose) and was closed down later (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Centre_for_Human...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Centre_for_Human_Rights_and_Democratic_Development#Controversy)
).

~~~
_bxg1
Fear is the death of reason.

By all means investigate the sources if you wish, but don't peddle conspiracy
theories without any actual evidence.

~~~
coldtea
In politics there's seldom evidence available to average Joes.

They release/open some files after decades (not even everything) and you find
out that they were lying through their teeth.

If people are to make any difference now, not in several decades, they should
doubt most things said officially said, especially for matters concerning
trading competitors, or the "enemy du jour" \-- evidence or not, they should
take things with a grain of salt.

(I'm also from a much smaller country. In countries where politics directly
affect you, history is lived and wars are fought directly -- not 10.000 miles
away --, and everybody knows everybody, being cynical of official
announcements -- of yours and other governments --, and recognizing duplicity
and private interests at play, is a survival skill.

In larger countries like the USA, you can live your life oblivious of politics
and major historical events, except on a much larger and slower scale. Heck,
your country can even be at war decade after decade, and it will only affect a
tiny minority of poor folk that go a draft, 99% of the people will live
business as usual.

But I digress -- and of course that's not proof that I'm right on this, just
my 0.02 in why some can better recognize that "political and private interest
conspiracies" are everyday realities, and not the stuff of conspiracy nuts who
believe in illuminati. Try telling that to Italians, for example, who have
suffered politicians in bed with the Mafia for half a century, had whole
establishment programs to meddle with elections (and prevent parties with 20%+
of the popular vote to ever reach power), and even "enjoyed" government backed
extremist organizations killing their own citizens -- and all those verified
by courts, albeit much much later).

