We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19501572 and marked it off-topic.

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19504235.

Note to readers: this is not a mere rhetorical flourish. Falun Gong practitioners are likely killed in large numbers (thousands) for the purpose of harvesting their organs, though obviously evidence of this is tightly controlled.

Some facts that increase the plausibility of the claim:

1) China has among the shortest wait times in the world for organ transplants

2) China has little public engagement for voluntary organ donation. There were 373,536 registered organ donors nationally at the end of 2017. That number of donors would equate to 29 donations annually, going by US rates. Let's be generous and grant that 100 or so donations come from a voluntary donor.

3) Officially, the government of the PRC says that around 10k organ transplants happen per year. Most outside observers claim this is a significant undercount, but let's go with it.

4) The PRC claims that most of its organs come from voluntary donors.

Where do the rest of the organs come from? There's a huge discrepancy here. You can find plenty of people who attest that they've witnessed them coming from Falun Gong practitioners. I don't find individual accounts of anything that compelling, but they're easy enough to find. Plus, any mention of any particular individual would bring in a large number of accounts dismissing and attacking that individual, derailing the conversation.

If someone responds complaining that a lot of this is ultimately speculative: sure. The government of the PRC could easily address and dismiss this issue by offering transparency into its organ donation system. This is low risk and shouldn't undermine the PRC's informational priorities, as there's no reason for it to be a heavily politicized area of discussion (aside potentially from some class issues involving Western medical tourists).

For a well sourced overview, see https://www.chinaorganharvest.org/app/uploads/2018/06/COHRC-... . Yes, the domain name seems sensationalist, but it's appropriate.

That is highly disputed and has a distinctly propagandistic ring.

Like most people, I haven't the time to study this question in detail, so I don't know the truth about it. But that's part of how propaganda works. By repeating something often enough in enough different places, the impression of a well-documented consensus is created. When one does research it in detail, the entire narrative usually falls apart. But so few people actually have the time to do that, it doesn't matter.

Dunno if they would stop if they couldn’t harvest their organs.

Anywho, not every authoritarian regime bothers with that extra step.

Keep drinking that flg coolaid

I don't think you're going to get away from this. By living in and working in China, paying Chinese taxes, and supporting Chinese companies, you are directly supporting an authoritarian regeime.

As a Canadian living in and working in America, I have a similar although less dramatic moral difficulty. The fact is that the American government is curiously abusive compared to your average developed national government.

Yet, you're living in the US.

So I assume the positives outweigh the negatives?

My personal experience has been very positive.

Please stop doing nationalistic flamewar on HN. The denunciatory rhetoric you've been invoking in this thread has no role in the kinds of conversations we're looking for here—it's a different sort of game, for a different sort of website. Since you're an experienced HN user, I'm sure you know this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

One of these things is not like the other. You lack much perspective.

As a Canadian we can only wish to have some of the freedoms the US offers. Property ownership is a right in America but in Canada it's a suggestion. In America you have freedom of speech in Canada you don't have that right but no one will both you practice.

Think Canada could do better as the world's police force? Would have Canada handled 911 differently? Would Canada have invaded iraq? Would the middle east be better off without that war? The US takes a lot of heat but by not doing anything would things be worse.

I don't think Canada is ready to handle that responsible. You need to be mature enough to do the good and bad. Canada just wants to do the good anything else that would taint that imagine in the collective mindset wouldn't be acceptable by the dominate few media narrative.

It is not clear to me that US foreign policy has been good for the Middle East.

It should be clear. For it to be clear you need to see what the other timeline looks like. Perhaps war on the scale that pulls in the rest of the world.

Regional powers are in check. Iran or Iraq were trying to get the bomb. Pakistan and India were on the edge of dropping a bomb on each other. Israel has been trying to get someone to attack Iran.

Keeping warlords in power is easy but longterm it works against your interests. Having a free Iraq has changed the region. It has given voice to oppressed people. It probably has caused Turkey uproar over the Kurds in Turkey wanting to join with the Iraq Kurds. But that is to be expected.. each problem solved will reveal two more.