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[content warning: gruesome violence against innocent people]
In the late nineties, China began to perform tens of thousands of organ transplants annually to rich or well-connected “transplant tourists”. China has very little organ-donation system to speak of, so where are the organs coming from?
The murder of innocent people whose only crime is peacefully practicing their religious beliefs.
The dead include Christians, Tibetans, and Uighurs, but the majority are practitioners of Falun Gong, a Buddhist-influenced religion that emphasizes meditation and qigong.
Recently, Leon Lee, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, has released two films onto iTunes. Human Harvest is a documentary about the harvesting of organs from political dissidents. The Bleeding Edge is a thriller based on the true story, starring Anastasia Lin, the reigning Miss World Canada, who was forbidden by the Chinese government to go to the 2015 Miss World pageant in Canada due to her activism against the persecution of the Falun Gong.
These films are not getting a theatrical release. Not because they’re bad films, but because no theater chain is willing to show the movie. The Chinese film market is one of the largest in the world, and theater chains and distributors are afraid of backlash by the Chinese government hurting their profits. The Chinese government has also threatened Lin’s father into severing ties with her; cast and crew members backed out because they were afraid of reprisals from the Chinese government against their loved ones in China.
The Chinese government knows that light is the best disinfectant. If people from developed countries know that Chinese organs come from the murder of innocent people, far fewer people will travel to China to get organ transplants, because most people are fairly strongly against murder. That’s why the Chinese government is desperately engaging in censorship.
I’m not a big fan of other people trying to tell me what I ought to watch, personally, particularly when they’re doing it to cover up their habit of murdering people for their religious beliefs. I don’t like thrillers or incredibly depressing documentaries, so I probably wasn’t going to watch The Bleeding Edge or Human Harvest otherwise. But I want censorship to fail. If you try to keep me from watching something, I’m going to watch it.
I hope you share my thoughts on this. If you do, watch The Bleeding Edge and Human Harvest. Buy them from iTunes. Tell your friends to watch it too. Don’t let the censors and murderers win.
Thing of Things 
” If people from developed countries know that Chinese organs come from the murder of innocent people, they’re not going to travel to China to get organ transplants.”
I can only think “Sweet summer child”. Sorry.
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If people from developed countries know that Chinese organs come from the murder of innocent people, they’re not going to travel to China to get organ transplants.
I wish I could believe that, I honestly do. But you have John Richguy, who is the boss of a big modern cutting-edge tech concern and has developed NeedsALiverNow problem, and dang it what is wrong with those biologists that they haven’t yet gotten on top of the 3-D Print Your Own Liver situation?
And you’d really think a rich white guy could find a match for himself somewhere in the Western World, but nooooo – all these ethics and rules about paying a poor guy to let you buy his liver, or paying to jump the queue ahead of some deadbeat dad of two who isn’t the boss of a big modern cutting-edge tech concern.
But China isn’t fussy about where the money comes from or queue jumping. And hey, some rice farmer got on the wrong side of their government and is for the execution squad? Well, John Richguy being squeamish is not going to stop that execution, and the liver will only go to waste, might as well get some utility out of that definitely will happen no matter what death, right?
If you’re someone who is looking at dying in the next year instead of living for another thirty to forty years (or even longer, if we crack cryonics/brain emulations/the latest wheeze in cheating death), and you’re used to throwing money and talent at a problem until it cracks, and you’ve never been denied anything you really wanted because you’re smart, rich and have everyone falling over themselves to praise you for being one of the leading lights in bringing the future about now – are you really going to get squeamish about where your liver came from?
Not just the John Richguys, either; us Bill and Jane Poorguys would be every bit as tempted. Faced with “no, really, death in six months” or “organ harvested from some anonymous faceless person who is for the chop anyway”, very few of us will stick to our moral principles.
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Not to mention the third-party hands-off deniable markets sourcing organs for the desperate (and able to pay for them) that would spring up in complacently looking the other way countries – not to pick on Thailand, but suppose there’s a clinic there that does “organ donations guaranteed all our organs are voluntary honest guv”? Are you really going to be too fussy about making sure that they aren’t trafficking in black market organs from China, or are a Chinese-backed front company importing such organs from That Place Nobody Mentions No Definitely Nothing To Do With Us?
