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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   11022 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.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/06/china-un-human-rights-experts-alarmed-organ-harvesting-allegations?LangID=E&NewsID=27167

UN human rights experts* said today they were extremely alarmed by reports of alleged ‘organ harvesting’ targeting minorities, including Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims and Christians, in detention in China.

The experts said they have received credible information that detainees from ethnic, linguistic or religious minorities may be forcibly subjected to blood tests and organ examinations such as ultrasound and x-rays, without their informed consent; while other prisoners are not required to undergo such examinations. The results of the examinations are reportedly registered in a database of living organ sources that facilitates organ allocation.

“According to the allegations received, the most common organs removed from the prisoners are reportedly hearts, kidneys, livers, corneas and, less commonly, parts of livers.

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.

Regarding censorship, there was an old article I remember well but sadly never saved. It was about a western journalist in China who worked closely with censors. The most fascinating thing to him was how opaque the process was. One moment they'd censor something that seemed completely innocuous and another they had zero problem when he was sure they'd want some change. They would never explain the rules of what leads them to act.

One of the standard dilemmas of censorship is that the censors can't just publish a detailed list of what people can't publish without defeating the whole point. You have to come up with broader and/or more-opaque rules that encompass but avoid revealing the narrower rules you really care about, and there's no rule less revealing than "just ask and we'll tell you if it's forbidden". The public has to be kept uninformed about what the public is being kept uninformed about.

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