Didn’t see a thread on this, so figured I’d start one. I was watching this video on China Uncensored which talks about the report that’s recently come out concerning the purported illegal organ harvesting being done in China to various prisoners. Since I doubt anyone will watch the video, I did a search and CNN has this report on the subject:
Just want to take a step back at that point…60-100k organ transplants per year?..!! :eek:
At any rate, you can read the whole CNN article, or here is the link to the actual report (well, it’s to the home page for it). According to Chris on the China Uncensored channel it’s pretty well cited, but I admit I haven’t read through it or even skimmed the report…it’s over 600 pages long. The story doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of press right now…not surprising as people seem to ignore this sort of thing when it happens in China…but, according to the video there seems to be some political pressure starting to get applied. I figured that, since the US recently has gone the extra mile against North Korea by sanctioning not only lil Kimmy v2.3 but also NK state officials AND organizations, that I’d ask, for debate, whether the US should do something similar to China? Basically, for debate…what should we do? Anything? Nothing? What should the EU do? Same? Does this even change your view on China, or still think it’s just the same thing with some cultural quirks (such as trumping up charges, executing people then cutting them up for their organs)?
Or, to cover all the bases, do you think this is all a bunch of horseshit? That when the CCP says it only does 10k organ transplants a year we can take that to the bank?
To the best of your knowledge, are there any implications that any of the 30k organs transplanted in the US…or those transplanted in the EU for that matter…are obtained illegally from prisoners?
Why do you suppose that, if it’s all on the up and up, the CCP would go on record, multiple times, saying that the actual number was around 10k…an order of magnitude difference? They want to downplay how good their medical establishment is, perhaps? Being modest as to their accomplishments? :dubious:
Uh, no? I don’t understand what that supposition has to do with your OP. I was just pointing out that if the US population supports/requires on the order of 30k organ transplants annually, it’s not unreasonable that the Chinese population would support/require on the order of three times as many.
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Why do you suppose that, if it’s all on the up and up
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Why are we assuming it’s all on the up and up? Why don’t we just provisionally go with the simplest explanation, namely that the population of China needs several tens of thousands of organ transplants per year (as we would expect by analogy with the US statistics), and most of those are supplied by organ harvesting from prisoners?
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Why do you suppose that […] the CCP would go on record, multiple times, saying that the actual number was around 10k…an order of magnitude difference?
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Uh, maybe they’re lying about the numbers so as not to admit to the organ harvesting from prisoners? Is this a trick question? I can’t figure out why you seem to think this inconsistency is so incomprehensible.
Why compare it to the US’s rate then? I guess we are both since I can’t see your point. Yes, I’d say that they get the additional 90k organs ‘illegally’…which is to say, they can do whatever they want, obviously, since they are in charge, but they don’t want to admit to the world how they are getting them, since that would make them look bad…by their own official records they collect, above boards, around 10k organs a year. Quite a gap there. This isn’t exactly news, since a lot of folks have been speculating about this for a long time. But this report seems to put all of the info together and is a big smoking gun.
So, that gets back to the actual questions in the OP. What should ‘we’ do? Should ‘we’ do anything, or is this basically just an internal Chinese thing and we should mind our own collective business? The reason we apparently decided to impose directed sanctions on North Korea was for human rights abuses…should we do something similar to China? We, after all, kind of know who is responsible for a lot of this, and who has turned a blind eye towards it at the least. Does this change your opinion on the CCP? On China?
We shoulda got a mediator. Here’s what I was thinking:
You seemed to be surprised and/or incredulous at the possibility that China might be performing 60-100k organ transplants annually.
I noticed that the US performs 30k organ transplants annually and has about one-fourth of China’s population, so the 60-100k number for China seemed reasonable.
I didn’t mean to imply anything about the presumed legality or illegality of such transplants, just that it seems reasonable that the population of China would need about 60-100k of them every year.
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This isn’t exactly news, since a lot of folks have been speculating about this for a long time. But this report seems to put all of the info together and is a big smoking gun.
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So, that gets back to the actual questions in the OP. What should ‘we’ do?
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What can ‘we’ do? I definitely will not be accepting an organ transplant in China, but that was never going to be a very likely scenario anyway, and my principled rejection isn’t going to make much of a dent in that 60-100k.
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What cultural attitude? Educate me.
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A lot of Chinese have a cultural aversion to post death organ harvesting. It’s why the numbers look so odd from their perspective…even the 10k ‘official’ numbers seem out of line with that attitude, let along 100k
Well, if the CCP says it’s only 2500-5000…
From your article if you read the next line:
The number of Falun Gong practitioners alone fare exceeds that…though, of course in many instances the person just disappears, so I suppose they could be at re-education camps or holiday resorts perhaps.