I’ve been very vocal in complaining about Third World fertility clinics and Westerners using the poor and desperate to have their “we bought and paid for that baby”, and people have been quite happy to defend this trade.
I don’t see any reason why people would not equally go “Well, if a poor Indian/Thai/whomever national wants to sell his liver so the money will go to support his family, why not? It’s his body, he can choose rational suicide if he wants!”
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“I don’t see any reason why people would not equally go “Well, if a poor Indian/Thai/whomever national wants to sell his liver so the money will go to support his family, why not? It’s his body, he can choose rational suicide if he wants!””
What does this have to do with Ozy’s post?
Also, donating your liver is not fatal. It’s a popular choice among poor peopleselling their organs under shady circumstances for that very reason.
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I think we have learned some fascinating things about your ethics today.
Evidently, people are willing to get an organ without inquiring too much about where it came from. But if they get an organ and know for a fact that it comes from a murdered dissident… well, maybe not everyone will have a problem with that. Maybe fifty percent of people can sleep at night knowing that their heart beats because an innocent person was killed. But in that case the Chinese government just lost half its market, and suddenly murdering people gets a lot less profitable.
Andd I observe that, empirically, in the developed world, we do not murder homeless people or addicts or prisoners for their organs; indeed, we don’t even let people sell their organs. And very few people seem to be advocating for the pro-murder position here, even the ones who are dying.
In the event that there are shady third-party organ sellers: well, we just made it significantly more inconvenient and less profitable to butcher people for their organs, so I’m taking that as a win.
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The world is full of people who cherry pick facts, disbelieve inconvenient truths or otherwise rationalize their selfish desires as being ‘right.’
The more is on the line for us, the more we do so. Dying is ‘a lot on the line.’
Empirically, we outsource a lot of bad behavior to other countries, so we can pretend to have clean hands, while we import the products.
See the clothing industry, cocoa farming, mining, fur farms (my country banned mink farming, but allows mink fur imports, which effectively replaced mink farmed in Holland with mink farmed in China, under way worse circumstances), etc, etc. A lot of people get killed for our products because of this.
The outsourcing of torture by the Bush administration was also a good example of pretending to not be responsible for unethical behavior.
Buying organs from murdered people seems to simply be a more extreme case on a continuum of immoral things that we already do. Of course, a good argument can be made that this is too far along the continuum for us to accept. But a good argument can also be made that it isn’t (especially since only a fraction of eligible organ recipients have to be willing to go this far to keep this business going).
PS. I do agree that ‘very few of us will stick to our moral principles’ is a silly, absolutist statement.
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Ozy. Look me in the eye and tell me if the doctors say your kid will die unless they get a liver, you are going to stick to your principles and say “No Chinese murder livers for us, I’m calling the undertaker to order a white coffin now”.
I might have the guts to refuse something that would save my life (I have no idea, I don’t want to bet on my courage that far). A family member, though? Am I going to stick with “Sorry, sis, you have to die for my principles?”
Some people will refuse because of ethics and virtue. Some won’t give a damn about anyone other than themselves. And most people will do desperate things in desperate situations.
A 50% market in the West for Chinese livers isn’t going to stay at 50% forever, as society gets accustomed to “yeah some people buy livers from executed Chinese”. Any more than divorce remained only for cases of wicked abuse and ordinary marriages would never end in divorce, or contraception was going to be confined to married couples who already had four kids and would never be used by the unmarried and/or to ensure no kids at all (see the Lambeth Conference in 1930 accepting limited contraception):
Now you tell me – in 2018, is the Anglican Church (or indeed Protestants in general) noted for being strongly against contraception, abortion and sex outside of marriage and insisting on chastity outside of wedlock, or is that attitude found most strongly amongst those loopy Fundies everyone laughs at for being so backwards?
Chinese organ markets will go the same way.
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An interesting case to look at is foreign adoption. The backlash against the theft of children from their parents seems to have come primarily from adopted children, who looked into their biological parents & the adoption system and discovered that children were falsely
soldput up for adoption as being orphans. In contrast, parents who adopted or look to adopt seem much more disinclined to believe a narrative that enables them to adopt without guilt.LikeLike
Human Harvest is also available on Amazon,: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MRNWGWJ/ref=pe_385040_118058080_TE_M1DP
Just purchased.
