I know of one person (my friend's mom) who literally got this procedure done: she needed a new kidney, and they waited till a death row convict came along who was a match. When she was matched, she got a phone call to come over to that particular city quickly, and she went there, and came back a few days later with a brand new pair of kidneys. It was almost like when you give your car in for repair, and when it's ready they call you.
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].
> because, like private "for profit" prisons, it incentivises bad things.
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. […]
Not just a short, Niven wrote numerous books on the subject.
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.
True. I have a copy of "A Gift From Earth" here, in the same volume as the "Tales of Known Space" short stories which includes the one mentioned above, and "World of Ptavvs".
If you read the linked Al Jazeera article, it has more information:
> 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.
I don’t know anything about Rose Pak but your rumor post feels so vile like political propaganda. Your links have no substantiation whatsoever and you’re comfortable with that?
Her connections to mainland China are well documented. From Wikipedia:
“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.
I'm not disputing anything said, but just a heads up since I also heard about the Fulan Gong organ harvesting thing years before I heard any thing else about what Fulan Gong even is: read up on it. It has its own weird nest of conspiracy around it.
> I'm not disputing anything said, but just a heads up since I also heard about the Fulan Gong organ harvesting thing years before I heard any thing else about what Fulan Gong even is: read up on it. It has its own weird nest of conspiracy around it.
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.
The most interesting thing about Falun Gong is that their leaders believe that Trump was sent by heaven to destroy the communist party, as reported by the LA Times.
How do you travel to another country, and come back with new kidneys specially when you are already of old age and so not so high on a donation waiting list?
I know other western countries were people in their 60ies regularly receive transplants.
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.
China has one of the largest organ transplant programs in the world and there's a very well documented practice of well connected CCP members getting preference.
No. But China had very recently only 31 ( yes 31 ) persons officially registered as organ donor. So how do you travel to another country, and come back with new organs that fast? How do you jump the queue? In the West you are even refused a heart transplant if you are not vaccinated for Covid...
Also very much out of left field. If this is as common as claimed, only one example would've been needed (and more examples could've been sourced with less controversial contexts). The second example:
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.
The biggest mistake western democracies have made is to trade with dictatorships. Enriching them has not encouraged them to become progressive, it has only made them more powerful. We have sown the seeds of our own destruction through our complicity.
Historians would point toward a pressure toward democratization of states that occurs as the middle class gains more power.
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.
>Historians would point toward a pressure toward democratization of states that occurs as the middle class gains more power.
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/
> China has created a bourgeoisie class which is also the effective monarchy
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.
The American military needs Boeing (and Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, etc.) to supply parts for their jet fighters, missiles, etc.; enough so that if these companies were owned by selfish individuals rather than profit-driven corporations; and those selfish individuals pressed the issue of "maybe not making any more missiles for the military" at just the right time, then they'd not only not be charged with treason, but instead would get whatever they wanted, up-to-and-including having laws rewritten to serve them.
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.
"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"
Just need to become a donor and provide campaign contributions. You get semi-sovereign autonomous power pretty soon.
> I think it much more convincing that social values determine the direction in which a country allows government to rule them.
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.
Notably, this model was repeated in East-Asian countries like South Korea and Taiwan. They managed to transition away from authoritarian rule and democratize without any excess of social tensions. More recently, Central-Eastern Europe has also been broadly successful following the fall of Soviet rule. People love to talk about democracy as if it's somehow in decline as of late, but this couldn't be more wrong.
A dictatorship has the need to define an enemy or threat so that people are fine to compromise on self-determination. It can be another culture or corruption or anything most people will align themselves against.
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.
Sure, it worked in Central-Eastern Europe during the early 2000s.
"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.
I'm not sure I would qualify any post-Soviet Eastern European country (Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, ...) as a boradly successful. Typically, they are highly corrupted, wealth amass in a tiny sliver of the population, they are hemorrageing their youth and their brains, their political spectrums can be resumed as ‶corrupted right-wing guy sucking on the EU tits″ and ‶corrupted even more far-right guy sucking on Russia/China tits″, rights of women are openly contested and dimnished, and they are on the slippery slope to the actually worrying part of the far-right spectrum.
