Organ Harvesting and Trafficking

Organ harvesting is a surgical procedure that removes organs or tissues for reuse, typically for organ transplantation. Organ procurement is heavily regulated in most countries to prevent unethical allocation of organs. However, it is a big business in China.

Human rights groups have known about forced organ harvesting in China for over a decade. Minorities and prisoners are especially vulnerable. They are killed and theirs organ removed. The victims are people who follow Falun Gong, Uyghur Muslims detained in the Xinjiang region, Tibetan Buddhists, and Christians.

The organ recipients are wealthy Chinese or transplant tourists who travel to China and pay a substantial sum to receive the transplant. The waiting times are short and at times vital organs are booked in advance.

Related reading: What You Should Know About Organ Harvesting in China; Harvesting Organs From the Poor; Peter Singer on Harvesting Organs From the Living Dead

The Darkness of Mao's Revolution

Tia Zhang

The communists took power in China in 1949, ending a prolonged civil war that had left the country weary and ready for change. Many hoped that the Mao's government would improve conditions for the average citizen. Instead, China slipped into a violent revolution that became one of the twentieth-century’s greatest humanitarian disasters.

Mao unleashed his Red Guards, a group of students and children of Party officials who had been brainwashed from childhood to be Mao’s enforcers. They marched in the streets, berating and beating people at will. Executions were common, with the public being forced to watch. Conservative estimates put the death toll of Mao's revolution at 65 million.

The Great Leap Forward was Mao’s attempt to collectivize agriculture, and it resulted in the worst famine in history. It is estimated that 45 million people starved and died during Mao's Great Famine.

The book “Dancing Through the Shadow" details the period through the life experience of a Chinese ballet dancer. The story follows Tia Zhang's life as she navigates motherhood, marriage, and an escape from communist rule. The story's background is the darkness of Mao's totalitarian regime which dictating the terms of Tia's life until she could escape.

Related reading: Dancing Through the Darkness of Mao's China; On Trusting the Elites; Smelling Rats: The Story of Katharine Atholl; Living in a Post-Human World

China Improves Military as Part of "National Rejuvenation"

By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service


The just-released "Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China for 2014" report said China's military expenditures continue to grow in keeping with its goal of being a regional and world power.WASHINGTON, June 5, 2014 – China continues to modernize and improve its military capabilities, according to an annual DOD report to Congress, and is also preparing for contingencies in the South and East China Seas where Beijing has been involved in increasingly tense territorial disputes with its neighbors.

The main mission for the People's Liberation Army, the report said, is to improve the capacity of its armed forces to fight and win short-duration, high-intensity regional contingencies.

China continues to prepare for potential conflict in the Taiwan Strait -- which includes deterring or defeating the United States, according to the report.

"The People's Liberation Army also is placing emphasis on preparing for contingencies other than Taiwan, including potential contingencies in the South and East China Seas," the report says.

The PLA Navy, the report said, conducted its largest-ever fleet exercise in the Philippine Sea.

China also conducted a series of joint military exercises in September and October, according to the report. "These exercises combined PLA ground, navy and air forces in large-scale maneuvers along China's southern and southeastern coasts," the report said.

Read it all here.

USA's Role in Japanese Vivisection Atrocities

US scientists were “accomplices after the fact” in Japanese doctors’ war crimes
by Michael Cook

All of contemporary bioethics springs from the Nuremberg Doctors Trial in 1947. Seven Nazi doctors and officials were hanged and nine received severe prison sentences for performing experiments on an estimated 25,000 prisoners in concentration camps without their consent. Only about 1,200 died but many were maimed and psychologically scarred.

So did the US do to the hundreds of Japanese medical personnel who experimented on Chinese civilians and prisoners of war of many nationalities, including Chinese, Koreans, Russians, Australians, and Americans? They killed an estimated 3,000 people in the infamous Unit 731 in Harbin, in northeastern China before and during World War II – plus tens of thousands of civilians when they field-tested germ warfare. Many of the doctors were academics from Japan's leading medical schools.

Nothing.

Well, almost nothing. Twelve doctors were tried and found guilty by the Soviets in the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in 1949, but they were all repatriated in 1956. American authorities dismissed the trials as Soviet propaganda. Many of the doctors in Unit 731 went on to successful careers in Japan after the War. The commander of the unit, Shirō Ishii, lived in relative obscurity but his successor late in the war, Kitano Masaji, became head of one of Japan’s leading pharmaceutical companies.

How did the Japanese doctors escape justice?

A fascinating answer appears in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. The broad outline of the story has been well documented, even if it is not widely known. To cut a long story short, the Americans struck a deal with the doctors. They traded immunity from prosecution for access to scientific information from the ghastly Japanese experiments – many of which are too grim to detail here. (If you have the stomach for it, a remorseful doctor describes, at the age of 90, some of his vivisection experiments in an article in the Japan Times.)

Read it all here.

China economic growth winding down?

Major shifts underway in the Chinese economy that Stratfor has forecast and discussed for years have now drawn the attention of the mainstream media. Many have asked when China would find itself in an economic crisis, to which we have answered that China has been there for awhile -- something not widely recognized outside China, and particularly not in the United States. A crisis can exist before it is recognized. The admission that a crisis exists is a critical moment, because this is when most others start to change their behavior in reaction to the crisis. The question we had been asking was when the Chinese economic crisis would finally become an accepted fact, thus changing the global dynamic.