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It’s very contentious to say that organs were mostly just harvested from people whose only crime was peacefully practicing a religion.
Is there good evidence for that claim outside the documentary itself? I agree about the need to the very suspicious of someone anytime they try a cover-up (corporates equally as much as a governments), but sometimes people cover-up stories because they make them look bad, not because the story is true.
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Falun Gong would have to be doing some very very bad things indeed to be as bad as a totalitarian state butchering people and selling their organs.
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I don’t think the question was whether the ‘donors’ are as bad as the Chinese government or whether they deserved it, but whether we have evidence for the particular claims in the documentary.
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Right. What only the most ignorant of Chinese government supporters would try to deny is that organs are harvested from condemned criminals, and were without any pretence of consent at least prior to 2015. Beyond there I’m not so sure what’s going on. I have to admit, though – that Boston Globe article Ozy cites in turn cites a couple of books written by a journalist and a human rights lawyer that, I suppose, back up the claim that these were essentially religious practitioners condemned only for their beliefs.
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In particular, the claim from the Globe article that seems hard to swallow is that “most of those killed are peaceful citizens persecuted for their beliefs: Tibetans, Uighurs, Christians”. Really? They have all the thousands of criminals that could be condemned for actual crimes, and they’re going after Christians and Tibetans?
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I’ll add my voice to the others stating that I doubt anyone involved in buying organs from the Chinese really believed they were coming from volunteers. That said, I agree that murdering people and stealing their organs is still murdering people, and insofar as this puts a stop to that, sign me up.
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The thing here is that the Chinese aren’t killing dissidents because they want to sell organs, they are selling organs because they have a surplus from killing dissidents.
Back when I lived for a while in China, it was fairly common practice to ‘convert’ prison sentences to death sentences because it was cheaper than building new prisons.
The Chinese have a fundamentally different view of the value of human life.
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Agreed. The part that’s actually wrong enough to be indefensible from my point of view is the death penalty. Harvesting their organs afterwards may be tasteless, but it’s efficient and only adds positive utility. At least directly – it might incentivize keeping or extending the death penalty, which would probably be negative utility.
So we should criticize them for killing criminals and dissidents instead. But then at least people in the US would look a tad hypocritical doing it…
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I’m in agreement; I can’t super fault the idea of getting use out of the organs of people who are being killed anyway. But, I agree people who could buy these organs shouldn’t; the incentives being created are all kinds of fucked up, plus if you’re both a profit-making operation and a totalitarian state (the latter making it pretty damn difficult to sue you) I’m not sure I would trust that everything is up to the standard one would hope for for an actual organ going inside you.
Still, if I was in that position – going to die without a transplant, and able to afford one of these – I don’t know if I could stand on principle like that.
I think if people are *being killed for their organs*, I could. If the organs of people who are being executed anyway are being sold.. then I dunno.
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It’s even cheaper if you can sell the organs, which means that logically, an amoral and economically rational Chinese bureaucrat will convert more sentences when a system to sell organs is in place.
At one point, the legal system can become an actual profit-making industry, where actual guilt becomes secondary (see Russia and their willingness to steal property from people or asset forfeiture in the US, which doesn’t even need a conviction).
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Luckily, it will not be profitable for them because saying that ” ‘very few of us will stick to our moral principles’ is a silly, absolutist statement” and virtuous Westerners will not turn a blind eye to dodgy markets, right? 🙂
I don’t mind the aspersions on my morals/ethics; I do have moral principles which I betray every day by sinning, so I can’t throw stones. I do know the human heart is terribly twisty, and people like redefining sin so that the things they want to do are now a-okay and it was only the primitive repressive society of the past which called them sinful or wrong. We know X is perfectly fine and always has been! Which is why I think that also will happen with “using organs from executed prisoners where we don’t know/can’t be certain that this was done with consent, on people definitely guilty of serious crime, and not for the purposes of ‘it’s too expensive to keep prisoners but bullets are cheap and bonus we can sell the meat afterwards'”.
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What i find that’s so stupid is that qi gong can’t be done in china but yet again it was created in china so is doing tai chi (Which is a CHINESE Martial art) Illegal too
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