Organic farming, Chinese style

A Chinese soldier was sentenced to be shot. Shot he was – but he wasn’t killed. While the soldier was still breathing, his kidney and eyeballs were taken out, to be sold to the highest bidder in the spirit of free enterprise.

The report by the international China Tribunal to be published today will list thousands of similar instances. Organ harvesting is yet another growth industry in China, and many of the donors are slaughtered specifically to provide the products.

The products – hearts, kidneys, lungs, corneas, livers and skin (sold by the square centimetre) – are high value. For example, a kidney goes for $200,000; a liver, for $300,000. Pre-orders are welcome: prospective donors can be custom-slaughtered, and their organs transplanted while still fresh.

The original owners of the merchandise don’t even have to carry donor cards. Some probably do, but an article in a journal of medical ethics showed that of the 120,000 organ transplants carried out in China between 1977 and 2009, only 130 were voluntary.

Business has picked up since 2009, with some 90,000 operations carried out every year, which is a fitting paean for the champions of both organic farming and free enterprise.  

The Chinese authorities claim libel, but then they would, wouldn’t they? Occasionally, their censorship has an off day, and their own medical journals inadvertently let the cat out of the bag.

One article that slipped through by such oversight thoughtfully weighed the pros and cons of anaesthetising a donor before his heart and lungs were removed. The honest author made no claim that the patient would survive the operation.

One can understand the dilemma: anaesthetics don’t come cheap, so why waste them on someone who’s going to die anyway? I don’t know if the Chinese have a saying like our ‘waste not, want not’, but I suspect they do.

The harvest delivered by such organic farming seems to be particularly good in Xinjiang and other areas of western China, where Uighur Muslims live. However, reports show that many of them don’t live long.

They are being rounded up and sent to re-education (aka concentration) camps where many are put down and sold for parts. Apparently, their organs are in high demand in Saudi Arabia for being halal: the Uigurs neither drink nor smoke, which keeps their organs in the pristine condition demanded by their exacting religion.

Some Buddhist sects receive a similar treatment, even though their innards aren’t necessarily halal. But, according to one Chinese transplant surgeon, they keep their bodies in such good shape that their organs are commendably healthy.

However, it’s the Uigurs who seem to yield the best crop, which is why western China has become a magnet for organ tourism. Airports there even feature ‘human organ transport channels’, signposted in both Chinese and English. This bespeaks a respect for wealthy people undiminished under the communists: at $300,000 a pop, only a highly respectable person can afford, say, a liver.

So what will happen when the report is published? How will it affect trade with China? The answer is, not at all.

Western governments will claim that the evidence is insufficient, no matter how many Chinese doctors will have admitted slaughtering people for their organs (some already have). After all, trade with China is lucrative, and what could possibly be more important than that?

In my book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis, I questioned the morality of importing vast quantities of goods produced by slave labour (an admittedly more visible source, the new film Greed, talks about that too). But of course morality doesn’t come into it.

Cutting China off from the global economy would make us all poorer and, more critical, our ‘leaders’ less electable. Can’t have that, can we now?

Far be it from me to suggest we boycott goods coming from countries different from ours. Yet there exists a demarcation line separating ‘different from ours’ and unspeakably evil.

Contrary to frequent claims, doing trillions’ worth of trade with China’s regime won’t make it less evil. It’ll only make it more powerful, more able to impose its evil on others.

Our cynical ‘leaders’ know this perfectly well, and don’t care. Their immediate electoral prospects soar above all other considerations. Many of their charges, however, have been seduced into genuinely believing in the redemptive nature of free markets.

I’d be a rich man if I had £100 for each time a libertarian or even a soi disant conservative told me that, once a tyranny has allowed free markets, everything else will follow. It’ll become a paragon of liberty overnight and a thousand – nay, a trillion – flowers will bloom, each representing a currency unit.

We in the West still acknowledge, for old times’ sake, that man is more than a sum of his parts. But, to keep brisk trade with China going, we’ll accept its denial of this basic principle as merely a cultural difference. We have one culture, they have another. Who’s to say ours is better?

One would think this hardly needs telling, and in fact it doesn’t. Screaming about China’s take on organic farming is an exercise in futility.

Once the report comes out, a kaleidoscope of headlines will adorn our papers for a few days. And then we’ll go back to comfier stories calculating the number of children Boris Johnson has sired or the number of women Harvey Weinstein has violated.

Whoever said “all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing” had a point, although I doubt that truly good men can ever take evil lying down. One way or the other, learn Chinese, ladies and gentlemen.