Last week, the crisis was announced with a flourish. First, The New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-recipient Paul Krugman penned a piece titled "Hitting China's Wall." He wrote, "The signs are now unmistakable: China is in big trouble. We're not talking about some minor setback along the way, but something more fundamental. The country's whole way of doing business, the economic system that has driven three decades of incredible growth, has reached its limits. You could say that the Chinese model is about to hit its Great Wall, and the only question now is just how bad the crash will be."

Later in the week, Ben Levisohn authored a column in Barron's called "Smoke Signals from China." He wrote, "In the classic disaster flick 'The Towering Inferno' partygoers ignored a fire in a storage room because they assumed it has been contained. Are investors making the same mistake with China?" He goes on to answer his question, saying, "Unlike three months ago, when investors were placing big bets that China's policymakers would pump cash into the economy to spur growth, the markets seem to have accepted the fact that sluggish growth for the world's second largest economy is its new normal."

Read it all here.

 

Chinese Generate Brain Cells From Urine

Writing in the journal Nature Methods, scientists from Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that they were able to reprogram the urine cells to become neural cells without passing through pluripotency. They did this with a clever technique which did not involve shuttling genes from genetically engineered viruses into the target cell. This seems to result in harmful mutations.

The report states that "eprogram epithelial-like cells from human urine into NPCs (hUiNPCs). These transgene-free hUiNPCs can self-renew and can differentiate into multiple functional neuronal subtypes and glial cells in vitro. Although functional in vivo analysis is still needed, we report that the cells survive and differentiate upon transplant into newborn rat brain.

China-USA Cooperation

By Karen Parrish
American Forces Press Service

BEIJING, Sept. 19, 2012 – Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping both said at the outset of a meeting here this morning that the secretary’s visit to China will advance cooperation between the two nations’ militaries.

Xi is widely considered as the top prospect to be China’s next president when the government transitions in 2013. He hosted Panetta at today’s meeting in the Great Hall of the People, just west of Tiananmen Square.

During a short open-media period at the beginning of the meeting, the vice president welcomed the secretary and said he believes Panetta’s visit “will be very helpful in further advancing the state-to-state and military-to-military relations between our two countries.”

Panetta responded that he is honored to visit China, as he was honored to host Xi at the Pentagon during the vice president’s visit to the United States in February. He added he appreciates Xi’s support in encouraging closer military coordination between the two countries.

“We are two great Pacific nations with common concerns,” the secretary said. “We want to begin what you have called a new new-model relationship, and we can begin with better military-to-military relations. I am confident that we will be able to improve our dialogue, our communication and our security together.”

Speaking to U.S. and Chinese reporters later in the day, the secretary said the vice president -- who had been out of the public eye for some weeks before last weekend, and whose health had been the subject of intense speculation -- had been “very engaged” during their meeting.

“We were scheduled to [meet] for about 45 minutes. We went a half hour or more beyond [that] in the discussion,” Panetta said.

The secretary said Xi impressed him at this meeting, as in their earlier Pentagon meeting, as someone who speaks frankly and “from the heart.”

Panetta said he was impressed with Xi’s directness and believes the vice president sincerely wants to work toward a better relationship with the United States.

Shortly after his meeting with Xi, the secretary gave a speech at the People’s Liberation Army Armored Forces’ engineering academy. He was the first defense secretary to visit the academy.

Before leaving China, Panetta is scheduled to visit the eastern port city of Qingdao, where he will meet with the commander of China’s North Sea Fleet.

Panetta began this trip to Asia, his third, with a stop in Japan, and will conclude the trip with a visit to New Zealand, the first by a U.S. defense secretary in 30 years.

China Crackdown on Organ Trafficking

Chinese police have arrested 137 people, including 18 doctors, in the latest crackdown on human organ trafficking. The Ministry of Public Security also said that 127 organ suppliers were rescued in raids in late July.

The suspects illegally recruited suppliers over the internet, facilitated the deals and made huge profits from the transactions, which had endangered the health of the suppliers and placed a heavy financial burden on the recipients. "The suspects usually used fake identities to recruit healthy candidates from the internet and put them under secret confinement separated from the outside world," a Ministry of Security statement said.


About 1.5 million Chinese are said to need organ transplants, but only around 10,000 are performed annually due to a lack of donors. The gap has generated an organ trafficking industry, which seems to flourish even though the sale of organs was declared illegal last year. ~ London Telegraph, Aug 5

Chinese Woman Saved 30 Abandoned Babies

A woman has been hailed a hero after details of her astonishing work with abandoned children has emerged.

Lou Xiaoying, now 88 and suffering from kidney failure, found and raised more than 30 abandoned Chinese babies from the streets of Jinhua, in the eastern Zhejiang province where she managed to make a living by recycling rubbish.

She and her late husband Li Zin, who died 17 years ago, kept four of the children and passed the others onto friends and family to start new lives.

Her youngest son Zhang Qilin - now aged just seven - was found in a dustbin by Lou when she was 82.


Read it all here.

Chinese Sages on Natural Law

The bitterest debates today in the public square often turn on what is "natural". The Chinese sages had a lot to say about this.

