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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7495 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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So there is a question that has been gnawing at me for the longest time: is PRC... Good? I mean:

  1. wildly economically succesful with a dynamic tech sector
  2. conservative and nationalistic population, proud of its' culture and heritage - this is the big one tbh, even the more liberal side of the population doesn't seem that bad, none of that self-hatred of the West
  3. technocracy - yeah, they may not be AS meritocratic as they advertise, and personal connections play a huge role, but comparing their officials to whatever the hell Western politicians are doing is not favorable to the latter
  4. willing to forego some comfort and economic progress for the sake of national power and sovereignity (as a European, seeing how our societies prefer to bend over looking for outside help instead of taking the harder route of building capacity for assertivness - yeah, China seems really vindicated right now)

I mean, there are obviously some tough things to get over (the whole free speech thing, how they handled COVID with safetyism that would make many in the West blush, all the other usual stuff), but genuinely, honestly... Following the news from China for a few years, I really can't help but envy the Chinese. Take down the communist iconography and I think that many on the right would see it similarly to Japan.

I wrote up a long high effort reply to this and then my browser app froze and when it returned the page refreshed and my in progress reply was gone. So I apologize but my second attempt is going to be shorter

1: I knew vaguely there were "rumours" about China doing forced organ harvesting. I only learned very recently the rumours are basically not rumours and have a lot of evidence. My mental model was also maybe dozens of such cases if they were real and not a conspiracy theory. The actual mathematical discrepancies suggest I was wrong by several orders of magnitude. There's a ton written about this if you Google it, I had just so automatically dismissed it as a conspiracy theory I never had. I apologize for not getting the links I originally included but it really is very simple to find.

Edit: I'll add some now

https://humanrightscommission.house.gov/events/hearings/forced-organ-harvesting-china-examining-evidence

Last month, the American Journal of Transplantation – the top peer-reviewed publication on the subject – published a large-scale computational textual analysis of 2,838 Chinese-language articles published in Chinese academic journals between 1980 and 2015 which supports the inference that transplant surgeons in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) removed organs, including hearts and lungs, in violation of the internationally-accepted “dead donor” rule, i.e., before donors have been (or could be) declared “brain dead.”

The PRC is widely alleged to be a major harvester and trafficker of forcibly acquired organs. Available information indicates that Falun Gong practitioners have been the primary victims of this cruel practice, and there are now allegations that imprisoned Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities are also victims, based in part on accounts of mandatory medical testing in Xinjiang consistent with preparation for organ removal. Since 2015, Chinese authorities have claimed to only source organs from voluntary donors, but there are doubts as to the veracity of the claim. Data suggests that Chinese hospitals have performed many times more transplants than the highest estimates of ethically available donors can account for

The final judgment of the Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China Tribunal, published in March 2020, concluded that forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims.

https://www.mccaininstitute.org/resources/blog/uncovering-evil-illegal-organ-harvesting-in-china-and-the-2025-stop-forced-organ-harvesting-act/

As of 2015, China declared that all organ donations would be “sourced from voluntary donors,” repealing an earlier policy that allowed the government to source organs from death row prisoners. Accordingly, in 2017, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reported that the voluntary organ donor list of approximately 375,000 people “yielded 5,146 ‘eligible’ organ donors,” resulting in over 16,000 organ transplants.

Yet scholars and experts, such as those who form the China Tribunal, an international organization tasked with investigating transplant practices in China, find a different reality. They estimate from data, including hospital bed counts and medical personnel, that China conducts between 60,000 to upwards of 100,000 organ transplants annually.

Given the overwhelming gap in these statistics, from where did China source tens of thousands of organs?

The answer lies in the illegal operation of forced organ harvesting. Recent congressional testimonies estimate that 25,000 to 50,000 prisoners in China undergo forced organ transplants annually. Imprisoned and detained religious and ethnic groups, including the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities, account for the majority of victims.

https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/76845/html/

  • Implausible increase of transplant numbers in China between 1999 and 2004.
  • Increased transplant numbers cannot be attributed solely to executed prisoners.
  • Implausible growth of China’s organ donation numbers.
  • Discrepancy between officially reported transplant numbers and other transplant infrastructure parameters.
  • inexplicable medical exams in Chinese detention camps.
  • DAFOH estimates that more than 150,000 Falun Gong practitioners have become victims of forced organ harvesting in China in the past 16 years.

2: The level of censorship in China is very extreme. My penpal told me as a funny story that when they banned stack overflow the software engineers rioted and they backtracked, but in general they ban things freely and arbitrarily. As someone who does follow lots of Chinese media I get used to tv shows getting cancelled or the plotlines getting massively changed because someone decided that from now on you're not allowed to have zombies. The latest development is now you're not allowed to positively portray permanent transmigration, they think it's a suicide risk. It's very much not just the "obvious" don't say anything about tianenmen square, don't criticize the government, etc, it's constant stupid nonsense.

Permanent transmigration? Like leaving China or?

You might know it by the word "isekai". AKA that thing in fiction where people from our world go into a different world, usually unexpectedly and sometimes after death.

I've seen at least one Anglophone author use "portal fantasy" as the Western equivalent of the term "isekai". I haven't seen any use "permanent transmigration".

In my experience of n=1 reading Chinese cultivation novels, the term has been "transmigration".

"Portal fantasy" sounds misleading to me. Like it's about a world where rifts open in random places and monsters come out to be slain for loot.

No, "portal fantasy" is an older term (dating back at least to 1997) and describes works like Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and The Chronicles of Narnia where a kid gets transported to a fantasy land to have adventures and save the day before returning home to their ordinary lives (xkcd boils down the genre to a nutshell in "Children's Fantasy"). It's also different from the modern isekai genre, which usually involves older teenagers or outright adults dying and being reincarnated into a fantasy world, often with great powers.

There's a handful of weird intermediate works: Spellsinger has a loser adult who doesn't die, but never returns and gets great powers; Magic Kingdom For Sale SOLD has a successful adult who could return but doesn't want to do so and is flakier on powers, Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure has a teenager with great powers who eventually has to force his way back into the alternate world, the main Barsroom stories have an adult getting superpowers in mere irreversible transportation but a couple characters eventually end up getting Truck-Kun'd into space.

But normally, yeah, there's a pretty clear division, and that's ossified a lot in the last two decades.

It's also different from the modern isekai genre, which usually involves older teenagers or outright adults dying and being reincarnated into a fantasy world, often with great powers.

As seen, for example, in Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom series.

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