Harvesting Bloody Fruits

One of the conceits of Wang Lixiong's Chinese Tidal Wave apocalypse-in-progress, is that modern China has completely lost its moral and social compass. What the centrally lead communist system didn’t break into pieces, the new Hobsian capitalist winner-take-all chaos has swept into the dust bin.

It is possible that the combination of predation through State fiat combined with a lack of rule of law with regards to those low in status may make for the worst of all possible outcomes. The State takes away the incentive for otherwise impoverished people to work together and solve their own problems: to self enforce a moral code, and bullying winner takes all business climate insures that only a small percentage of people are able to succeed in this isolated condition. And to truly succeed you must succeed large because first you need to pay for a lot of taxation to pay for the government, and secondly to get to the level where the government will protect your interests (licensing, permits, etc.).

Most people in the middle class of our country of course pay taxes, and provided that they show the required obsequiousness to the status quo, will also receive the minimal level of preferential treatment of the state. They can (for the moment) carry weapons, they will not (usually) be stopped without cause and searched. Etcetera….. Most Americans view this treatment as their due right, but since not all Americans are treated this way, and the differing treatment is to some degree systematic, than I think it is more accurate to say that it is preferential. The legitimacy of this preference is of course a debatable point. It is not in a vacuum that people who look a certain way, and dress a certain way, and live in certain neighborhoods are more likely to be randomly searched, etc. Even much of the racial anger over the issue seems to stem not from the practice itself, but that some racial groups are held to a higher standard to receive the preferred treatment. Searching people who look like ‘gangbangers’ is O.K. Searching college professors is not.

So just how far can one expect this treatment to go? In the United States we are talking about allowing strikes against ‘terrorist’ suspects who are U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. This of course is completely wasteful because it is a complete contravention to the Green three “R” principal: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

For a more holistic, Green policy we should look to the harvesting practices used by the Chinese towar their dissidents. Don’t blow them up; Re-use them.

The Xinjiang Procedure
Beijing’s ‘New Frontier’ is ground zero for the organ harvesting of political prisoners.
Ethan Gutmann, Weekly Standard, 5 December 2011, Vol. 17, No. 12 (Hat tip: The Browser)

To figure out what is taking place today in a closed society such as northwest China, sometimes you have to go back a decade, sometimes more.

One clue might be found on a hilltop near southern Guangzhou, on a partly cloudy autumn day in 1991. A small medical team and a young doctor starting a practice in internal medicine had driven up from Sun Yat-sen Medical University in a van modified for surgery. Pulling in on bulldozed earth, they found a small fleet of similar vehicles—clean, white, with smoked glass windows and prominent red crosses on the side. The police had ordered the medical team to stay inside for their safety. Indeed, the view from the side window of lines of ditches—some filled in, others freshly dug—suggested that the hilltop had served as a killing ground for years.

Thirty-six scheduled executions would translate into 72 kidneys and corneas divided among the regional hospitals. Every van contained surgeons who could work fast: 15-30 minutes to extract. Drive back to the hospital. Transplant within six hours. Nothing fancy or experimental; execution would probably ruin the heart.

Note the term strange fruit refers to lynchings in the Southern United States.  I did not recall that (rather tenuous) linkage until after I wrote this post.