> Typically, they are highly corrupted, wealth amass in a tiny sliver of the population, they are hemorrageing their youth and their brains
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?
> These things have long been super typical of growing middle-income countries on their way to First-World country status
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.
Look, I'm Polish, I'm critical of the current Polish government for a variety of reasons (including its stance on European Union), but your description of what Poland is today is just outrageous.
> 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.
> Historians would point toward a pressure toward democratization of states that occurs as the middle class gains more power.
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.
While true for England, things went a little differently in France with the French Revolution. I'm not sure if it started as you say, but it ended not much differently than a violent overthrow of the ruling class in other countries.
To be clear, the French Revolution is exactly in line with the example, and part of the definition of it; bloody revolutions are often how the middle class takes power to enact democracy.
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.
This is historically accurate, sure, but from what I have seen the current ruling class in the West has used this as a cheap excuse at best. It certainly seems to me that they have simply been selling our cultural and technological heritage away to line their pockets. The fact that a lot of these people would prefer a society run the way China is run also helped in getting them to support China too.
Right, they should follow the nice democracies like the US which gives a death row convict the option to choose between firing squad and electrocution [1].
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.
Even China official admitted that the practice is unethical, maybe you are too eager to shill for them?
> 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]
If the western world won't trade with dictatorships, where would all the raw resources that make western lifestyles possible are going to come from?
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.
So, you're suggesting that we should eat higher costs for everything, lower wages, harder and more dangerous work, and maybe throw in Beijing air quality as a bonus.
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.
> I’m old enough to remember life before PRC manufacturing, and it was just fine.
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 think we’d be way better off if our manufacturing jobs had stayed on our turf. Yes, things might be more expensive, but we’d also have many more people being paid good wages, we would have reduced GINI inequality issues, we would have better supply-line security, we well might have more workers unions, and we would be more incentivized to reduce our pollution.
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.
You need to re-read the stats on Trump voters. They are not all unemployed, uneducated, steel-mill hicks. Not by a looong shot. Your use of stereotypes is a poor strategy.
Holy batman strawman. Elections are hinged by a tiny % of swing voters. These were the 80k or so voters in Swing states. I never said anything about the rest of the voter base.
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.
Growth would have been slower sure, but we were doing fine before and we'd have done fine without them, but they would still have rotted and by now may well have been forced to reform through economic failure.
> Growth would have been slower sure, but we were doing fine before and we'd have done fine without them, but they would still have rotted and by now may well have been forced to reform through economic failure.
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.
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.
Lots of plastic junk comes out of China, but the good stuff does too. I checked where a newly arrived superconducting magnet was made when purchased from a German vendor - China.
Everyone always goes straight to outsourced manual labor as a solution. It's a bad solution. If we weren't a nation run by corrupt middle managers trying to inflate their own salaries and sense of purpose we'd have stuck with the tried and true method of innovating on the manufacturing process itself making it more automated and less dependent on human labor. Human labor is always slow, prone to mistakes, and expensive. It's the favorite tool of the incompetent. If you think that's wrong then ask yourself which is better, harvesting a field with 100 workers with hand tools or with 1 farmer and a tractor?
China also doesn't share our value of craftsmanship. By letting them own a portion of our supply chain, they own a lot more than just the manual labor. They put us in situations where measuring temperature means buying an antique mercury thermometer, buying a $400 nist certified alcohol one, or getting Chinese made garbage that is not accurate within 2°.
They could make quality long last products. But in general both as individuals and as society in general from companies to government value cost cutting and short term profit most. So ofc what gets made and sold is the cheapest possible product that is still passable at time of sale.
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.
Mexico would ultimately benefit from more investment. Throw in the trillions the US has wasted on nation building elsewhere and the Americas could have been built into having much stronger public institutions. It's not like Western Europe doesn't leverage its eastern neighbors and North Africa for cheaper labor.