Zac Alstin 

A common argument against same-sex marriage is that it is ‘unnatural’. But without qualification, such an argument is pointless. What do people mean when they call something ‘unnatural’? Do they mean ‘unusual’, ‘abnormal’, or ‘ugh! I don’t like it!’? Do they mean ‘it doesn’t happen in the animal kingdom!’ or ‘it can’t happen without human interference!’? Perhaps they mean ‘it contains synthetic products!’ or ‘it was built in a factory!’?

As an ethicist, I draw on a system of ethics known as ‘Natural Law theory’. The theory dates back to Aristotle, was developed by Thomas Aquinas, and has, in recent decades undergone a resurgence and reinterpretation. So I have an interest in the use of the words ‘natural’ and ‘nature’ with regard to ethical issues. Unfortunately the confusion over these words is such that many people find the whole concept of Natural Law theory preposterous. (I know I did.) How can there be ‘laws of nature’ with regard to ethics? Isn’t the whole point that the freedom of the human will defies any laws of nature? If there were laws of nature regarding ethics, then surely we wouldn’t have any choice but to obey them?

Naturally, I want to set the record straight. Now please hold still while I correct you:

How vast is God, the ruler of men below! How arrayed in terrors is God, with many things irregular in his ordinations! Heaven gave birth to the multitudes of the people, but the nature it confers is not to be depended on. All are [good] at first, but few prove themselves to be so at the last.

Can you guess the origins of this quotation? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not biblical, it’s not Jewish; it’s not from the Middle East, but from the Far one. The text comes from the ancient Chinese Book of Odes, a collection of 311 poems dating from 1000 BC to 476 BC. This passage conveys an impression of God (Shang Di: the supreme Emperor) which might seem familiar to a Western audience. But the use of the word ‘nature’ is probably less familiar. The German Sinologist Richard Wilhelm explained this Chinese perspective well:

‘Man has received from heaven a nature innately good, to guide him in all his movements. By devotion to this divine spirit within himself, he attains an unsullied innocence that leads him to do right with instinctive sureness and without any ulterior thought of reward and personal advantage. This instinctive certainty brings about supreme success and "furthers through perseverance". However, not everything instinctive is nature in this higher sense of the word, but only that which is right and in accord with the will of heaven. Without this quality of rightness, an unreflecting, instinctive way of acting brings only misfortune. Confucius says about this: "He who departs from innocence, what does he come to? Heaven's will and blessing do not go with his deeds. "’

This concept of nature is by no means peculiar to Chinese thought. As the etymology shows: ‘nature’ comes from ‘natus’ meaning ‘born’, as in ‘the characteristics a person or thing is born with’. In the era of medieval philosophy the word took on its more abstract and refined connotations such as "essential qualities, innate disposition".

When we hear people claim that something is ‘unnatural’ they are (or ought to be) speaking in terms of the qualities or disposition that we are born with. But use of such terms as ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ in the present culture is often confused with a different philosophical notion of ‘nature’ as ‘the great outdoors’, ‘mother nature’, or ‘stuff animals do.’ This basic interpretation of nature simply defines it as everything that is not produced by human effort or ingenuity. A natural lake stands in contradistinction to a man-made lake. Natural light is distinguished from artificial light – the product of human artifice. This alternate meaning of ‘nature’ can also be embellished and romanticised such that the term ‘natural’ can even bestow a quasi-mystical form of approval; while describing something as ‘unnatural’ is to condemn it as somehow misbegotten, malformed, dangerous, or toxic.

So we have three closely related concepts, presented here in suspected order of development:

1. Nature as the essential qualities of a thing
2. Nature as distinct from human activity
3. Nature as a quasi-mystical force or principle

First, things have their own nature or essential qualities. Secondly, we observe that human beings have the ability to choose how they will act; our actions can either accord with, or conflict with our own essential qualities or nature. Humans have, for example, discovered that inhaling smoke into our lungs on a regular basis is not conducive to our health, even though it might feel good.

Not only can we act against our own nature, we can also subvert or alter other things against their own nature: thus we domesticate animals, make furniture from the wood of trees, cook food to make it more palatable, and so on. It is not, strictly speaking, in the nature of animals to behave domestically, nor of trees to act as tables, nor for various foods to be altered by the heat of cooking. Hence, we distinguish between ‘natural’ as the way things are without human interference, and ‘man-made’ or ‘artificial’ for those things whose properties are dependent upon human intervention.

Thirdly, this distinction between the world without human interference and the world with human interference has taken on a moral or quasi-mystical aspect. We have grown weary of our own artifice, and suspicious of the value of our interventions. A recent history of man-made disasters, the creation of toxic, radioactive, and otherwise dangerous substances, and even the aesthetic misery of many urban human environments have all contributed to the impression that the natural world is superior to that produced through human intervention. Natural wonders are achieving greater significance than man-made wonders. Natural processes from environmental management to childbirth are attributed an almost spiritual quality found lacking in more artificial processes. Rightly or wrongly, natural ingredients and products seem inherently favourable over synthetic or man-made ones. We feel nature can be trusted; human beings, not so much.

So what about human nature, the ‘essential qualities’ of a human being?

