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Comment by toss1 | Hacker News Reader

>>While the government says 10,000 transplants occur each year, hospital data shows between 60,000 to 100,000 organs are transplanted each year. The report provides evidence that this gap is being made up by executed prisoners of conscience.

This indicates between 50,000 and 90,000 'prisoners of conscience' EVERY YEAR are executed and have their organs harvested. That is 1,000 to 2,000 people per week executed essentially for opposing the govt.

Yet we continue to do business with this government and allow them into world trade and govt organizations as if they were somehow ethical or legitimate.

This needs to be re-thought.

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Surely each executed prisoner could be expected to provide multiple organs, the transplantation of each being recorded as a separate operation?

Although obviously that's a pedantic quibble rather than a defence of the practice, as even a highly reduced number of such executions remains appalling.

Plausible.

I also didn't note the opposite, wondering how many are killed without having organs harvested and implanted, for whatever reason (disease, incompatibility, remote location, etc.).

Whichever form of error is likely present, I'm still just stunned by the magnitude of these numbers.

It really is the buried lede of the decade...

Do you use products made in China? If so, you indirectly (or in some cases, directly) support Chinese government.

Are you going to stop, now that you think they are unethical?

This new finding doesn't actually add much to my aversion, considering their past aggression against Tibet, internal mass killings before & during the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, their standard practice of IP theft as ordinary business...

I fully understand that any purchase supports that govt.

So yes, I already consciously and deliberately avoid purchasing any Chinese item whenever there is an option or I don't strictly need it.

E.g., the laptop and MBoard in my desktop are from Taiwan, Phone for SKorea, etc. I check labels on everything from clothes to furniture, absolutely refuse to buy any food or drugs made there (nevermind boycotts, just avoiding toxicity).

I also advocate against such dealings when I can. Treating this Chinese govt as if it were normal and legitimate will go down as a geopolitical blunder of historic proportions. Westerners think we're exploiting their cheap labor, while they are actually exploiting our myopic focus on quarterly profits above all, even strategic security.

That's ridiculous, it's the same fallacy as believing that a single person's choice to drive less somehow helps reduce global warming. The massive systemic abuses completely overshadow the noise of individual selection. It's not even clear to me that a social-media storm resulting in a global boycott of "Made in China" goods within developed nations would have much of a long-term dent in the Chinese economy or domestic policy.

Can you propose something more effective, that you personally can do?

Or are you suggesting we ignore (alleged) dozen of people executed every hour for organ harvesting?

Discussing the issue with your representatives would be a good start.

If I can (know), I avoid it. Same with a number of other organizations (mostly companies).

They also will be the world's hedgemony and the world largest economy.

That rate of execution is only a single order of magnitude shy of the rate of killings during the Holocaust. It likely is on par with the rate of killings during the earlier parts of the Holocaust, during which mass murder hadn't been optimized in the way it was later.

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