Exactly. My point here is that a lot of the Anti-China posters want to disregard and shed American’s responsibility. It’s just China that’s evil. Suddenly now that they’re rich and is/was on trajectory to surpass the United States. Where was the unified stance against China for the half century prior? The West and its consumers used China, but are now mad that the regime has always had its own agenda.
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.
We still have the same business incentives. Why wouldn't any CEO of a publicly traded company reduce resource costs as much as possible? If he would not do that, the boards would install someone who does. As an employee for a restricted time, it is optimizing your numbers and economic success until your successor takes over.
Without the exploitation of cheap labor and China work practices, we would have been motivated to automate the manufacturing process and your iPhone would cost 100 dollars.
I don't think that a nation that topples local governments to install dictator puppets [1] is so concerned about making countries more progressive. The idea that we're trading with China to make them more democratic was propaganda to sell a policy that would make the Soviets weaker and certain elites richer. This study sponsored by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is also propaganda.
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.
There was never any goal to make them progressive. The goal was always enrichment of the elites as CIAs numerous expeditions in south America and iran have proven. The only goal is alignment with NATO.
The goal of "promotion of democracy" is a simple propaganda lie that doesn't stand up to even the most cursory examination.
Strategies that isolate hostile or naturally adversarial countries don't seem to work either. Just look at North Korea. Arguably, the North Korea situation has resulted in much worse net violence and human suffering per capita than, say, the West's fraught trade entanglement with China.
> 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.
Bad example because the only reason the communist dictatorship in North Korea still exists is that they are propped up by China, and the only reason Chinese dictatorship exists is because they are propped up by the West.
I think execution is absolutely wrong and never morally justifiable. However I don’t see why execution + organ harvesting is worse than execution alone.
It supposes that not enough organs are in circulation.
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.
The Chinese jail system is as corrupt as you can think, since many connected people would like to take advantage of their connections and noboby wants to deny them.
Where's the outrage and incentive debates when fully formed human babies are "aborted" and sent to be burned for biofuel? All done by for-profit companies all the way through. I definitely didn't see it here in HackerNews.
What the hell are you talking about? Do you even know what a 20 weeks fetus look like? And wtf, why would anyone burn some 30g thingy for biofuel? Especially that plenty of abortions are simply a heavier than usual blood flow, not a surgical operation of getting a baby out of someone, smh.
Exactly. I agree with the perverse incentives involved in harvesting their organs at all. But I see no difference between anesthetyzing someone and removing their heart, and giving them a lethal injection. The former may well be less painful. (Strongly against the death penalty in any form.)
Just as notable is that china passed laws to stop this practice in 2015 as the article noted. The same year taiwan stopped the practice of taking organs from prisoners. Yet the propaganda is rather one sided. I wonder.
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.
The person you're replying to mentioned "poor and desperate people", while you mention the same as "willing donors". Perhaps they're being taken advantage of: they could be in a very bad socio-economic situation through no fault of their own, have no other means to keep themselves fed, or be misled about the potential consequences?
They said, "I'm against all organ "donations". If it is your time to die, it's your time to die."
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.
A lot of people are talking about “perverse incentives.” I guess they mean “people being sentenced to death simply so their organs can be harvested.”
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.
> 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.
Isn’t this inline with their values, collective above individual rights? Is it genuinely bad or is using the organs of someone you were about to execute and give someone else life a good thing?
They would probably say, on average, that it works out for the best overall for society? I disagree with them but they have a very different way of looking at things from me. I prefer to think about where others are coming from rather than just condemn them.
That's not what we are discussing, we are discussing harvesting organs from death row inmates. I'm against overall due to it being, as you say, the wrong incentives.
I suspect that Chinese law enforcement agencies are offering death row inmates conducive "incentives" and "arguments" to strengthen their good will to cooperate.
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.
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
But don’t you think for a second that may incentivise raising the number of executions to meet the high demand of organs? And having that justice in China is something that is not at all transparent it may as well turn any dissident into supply for organ banks. I find this extremely cynical and very hard to accept no matter how you look at it.