In the Chinese context, human nature puts us in a precarious position. Our own nature or ‘essential qualities’ are conferred by Heaven; even in modern Chinese the phrase for ‘nature’ with regard to innate human characteristics is where the first character stands for ‘heaven’ and the second stands more generically for ‘nature’, ‘character’ or ‘gender’. In fact the second character is itself composed of the character for ‘heart’, and the character for ‘birth’ or ‘to be born’, which, as we saw, correlates nicely with the Latin root of ‘nature’ being ‘natus’ meaning ‘born’. Human nature can be described as that which is in one’s heart from birth bestowed by heaven.

Nevertheless we read in the Book of Odes that “the nature it confers is not to be depended on [since] all are [good] at first, but few prove themselves to be so at the last.” In other words, despite the fact that our nature is good and is conferred by heaven, people still turn out bad in the end. This is because human beings have the freedom to choose: we can follow our nature for the good, or we can turn against it for ill.

As our German Sinologist elaborated: “not everything instinctive is nature in this higher sense of the word, but only that which is right and in accord with the will of heaven.” We find ourselves troubled by seemingly ‘natural’ desires that are in conflict with one another. Likewise we find ourselves desiring things that we know simply cannot be part of our nature. Hence the objective qualifier that we must act in accordance with the will of heaven, that which conferred our nature in the first place.

The theologically savvy may have noticed that these concepts rather neatly parallel the Judeo-Christian perspective in which human beings were created good by God, but have gone awry from the created order through disobedience to God’s will. But this particular interpretation of the human predicament is heavily laden with centuries of religious and cultural baggage. The apparent religious drama of clashing human and divine wills and personalities unfortunately lends itself to an indignant adolescent interpretation in which God is perceived to be a domineering father figure whom we loathe and fear; someone more powerful than us who implicitly demands our servility and stands in opposition to our individual desires. In the interests of avoiding such emotional trigger-words as ‘commandments’ ‘disobedience’ and ‘punishment’, let us instead examine the following analogy.  

Imagine you are a skilled robotic engineer, who has created a fully functional humanoid robot. Since you are also a fictional engineer, you have found it easily within your power to grant your robot the ability to pick and choose its own courses of action.

You install a list of guidelines for all the important things: remember to recharge regularly, do not immerse in water, do not drop, do not use if seal is broken, and so on. Of course, you could have ‘hardwired’ these instructions, but that would obviate the sheer coolness of a robot that has to decide not to drop itself repeatedly on its head, rather than being directly programmed not to. So although the robot has the ability to choose its own course of action, it is theoretically constrained by the nuances of its own nature.

Despite these instructions, the robot is still entirely capable of choosing to stand outside in the rain, drop itself from a height, or fail to recharge itself. If it ignores the instructions, it will be damaged. No need to talk about commands, punishments, or obedience.

This analogy illustrates the common points of the Chinese and Judeo-Christian view of human nature regarding our freedom to choose our own course of action. We have free will; we can use it however we like. But we are constrained by the logical limits of our own essential qualities. Tall people like me are constrained by stupidly low kitchen benches. Short people are constrained by wall cabinets placed at a reasonable height. One person cannot be both short and tall at the same time in the same way. We should therefore choose things that are suited to our nature.

In ethics, choosing things in accordance with our nature is known as ‘natural law’. Unfortunately, whenever an ethicist uses the term ‘natural law’ a certain proportion of his audience pictures an apple falling on Sir Isaac Newton’s head. We are used to hearing of ‘natural laws’ or ‘laws of nature’ in regard to physics rather than ethics. Yet it should come as no surprise to hear that human beings are subject to both physical laws as well as ethical ones. It is in the nature of human beings that our bodies are subject to the force of gravity; and we call this a physical law of nature. It is likewise in the nature of human beings that to choose to subject oneself to the force of gravity from a great height is not good for one’s continued survival, let alone one’s further flourishing. We call this an ethical law of human nature.

At this point, some are liable to object: how can it be an ethical law of nature, if we are free to break it? We aren’t free to break the law of gravity, after all.

But this objection misunderstands what the law is about. The ethical law does not say “You cannot throw yourself off a building”, rather it says “suicide is incompatible with human flourishing” and leaves you to work out for yourself the implications with regard to falling from a great height.

This is why human beings come undone. We are free to choose our course of action, yet we ought to heed the constraints of our own nature, our essential qualities. Instead, we desire things that cut against the grain of our nature. We find ourselves adapting to habits, beliefs, cravings, yearnings, a whole way of life with no foundation in human nature or the way of heaven. This is the predicament identified by the Chinese philosophers.

Another ancient Chinese text, the Book of Rites, depicts the tragedy of human existence under the power of unregulated desire:

‘Now there is no end of the things by which man is affected; and when his likings and dislikings are not subject to regulation (from within), he is changed into the nature of things as they come before him; that is, he stifles the voice of Heavenly principle within, and gives the utmost indulgence to the desires by which men may be possessed. On this we have the rebellious and deceitful heart, with licentious and violent disorder. The strong press upon the weak; the many are cruel to the few; the knowing impose upon the dull; the bold make it bitter for the timid; the diseased are not nursed; the old and young, orphans and solitaries are neglected - such is the great disorder that ensues.’

