According to this story at Fox News, China is not only harvesting human organs from unwilling donors, they’re using the Army to do it. Apparently, China is a bit uncomfortable with a recent documentary about this horrendous practice. According to the Ottawa Citizen, they recently applied some political pressure on the Canadian Broadcasting Company to shelve its airing. Besides the small blurb at Fox News, there isn’t much coverage of this story in the United States — not altogether surprising. Still — given the choice between running a story about recalled toys manufactured in China, and the forcible removal of human organs, the latter would appear more newsworthy than the former, but apparently, this simply proves my ignorance of professional journalism.
The story becomes more interesting when you realize that the people targeted for the involuntary donation of human organs is a group called Falun Gong, translated as “Great Law of the Wheel of Law,” their teaching variously described as spiritual, religious, and metaphysical. The persecution of these adherents isn’t exactly “news,” because according to Wikipedia, the arrest, imprisonment, torture, psychiatric experimentation, and forced labor has been going on since 1999.
Any suggestion that human rights abuse in China is a relatively new phenomenon ignores the entire history of that ancient country. This would be true even if one discounts all additive examples of atrocities heaped upon the Chinese people from the instant of China’s first contact with western culture; yet one cannot help but observe, in a world that has increased its sensitivity to human rights issues, modern China hasn’t changed much from the days of its Age of Imperialism.
In the treatment of its citizens, and in the control that China’s government exerts over every aspect of life, there is little difference between ancient and modern China. Recently, intelligence expert Herbert Meyer told us, “In the last 20 years, China has moved 250 million people from the farms and villages into the cities. Their plan is to move another 300 million in the next 20 years. When you put that many people into the cities, you have to find work for them.” So then, does this explain the forced removal of human organs?
Perhaps . . . but I think that in spite of China’s effort to squash the documentary in Canada, the government remains aloof about the opinion of foreign governments — and the only backlash they really fear is that fewer people from the United States and Canada will avail themselves of the great deals offered on human organ replacement.
Hat tip: The Dragon Lady’s Den
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