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China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

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Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#201

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

schoen wrote: post #109
pasabagi wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I regularly go to a restaurant run by some Falun Gong refugees, and I've spent a fair bit of time, while waiting, perusing their pamphlets and books. To be honest, my feeling has been exactly the same as yours - while, from my very first interaction, I was aware that Falun Gong were persecuted in China, and while I don't really have a rosy picture of what that entails, their political writing and pampletting is just…

I'm also always struck by the culture gap when Falun Gong tries to communicate to western audiences. The main slogan that I've seen on banners at their protests: "Falun Dafa Is Good". This made me think of nothing so much as the "Log Song" from Ren and Stimpy : It's log, it's log, it's big, it's heavy, it's wood. / It's log, it's log, it's better than bad — it's good!

Never thought I'd see a Ren & Stimpy reference on HN.

Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#202

Post by SubiculumCode »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #199
SubiculumCode wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other nation-states in the Asia Pacific would be perfectly willing to start taking our orders for commercial goods. No doubt the trade war with China has been, or will be, good for their industrial economies. It is not ethics however that is driving a wedge between the United States and China. It is China's efforts to solidify its power over the Asian Pacific seas (in)conveniently named the China Sea and their trade…

"Other nation-states in the Asia Pacific would be perfectly willing to start taking our orders for commercial goods." They would if they could. Most other nations are nowhere near the level of sophistication of China on 'making stuff'. It's not just cheap labour, it's a myriad of other things related to it that China specializes in. China is not trying to take over the world, they just want to be the 'superpower' in…

Agreed. But I suspect that their sophistication is not so exclusive or far ahead that other countries could not move into their place over the course of a decade.

Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#203

Post by atr_gz »

ir193 wrote: post #102
alehul wrote: post #34

When I was younger, maybe five years ago or so, I was living in Boston and I'd consistently see a pack of Chinese protestors outside the public library at Copley (very popular area) holding up signs, looking to gain attention for this very issue. They spoke to me as best as they could, handed me a pamphlet with hard-to-parse English but nonetheless gruesome descriptions, and asked for my signature along with any othe…

I can guarantee you many Chinese protestors you can see in US are protesting for political asylum. For them, protesting for is only a way to green card. Almost every Chinese Uber driver I met in SF are under political asylum

I recently read a non-fiction book, Patriot Number One about this. The main subject of the story pretty clearly deserved asylum but it goes into detail about how people who weren't really persecuted go about getting asylum as well. Really interesting story about small-town Chinese politics and different ways people immigrate.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35575186-patriot-number-...

Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#204

Post by porpoisely »

sgt101 wrote: post #106
porpoisely wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At first look, from a Western perspective, this is 100% clear-cut morally bad. There is no such thing as a western perspective or morals. Just like there is no such thing as an asian perspective or morals. The western, just like the asian or even chinese, perspective is so vast and disparate and diverse that it is futile to pigeonhole one region into a single perspective. Case in point, the "west" encompasses every…

>The judeo and christian are morally antithetical. The basis of christ and christianity is the fundamental shift from judeo values and morals to christian ones. I have Jewish friends, they are not morally antiethical to Christian values, they are moral people who I love. Everything I know about Judaism informs me that its practioners share my morals. Please state specifically where you believe the gap between Judaic…

I have jewish, atheist, christian, muslim, buddhist, hindu, etc friends also. They are all moral people. So is it judeo-atheist-muslim-christian-buddhist-etc values?

There is no such thing as a judeo-christian morality or value. It is a political term invented a few decades ago for political reasons.

I don't want to get into a religious debate. Those never end well and there can never be a conclusion because they all hinge on interpreting text hundreds of pages long full of contradictory statements. And never mind there are different flavors of judaism and christianity.

But if judaism and christianity had same values then one is obviously redundant. But obviously that isn't true. There isn't even "judeo" values or christian values. The term "judeo-christian" is meaningless. There is no value, morality or anything underpinning it expect for political expediency.

Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#205

Post by EdwardDiego »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #192
sgustard wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While visiting, am I free to loudly denounce the government?

No you're not. Snowden wasn't allowed to denounce the government either.

He was, just not with a bunch of classified documents in hand.

Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#206

Post by sonnyblarney »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #202
sonnyblarney wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Other nation-states in the Asia Pacific would be perfectly willing to start taking our orders for commercial goods." They would if they could. Most other nations are nowhere near the level of sophistication of China on 'making stuff'. It's not just cheap labour, it's a myriad of other things related to it that China specializes in. China is not trying to take over the world, they just want to be the 'superpower' in…

Agreed. But I suspect that their sophistication is not so exclusive or far ahead that other countries could not move into their place over the course of a decade.