The remedy, laid out in the very beginning of the Book of Rites, is a simple yet profound prescription:

'Pride should not be allowed to grow; the desires should not be indulged; the will should not be gratified to the full; pleasure should not be carried to excess.'

Our culture has known this prescription for thousands of years; yet at certain times including our contemporary culture, its guidance has been ignored. Our modern culture conflates this guidance with the negative image of our religious history as a repressive, domineering force. We are now quietly encouraged to let our pride grow, to indulge our desires, to gratify our will to the full and carry pleasure to excess; all under the auspices of rebellion against false religious servility.  

Zac Alstin works at the Southern Cross Bioethics Institute in Adelaide, South Australia. From here.

Related reading:  Barack Obama on Natural Law; Natural Law and the Political Animal

Obama Slams Door on Chinese Dissidents

The shining city on a hill slams its doors

Constance Kong | 7 May 2012

A “no vacancy” sign has been posted on the gates of the US Embassy and its consulates in China. Two high profile Chinese individuals seeking political asylum – one a blind dissident, the other a government official fearing for his life -- have been turned away in recent months. Washington has shamefully placed its economic jitters above the principles upon which the land of the free and home of the brave was founded.

Sure, a deal has been brokered to allow blind human rights activist Chen Guangcheng to leave China to study in the US, if he chooses. But before that deal was cut, US Embassy officials drove Chen, who had been at the Embassy for six days, to a local hospital and left him there alone to obtain treatment for a leg that had been injured during his daring escape from house arrest and a 500 km journey to find sanctuary in Beijing. Chen later contacted friends who posted to social media sites that he feared for his life in the absence of the US officials.

The other would-be asylum seeker turned away by the US government in recent months was Wang Lijun, the Chongqing chief of police. In February, fearing for his life, Wang had driven some 300 kilometres from Chongqing to the US consulate in Chengdu to ask for political asylum. Wang supposedly had information to trade about his boss, the now deposed Chongqing Communist Party Secretary-General Bo Xi Lai.

He had been investigating Bo’s wife Gu Kailai, a high-profile international lawyer, for possible involvement in the murder of one of her business partners, a British national, Neil Heywood. After spending a night in the US consulate, Wang left the next morning and surrendered to the police who had surrounded the consulate. He hasn’t been heard of since but is said to be enjoying “resort-style treatment” in Beijing.

While the US claims it did not force or try to persuade the two men to leave, it is unlikely that either would have left of his own volition. It seems more likely that they entered the darkness of the Chinese legal system because their families had been threatened.  

Three factors probably influenced the US attitude towards the two fugitives.

The first was diplomacy. Just before Chen’s unannounced arrival,  Mrs Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner arrived for the Sino-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue. A messy diplomatic quarrel would have spoiled important negotiations on geopolitical and trade issues. Persuading Chen and Wang not to defect would have been a high priority for the Obama Administration. Washington may have achieved several wins in those talks (eg, promises to further open its automotive insurance sector to foreign investment and to allow greater foreign investment into its stocks and bonds) because US diplomats had shoved the two incidents off the agenda.

The second factor is money. Growing commercial links make it increasingly difficult for Washington to give Beijing lectures on human rights. China is now the US’s largest trading partner. Additionally China is one of the largest holders of US treasury bonds –US$1.1 trillion. Neither of the troublemakers affected US strategic interests. Wang was a relatively lowly official and Chen was a mere human rights campaigner. America had nothing to gain and much to lose by protecting them.

The third factor is cynical pragmatism.  America wants to deter other people from scaling the gates of its missions in China. Until now, many Chinese regarded the US as the only nation which would stand up to their authoritarian government. By turning Wang and Chen out into the cold, Washington has sent a powerful signal that there is no room in the inn. Defectors and dissidents have been scratched from the invitation list which was once extended to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”.

Times have changed. Back in the days of the Cold War, defectors and dissidents from the Soviet Union were welcomed. But in the 1980s the fight was ideological and the Soviet Union was an expansionist power. China, despite its socialist rhetoric, is not an ideologically driven expansionist power. It does not seek to impose its political and economic structure on the rest of the world the way the USSR did. Nowadays State Department apparatchiks are reluctant to risk trade and security ties over a few unknown dissidents.

While it is likely that Republican candidate for president, Mitt Romney, will exploit this incident in his campaign, don’t expect him to behave differently. Ronald Reagan negotiated the release of the famous refusenik Anatoly Scharansky from the Soviet gulag. But those days are over. As President, Romney would be lobbied by the foreign policy establishment against “rash actions” which would jeopardise American trade.

But they forget that cynicism jeopardises something more important, America’s honour. People like Chen Guangcheng speak truth to power. Their ideals of democracy, freedom and human rights resonate with the American people. By ignoring dissidents in China – and in other nations suffering under oppressive regimes – isn’t America in danger of repudiating the ideals of its founding fathers? Secretary Clinton and President Obama talk the talk of human rights but they don’t walk the walk.

The US is looking like a nation with double standards. Allies in Asia must be wondering whether it will support them if they are threatened by China.  Although the US held joint naval exercises with the Philippines last month to demonstrate its solidarity against China’s claims to islands in the South China Sea, the treaty between the US and the Philippines is so vaguely worded that there is no guarantee that American warships will come to Manila’s aid in a real conflict. A fair weather friend is not what the region needs as China continues to increase its military budget year-after-year to further enhance the world’s largest standing military force.