China's death row is shrouded in secrecy. It keeps its figures on executions secret, but Amnesty International estimates that it killed thousands of prisoners from 2016 to 2020. The US government, conversely, killed 13 prisoners during that time period following a 17-year hiatus that former President Donald Trump ended.
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.
So China infringes on human rights, in other news "water is wet". Not really newsworthy. I would be shocked if it was Iceland or Norway doing that.
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.
What is he supposed to write instead? This is not news. There's new studies confirming it, but we've known for decades China is ruled by a totalitarian regime that treats human life as disposable, and we've heard rumors of this for decades, and of much, much worse.
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.
"They envy it. They want it. They want us to be less free and more like that."
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.
It is nearly impossible to get an honest current thought from a Chinese citizen about that, many are comfortable, many are afraid that they will be reported for expressing any opinion. There is a worldwide network of snitches of mostly other Chinese citizens that will harm their interests and family in China. Just because you aren't part of it by not being Chinese (citizen) doesn't mean that a non-party line message won't harm them.
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.
You don’t really have to get their individual thoughts. At the end of the day look at their satisfaction levels. Look at the number of Chinese exchange students returning home vs staying abroad. And look at the economy. If it is doing well, chances are most people will be Ok with their government.
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.
> Look at the number of Chinese exchange students returning home vs staying abroad.
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.
I think a good litmus test for if something is a good argument is to see if it is something possible to disprove by proving the inverse.
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.
I (mostly) agree with you factually, but I really think it's almost always detrimental to use the old line "this isn't newsworthy" and its other forms, e.g. "why are you surprised", as they imply fallacious equivalencies. "Newsworthy" is not equivalent to "secret", and "surprise" is not equivalent to "offense/outrage". It's bad to imply that news outlets shouldn't report on these things, or that people shouldn't be emotional about them, or have strong opinions about them.
At the same time I'm not wearing any clothes made in North Korea or Venezuela, same as pretty much everyone. How exactly is it making a difference on the lives of those people living under those regimes?
The nice thing about the Ukrainian war is that it's going to show how overrated economic boycott is in practice.
> At the same time I'm not wearing any clothes made in North Korea or Venezuela, same as pretty much everyone.
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.
What makes you think the Chinese people don’t support their government? People will support their government if they can deliver the basic needs like economic growth and prosperity. At least on that front most people agree China has had some of that over the last 20 years. It’s safe to assume if that keeps up Chinese citizens can be pretty complacent.
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.
Nothing makes me believe they don't support the government. Just like nothing makes me believe they could enact any change if they wanted, which is what the parent implied.
Well basic math, there's more than a billion of them. How do you think the Communist party displaced the old regime? If the people were to march on Beijing the government would cease to exist within one day, which is of course why it actually tries really hard to keep the people happy.
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.
I'm not familiar with the details of the Communist party, but today's China is autocratic. It's a mistake to take the democratic principle of "people can enact change" and take it to an autocratic government (and outright contradiction when using the adjective "totalitarian").
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.
What is important to understand is that both democratic and autocratic governments depend on legitimacy. No the Chinese military or police would not stand any chance against the true popular will of the Chinese, not for a second. That is why the Chinese government has economic growth targets and social programs and so forth. If they could rule like medieval kings they would. All modern, large states are accountable to their people, regardless of whatever form of government rules.
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.
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.
1984 was "billions of masses"? None of your examples show the majority will being crushed. Obviously a small movement on the scale of thousands cannot (and should not) overthrow a regime.
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?
1984 could have turned into billions if allowed. A billion-strong movement does not appear fully formed out of the blue.
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.
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?
Just because it is not news means we should not discuss it? I find such comments lacking any value other than stating this has been happening for a while.
It’s important to note that Chinese students abroad are generally quite wealthy. On average, the system is benefiting them and hiding all the bad stuff from them. It’s hard to know if there is a lot of unrest within China because most of the people who would have a big problem with the regime can’t travel abroad.
On that same note, its also important to not lend much/any weight to the perspective of prior immigrants from China or "greater China" that came in various prior waves. They left, they have a universally negative opinion and haven't been there for 20-30 years. Its not an accurate take on the people there, or the travellers now, as simply surviving this long is a good enough indicator of complacency and comfort.