It is.

The list is long.

You need tons of people with tons of little bits of specialization, tons of factories run by experienced people, tons of workers for those factories willing to put up with rubbish, you need all the support: capitol, financial systems, export sophistication etc..

Surely, any group of people well enough organized could build maybe one such city of a few million people in ten years, but that's small.

In the meantime, in India, they can't get the electricity grid to work. Factories? No way.

Which is why we see a lot of software outsourcing in India, factories in China.

For assembling Nike shoes or something, other parts of Asia might already start to make sense. But for real manufacturing of most things ... it's China for the foreseeable future.

Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#207

Post by EdwardDiego »

schoen wrote: post #109
pasabagi wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I regularly go to a restaurant run by some Falun Gong refugees, and I've spent a fair bit of time, while waiting, perusing their pamphlets and books. To be honest, my feeling has been exactly the same as yours - while, from my very first interaction, I was aware that Falun Gong were persecuted in China, and while I don't really have a rosy picture of what that entails, their political writing and pampletting is just…

I'm also always struck by the culture gap when Falun Gong tries to communicate to western audiences. The main slogan that I've seen on banners at their protests: "Falun Dafa Is Good". This made me think of nothing so much as the "Log Song" from Ren and Stimpy : It's log, it's log, it's big, it's heavy, it's wood. / It's log, it's log, it's better than bad — it's good!

In my city in NZ, they like to do their tai-chi looking stuff in a park beside the main avenue of travel from the airport, with big banners about the Falun Dafa and Friends Association, but most of the banners are filled with hanzi - which makes me wonder who they're preaching to - Kiwis, or Chinese migrants?

Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#208

Post by 68c12c16 »

i remember reading another report by washington post on this issue a year ago...i am posting the report link here and perhaps it could provide us with a bit more details regarding the problem...

  news title: China used to harvest organs from prisoners. 
              Under pressure, that practice is 
              finally ending. 
  date: 2017/09/14
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-the-fac...

Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#209

Post by mindentropy »

stanfordkid wrote: post #172

Why do people fall for this sort of stuff so easily? There is a pattern of western governments regularly organizing subversive, extremist, headline grabbing testimonies to further foreign policy objectives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony I don't think the Chinese government is great either, but I'm pretty cognizant that the level of anti-China FUD is directly proportional to the accelerating economic…

This is similar to the story regarding Supermicro hack. The Government propaganda is on a hyper drive with the recent Chinese tensions.

Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#210

Post by madstap »

keldaris wrote: post #184
blhack wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We (the U.S) tolerate their disrespect for human rights because we also do not respect human rights I'm sorry but this statement is just absolutely and completely ridiculous. I don't know if you've either never been to The United States, or you've never left The United States, but the difference between the respect that we have for human rights, and the respect that much of the rest of the world has, is stark.

It's not ridiculous. It merely conflates (as do most statements in this thread) two orthogonal aspects - how repressive a society happens to be internally and how much of a threat it poses abroad. Historically, there doesn't seem to be any perceptible correlation between those two factors. The U.S. is indeed by most metrics one of the freest societies on the planet in terms of the state repression imposed on the aver…

What metrics are those?

The US has the biggest prison population in the world by a big margin, 655 per 100k people (El Salvador is in second place with 604/100k and China is at 118/100k). I'd call that state repression.

In other measures it does better, like the so-called democracy index, where it ranks #21 (flawed democracy), which is better than China at #139 (authoritarian). In the reporters without borders press freedom index it's at #45, with China at #176 (almost dead last, out of 180).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

https://rsf.org/en/ranking

I would argue that state repression is not only about direct interaction with police and other agents of the government, and that economic inequality and poverty is less direct, but just as real, relevant and serious form of oppression. If you buy into that premise, then the recent UN report is pretty damning.

http://undocs.org/A/HRC/38/33/ADD.1

Some quotes:

"About 40 million live in poverty, 18.5 million in extreme poverty, and 5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty."

" Its citizens live shorter and sicker lives compared to those living in all other rich democracies, eradicable tropical diseases are increasingly prevalent, and it has the world’s highest incarceration rate, one of the lowest levels of voter registrations in among OECD countries and the highest obesity levels in the developed world."

"For almost five decades the overall policy response has been neglectful at best, but the policies pursued over the past year seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege to be earned rather than a right of citizenship."

I'd say that compared to China it really is better, in most regards, but "by most metrics one of the freest societies on the planet" is a stretch, to say the least.

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