America’s treatment of Chen shows that it is no longer Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill”, a beacon to freedom. It is time for America to stand up for its principles again. To do this at a time when so much is at stake commercially will take true courage. America needs a president made of sterner stuff than Barack Obama.

Constance Kong is the pen name of a Shanghai-based business consultant.

Blind Chinese Dissenter Fights Mandatory Abortion

Chen Guangcheng, the “barefoot lawyer" has exposed one of China’s most hideous human rights abuses and he has challenged the Obama administration to truly make human rights – in the President’s words -- "a core national security interest and core moral responsibility."

Chen may be blind; he may be poorly educated; he may be a peasant – but he has outsmarted the world’s two most powerful governments. Neither of them wanted the one-child policy exposed to the glare of the world media. But now it is being discussed around the globe.

Forty-year-old Chen is a man of remarkable courage and intelligence. Blind almost from birth, he was raised on classic tales of courageous heroes fighting corrupt officials. He came from a poor family and only began school when he was 17.

In 1996 he began to lobby for rights for the disabled in Shandong Province, about 500 kilometres south of Beijing. He was so successful as a “barefoot lawyer” that local people took their grievances to him. He gained a national reputation by leading protests against illegal taxes, polluters, and discrimination against the disabled.

Local officials had already started harassing him when he launched a protest against illegal implementation of the one-child policy. He documented abuses and worked with victims and lawyers to organise a class-action suit against family planning officials in 2005. This failed, but his reputation grew.

Then local officials revenged themselves. They charged him with "wilfully damaging public property and organising a mob to disturb traffic". In 2006 he was sentenced to jail for four years.

In 2010 Chen was released but, together with his wife and son, he remained under illegal and sometimes brutal house arrest. Making his guards look like a bunch of Keystone Cops, Chen escaped on the night of April 22. Supporters drove him to Beijing.

From his hiding place Chen has released a YouTube appeal to Premier Wen Jiabao asking that officials who attacked his family be prosecuted and that the government prosecute corruption cases according to the law. Appealing to the law may seem quixotic, but if the draconian family planning laws had just been obeyed to the letter, women would have been spared some of the horror of forced abortions and sterilizations.

Horror is not too strong a word. Activist Annie Jing Zhang, of Women’s Rights in China, told a US Congressional hearing in 2009 that some towns display slogans like “Pregnancy with permit”, “When you are required by policy to get abortion, but if you don't, your house will be destroyed, your buffalo will be confiscated”, “Abort it, kill it, terminate it. You just cannot give birth to it” or “We would rather to have blood flow like a river than to allow one extra baby to be born”.
Chen ends his YouTube appeal by saying:

“Premier Wen, many people don’t understand these illegal actions. Is it the local Party officials who are disobeying the laws, or do they have the support of the central government? I think that in the near future, you must give the public a clear answer. If we have a thorough investigation and tell the truth to the public, the results will be self-evident. If you continue to ignore this, what will the public think?”

Chen’s audacious ploy discomfits the US as well. Although President Obama recently set up an Atrocities Prevention Board, his administration has been reluctant to question the notorious one-child policy of its biggest trading partner. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters in 2009 that human rights shouldn’t interfere with practical concerns:

"Successive administrations and Chinese governments have been poised back and forth on these issues, and we have to continue to press them. But our pressing on those issues can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis, and the security crisis."

And Vice-President Joe Biden gave a speech at Sichuan University last year in which he spoke so diplomatically about the one-child policy that he seemed to be endorsing it: “Your policy has been one which I fully understand -- I’m not second-guessing -- of one child per family”.

Now it’s time for the Obama Administration to show some courage of its own in standing up for Chen and his family. Essentially his demands are modest. All he wants is the protection of Chinese law. Even his activism against the one-child policy has been focused on getting officials to observe the informed consent enshrined in the law, not to overturn it.

Besides, it is possible that reformers in the upper echelons of the Communist Party like Wen Jiabao actually welcome Chen’s move. The hardline chief of security, Zhou Yongkang, who orchestrated the persecution of Chen, has already been rattled by the purging of party princeling Bo Xilai. Sympathy for Chen weakens his own position.

In any case, it is becoming increasingly clear that the one-child has been a disaster for China, as The Economist recently pointed out. China’s burden of elderly is growing, and the proportion of younger tax-payers is shrinking. Already there are labour shortages. Notwithstanding its current strength, China is a country which will grow old before it grows rich. Chen is a reminder not only of his government’s brutality but its folly in defying the laws of economic growth.

Chen Guangcheng’s fate now depends upon negotiations between two governments who both wish that he would step under a truck. But there is a way to support him. Nominate him for the 30th anniversary of the United Nations Population Award “outstanding contributions to increasing the awareness of population questions”.

In the past the prize has been given to odious family planning apparatchiks and to dictators like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Indonesian President Suharto. Its inaugural recipients, in 1983, were Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, after her notorious campaign for forced sterilization in the 1970s, and Qian Xinzhong, an architect of China’s one-child policy.

An avalanche of nominations for Chen Guangcheng would show that the world has finally repudiated one of the most despicable, senseless violations of human rights ever implemented by a government against its own people. Click on this link to download an official nomination form.


Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

Obama: No Comment on Chinese Dissident

April 30, 2012
Kent Klein | White House

President Barack Obama avoided comment on Monday when asked by reporters whether the United States would offer political asylum to an escaped Chinese dissident. The president and visiting Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda held a news conference after meeting at the White House.

With high-level U.S.-China talks set to start on Thursday in Beijing, the president sidestepped the delicate issue of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng.

The blind lawyer fled house arrest last week and is reported to have entered the protection of U.S. diplomats in Beijing.

Obama would not confirm that Chen is under U.S. protection or that American and Chinese diplomats are trying to negotiate an agreement for him to receive asylum.

“Obviously, I am aware of the press reports on the situation in China, but I am not going to make a statement on the issue. What I would like to emphasize is that every time we meet with China, the issue of human rights comes up,” he said.

Analysts say the issue could have implications beyond the upcoming strategic and economic talks between Washington and Beijing. China has been cooperating with the United States on global economic issues, working to discourage North Korea and Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and trying to prevent a war between Sudan and South Sudan.

Obama and Noda criticized North Korea’s recent failed missile launch. The president said he has tried to ensure that Pyongyang is punished for provocative behavior.

“The old pattern of provocation that then gets attention and somehow insists on the world purchasing good behavior from them - that that pattern is broken. What we said is that the more you engage in provocative acts, the more isolated you will become,” said Obama.

The Japanese leader said North Korea’s action undermined efforts to resolve the situation peacefully. Noda also called on the international community to work together to discourage Pyongyang from conducting nuclear tests.

Both leaders highlighted their agreement to move about 9,000 U.S. Marines from the Japanese island of Okinawa to other locations in the Pacific region.

Obama praised Noda and the Japanese people for their country’s recovery from the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that struck Japan more than a year ago. Noda thanked Americans for their support.

China Playing Both Sides on N. Korea

China has recently joined with other countries in condemning North Korea for a failed missile launch earlier this month. It was a rare public rebuke of its internationally isolated ally, leading many to closely scrutinize whether Beijing’s policies toward Pyongyang are shifting.

This week U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said China has provided some assistance to North Korea’s missile program, possibly violating U.N. sanctions on the country.

Beijing has denied the allegations, but Panetta says that China must do more to bring North Korea to the negotiating table.

"We've made very clear to China that China has a responsibility here to make sure that North Korea -- if they want to improve the situation with their people, if they want to become a part of the international family, if they, in fact, want to deal with the terrible issues that are confronting North Korea, there's a way to do that," he said. "And China ought to be urging them to engage in those kinds of diplomatic negotiations. We thought we were making some progress and suddenly we're back at provocation."

Read it all here.

American Colleges and Universities Mimic China

Alice C. Linsley


China has seen an increase in the number of universities and the focus has been on increasing the nation's wealth and power through science, engineering, and business management.

In 2008, a Thousand Talents program began recruiting established scientists everywhere under age 55 with lucrative grants and salaries to work in China. This year, Chinese officials rolled out the Young Thousand Talents program, with generous offers to attract even younger scientists.

In the past 15 years the number of Chinese universities has grown, and the number of degrees in science and technology has soared.  An estimated 1.5 million science and engineering students graduated in 2006. An official of the China Association for Science and Technology said recently, "The Chinese culture has a high respect for education, and families want their child to have a PhD, and will invest almost every coin they have in their child's education..."

One Chinese professor reports, "Among all the universities, only we have an anthropology department." There are about 20 students in that degree program and without government funding this program has little chance of survival. 

The Humanities and Social Sciences have fallen on hard times in China. That trend has taken hold of American Universities and colleges also. Physical sciences, engineering, and business receive bulk of foundation and government grants, and qualified people enjoy top salaries in both the public and private sectors.

I've experienced this trend personally.  For the past 10 years I have taught Philosophy, Ethics and World Religions at a women's college in central Kentucky. There are fewer and fewer courses for me to teach because the college has dedicated all resources to science, nursing, business, equestrian management and professional education degrees. Not a single course in Anthropology has been offered at the college in 10 years. Though I have been pioneering Biblical Anthropology for over 30 years and have over 600 publications in the field, I have not been asked to teach a single Anthropology class in 38 years of teaching.

This trend may be a conservative reaction to the more liberal and leftist tone of Humanities and Social Science professors, as well as a response to an economy that is not generating jobs.  It is impossible to know what the effects of this trend will be for future generations of Americans, but it is certain that as a nation we will be less educated and more more vulnerable to government regimentation and propaganda.  Is America following China's lead in education?


Related reading:  Should China Be Our Model in Higher Education?

China Warns US about Militarism in Asia

China's state media organization published an editorial Friday warning the United States on its plan to reshape and refocus its military. China's message: the U.S. shouldn't start "flexing its muscles" in the region.

The editorial in Xinhua takes issue with Obama's announcement that the military would be "strengthening" its presence in the Asia-Pacific region, even as it reduces its overall size and budget over the next 10 years. For more on the shifting focus of the U.S. military as announced yesterday, see this AP story.

The Xinhua editorial essentially tells the U.S. to play nice. Here's an excerpt:

The United States is welcome to make more contribution to peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region, but its possible militarism will cause a lot of ill will and meet with strong opposition in the world's most dynamic region.

Read more here.

China's Space Ambitions

China is shooting for the moon in an effort to become a major player in the long-dormant space race.

A newly released five-year plan outlines Beijing's goals of developing new rockets, satellites, and embarking on deep-space navigation. Longer-term, the aim is to have a global satellite-positioning system in place, construct a space station, and eventually to put a man on the moon.

Clean-burning fuels will power its next-generation rockets, which will launch heavy cargos into space, according to details of the program released by the government this week.

China's space program has already made major breakthroughs in a relatively short time. In 2003, it became the third country to launch its own astronaut -- known as a "Taikonaut" -- into space, and five years later, completed a spacewalk.

Despite the advances, in terms of experience China lags far behind the United States and Russia, which engaged in a Cold War-era "Space Race" for decades.

But while the emphasis on space has waned in those countries, China has placed a premium on the development of its space industry, which is seen as a symbol of national prestige.

Wang Xuhui, a senior scientist at China's Institute of Aerospace System Science and Engineering, contributed to writing the report, known as a "white paper."

"It is a powerful policy. The new edition of the 'white paper' issued today reaffirms China's aim and principle of [the] peaceful use of outer space," Wang said.

"It helps people to fully understand our policy; [and thus] reduce misunderstandings and enhance mutual trust."

Some elements of China's program, notably the firing of a ground-based missile into one of its dead satellites four years ago, have alarmed U.S. officials and others, who fear the militarization of the space race.

That the program is run by the military has made the United States reluctant to cooperate with China in space, even though the latter insists its program is purely for peaceful ends.


Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/china_ reveals_space_plan/24438267.html

Pakistan-China Military Drills

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army soldiers and Pakistani commandos from the Special Service Group (SSG) participated in a joint military exercise in Jhelum as part of a Pakistan-China anti-terrorist drill.

AP Photo
Source:  Pakistan Dawn

While watching the military exercises between Pakistan and China, General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani said Pakistan and China had no differences over matters of security.

Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Kayani said that military cooperation between Pakistan and China was not aimed against any country.

He further said that Pakistan and China’s army relations were not based on aggression against a particular country.

Not only do the countries have strong diplomatic ties but relations at the people-to-people level are also sound, Kayani said.

Senate Bringing Pressure on China

The Senate on Tuesday approved a bill that would put greater U.S. pressure on China and other countries to allow their currency to appreciate, giving the green light to a measure that supporters say would level the playing field with China but that both the White House and House Republican leaders have warned could lead to a trade war.

The chamber approved the measure on a 63-to-35 vote. The next step remains uncertain; House Republican leaders have declined to bring the measure up for a vote, arguing that the White House must first formally make its position known.

Read the story here.

UN's Flawed Fertility Figures

NEW YORK, August 25 (C-FAM) The UN has reversed a decade of speculation about a demographic winter in the West, and now says that every country will achieve replacement fertility by 2100 resulting in a global population of 10 billion. The problem is there is no basis for their turnabout.

UN agencies are hailing new numbers as evidence of overpopulation in the developing world and vindication of decades of anti-natal policies in the West, but the scientific basis of the latest UN forecasts is slim.

The most significant change in the UN’s new numbers is an increase in the predicted convergence rate from 1.85 children per woman, below replacement, to 2.1, about replacement fertility.

While the UN claims there is consensus on the matter, demographers have long argued that there is no evidence to support the assumption that global fertility will ever converge, and no basis for the assertion that all nations go through three phases of demographic change: from declining birth rates where most developing nations are today, to below replacement rates experienced by all developed countries except the US, and finally to recovery at near replacement rates which a few Northern European countries have achieved.

Adherents to the recovery hypothesis say that the dip in European fertility rates may be due to women’s delaying childbearing. But as a new RAND study points out, “changes in birth timing can affect short-term birthrates” but “the effects are mild, and the result of delay can be permanent for the population as a whole even if not permanent for any one woman.”

In terms of youth 15-24 years old entering the workforce or military, the new figures would mean that India’s much-anticipated demographic advantage over China would be curtailed. India would have 75 million fewer youth by 2050, and 324 million fewer by 2100, while China would gain 26 million more than previously expected.

Germany’s share of youth in 2050 would rise from a projected 8.5 percent to 10 percent of its population according to the new UN forecast, more than doubling the number of youth previously predicted by 2100. Likewise, the number of Russian youth would be more than twice existing projections, and Japan’s share of youth would jump from just 7.7 percent in 2050 to 10.4 percent in 2100.

In sharp contrast, governments remain pessimistic. Recent reports from the European Commission and the Japanese government, for example, assume that fertility will remain near today’s levels which are about 1.3 in Japan, and 1.4 in Germany.

To achieve the dramatically new fertility predictions, the UN Population Division created a “probabilistic model” that uses high capacity computing to run 100,000 of fertility scenarios for each country.

While this new model gives a patina of greater scientific accuracy, it is based upon an arbitrary and unsubstantiated fertility rate. Just because demographers now have the capability of churning out many thousands of scenarios for each country studied does not mean the result is scientific.

Policy analysts would do well to reject the UN one-size-fits-all fertility projections and rely instead on data accounting for the various national factors contributing to desired family size.

 From here.

Related reading:  UN Population Data and Global Power