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.
If you’re going to be killing people anyway it’s easy to start thinking that their organs shouldn’t go to waste, of course this is starting you on a slippery slope that’s better not even to start on
This is of course fallacious because waste is inherent to criminal punishment - you're literally inflicting something undesirable on someone, at a cost to yourself. Making sure that the costs of criminal punishment are shared helps keep every involved party honest. This is also an argument against things like privatized prisons and prison slavery in the U.S. If you're going to enslave prison inmates at all (and the U.S. Constitution allows this, so it does presently happen) it should be strictly to their own long-term benefit in their future capacity as free, law-abiding citizens.
At the same time you're incentivizing capital punishment and perhaps incentivizing persecution of people of a specific donor match, so then magically sooner than later enough donors become available to fill the needs of a wait list until the desired recipient has the organ(s) they need - or they may simply need a single donor and get to skip any lines, if that level of corruption actually exists in that society.
So I was about to write something flippant in opposition about it possibly being the reverse, the many serving the few (powerful), but since I felt I don't really know what I'm talking about I googled.
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.
Several western countries are already using opt out for organ donation rather than opt in, as many countries have overly long wait times and people die waiting for a liver or lungs etc
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
This is exactly the core issue of the paper, and a lot of inference is done on the side of the authors, which they correctly state and discuss. The intro + discussion is far better and much more insightful than the businessinsider article linked here.
* 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.
Unit 731 did not use any while doing vivisection. For China, looking at the practices being discussed here to ensure "high quality" organs, would the practitioners suddenly grow a conscience?
Anesthesia on brain-dead donors is the standard of care, not because the donor is suffering at that point, but because the stresses of the harvest can harm the organs. I doubt very much that the those involved in murder by organ theft would lower the quality of the organs just to make their victims suffer more.
More Victim's of Communism funded drama, "during executions" is a funny way of saying "after execution" just because they didn't verify brain death. PRC didn't establish formal transplant system until recently - using organs from executed was most viable interim solution. And largely insufficient in terms of supply/demand. It was still hard AF to get execution organ until ban, much easier to pay some rural villagers for spare kidney or buy from illegal harvesters murdering innocents in ASEAN.
there is a lenghty (and horrible) documentary on this focusing on the persecution by authorities of a non-violent movement of .. whatever it is called.. across China. The documentary came out in the USA right around the time that major trade policies were changed under Biden, which seemed not-coincidental. Once the finger pointing starts in this thread, lets remind ourselves that peace is possible, starting now.
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.
Yeah, the Falun Gong own several media outlets, so they have become well known as a group and have strong social media influences, they themselves support or create minor spinoff groups such as "China Tribunal" in order to get plausible deniablility for the claims these other groups make
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]
this phrase exactly, is sometimes called a "dog whistle" .. the intention is to incite violence against those who "do not deserve peace".. It is important to see this for what it is, and what it leads to, IMO.
There’s an unsettling lack of skepticism from the commenters here. If you do the most surface level digging on this, you will find that the author of the study is a shill for anti-China propaganda, usually with a guise of anti-communism. Writing like this is all produced through Washington thinktanks and then pushed to media outlets en masse. Given the source of money and political bent of this material, it’s hard for me to earnestly believe it.
Also remember that billions of dollars have been explicitly assigned by US legislation in the last couple of years for what is, basically, propaganda: the 2021 Strategic Competition Act gives $300 million per year for 4 years, the COMPETES act gives another $500 million.
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.
Study[1] has two authors, second of which is well-qualified[2] to discuss procedures and ethics regarding organ donation. Funding information is listed right after the publication date. It's not hidden information that requires any digging.
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?
> 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."
Oh yeah, the China Tribunal, I dont know if many people ever read the document that was published[1], but it has got several key points, which at the time I didnt quite understand why they were worded the way they were, such as repeating the "holiness" of the people's bodies, or phrases such as "the physical integrity of their beings", which, are just awkward phrases
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]
[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
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...