China sentences people to death and executes them for what they believe to be legitimate reasons. As part of this process, they harvest the organs of the condemned, organs that would go to waste if left within the bodies of the condemned.
China sentences people to death and executes them for the purpose of harvesting more organs.
Does the OP have issues with the first scenario? Would that change if the crimes which were eligible for execution became more restricted?
It would seem to me that if the idea of capital punishment is acceptable (it is not, to me personally), then harvesting the organs of the condemned is logical and also acceptable.
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Does the OP have issues with the first scenario? Would that change if the crimes which were eligible for execution became more restricted?
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Yes, I have a problem with the first scenario, knowing who a lot of the people are who the CCP is arresting and executing.
It wouldn’t really change, even if I believed the CCP that they were only executing those who (they believed) really, really ‘deserved’ it. For one, I’m opposed to capital punishment, but the main reason is that this is a slippery slope. China is rife with corruption that it’s hard to even explain to people who don’t follow along with the country. In such a system and with the incentive that the organ trade within China generates it would be pretty unrealistic to think that the Chinese would ‘only’ execute the official 2500-5000 per year and ‘only’ harvest those organs (or the ones of those healthy enough to harvest).
It’s only logically acceptable if you think that such a system is going to be controlled, with some sort of oversight and that the instances of corruption or abuse have been mitigated to the fullest extent (I’m opposed to capital punishment, as I said, but even if you were all for it there would be serious concerns even in the US or EU for something like this, when the demand for organs for transplant are so high).
In fairness, one execution could lead to many transplants. Each human has two kidneys, two lungs, one heart, the liver can be split among many people, two corneas, lots of skin.
Plus consider the donations that are made legitimately by people dying in car crashes or whatever.
I’m not saying that China is honest about their number of executions or that they aren’t harvesting organs from political prisoners, just that if they are using prisoner executions for organ transplants, it’s not surprising to have a much smaller number of donors to recipients.
Not only logical, but even a socially condoned way of eliminating habitual violators. The only problem is that once you start exploiting this market of new organs, the demand will eventually rise, and some way will need to be found to increase the pool of donors, leading to the scenario posited in Larry Niven’s The Jigsaw Man.
Yes, but the notion that we’ll start dis-assembling prisoners for their organs fails because most people who die couldn’t be saved by an organ transplant. Sure, we’re behind on organs, and there really are some people who die who could be saved if only there was an organ available for them. But the supply needed to fix that problem is not great. We don’t need millions of organs every year. We just need a slightly more logical system of organ “donation”. Like, maybe if you donate a kidney you could be compensated for a couple of weeks of missed work because you’re recovering from donating a kidney?
We currently have a bunch of very silly rules about organ donation that are preventing people from getting life-saving transplants. The good news about that is that, just like hitting yourself in the face with a hammer, it will feel so good when we stop.
Just a drive by update video on this, though it doesn’t seem that many are interested. Basically the video is a round table discussion about what’s happening and an update on the numbers…the biggest thing I saw was something that’s pretty unsurprising, which is that the 10k official number from the CCP is off by at least an order of magnitude. Not going to be a surprise to anyone following along. They get into the corruption angle too, which I sense a lot of people in this thread were handwaving with the objection that since the US does capital punishment it’s all really the same.
Anyway, just wanted to post an update since I saw it pop up as a new video on one of the channels I follow.
I’m not feeling like it’s reasonable to integrate market forces into a discussion of illness. Whether there are 10 hearts available at $1m a pop, or 1000 hearts available, each at $10, I still don’t need a new heart nor feel like having my chest cut open just for the sake of seeing how much my body does or does not try to reject a different heart. Demand doesn’t grow with availability, when it comes to invasive, life-threatening surgery.
The reference to organ harvesting in Niven’s “Known Space” was predicated upon the desire for life extension and the availability of effective immunosuppressive drugs, allowing people to extend their lives indefinitely provided a sufficient inventory of organs, which led to even trivial offenses being considered capital crimes. This is not to suggest that this is a realistic model of either biology (aging is more than individual organs failing) or future punitive measures, but nonetheless turning organs harvested from felons into a commodity tends to incentivize the criminalization of behaviors to increase availability of said commodity just as asset forfeiture has increased aggressive enforcement of drug prohibition.
I don’t think this is going to be a practical issue in the long term because within twenty or thirty years we’re likely going to have the ability to grow most organs in vito or in vivo using genetically altered animals, but nonetheless the idea of attaching any medical or political appeal to executing people is just as morally dubious as using condemned people for invasive or harmful medical experimentation. This is not a practice we want to rationalize as good or necessary.
Uh, no? I don’t understand what that supposition has to do with your OP. I was just pointing out that if the US population supports/requires on the order of 30k organ transplants annually, it’s not unreasonable that the Chinese population would support/require on the order of three times as many.
Here’s what I was thinking: