Are the Chinese going us one better?

In the United States, advocates of fetal stem cell research favor the use of human embroyos, in effect, for spare parts. But the Chinese seem to have gone us one better. Their government is profiting handsomely by the international sale of adult human organs. Where they come from is a matter of international concern.

One doctor reportedly told a potential customer that his hospital had ten "beating hearts" currently available for transplant.

China- ruled by history's most murderous regime- is also one of the world's most closed societies. As a result, verification of the persistent reports that China is murdering members of the Falun Gong sect and selling their internal organs on the international market is very difficult. A matter of weeks, for example, after Chinese dissidents began reporting that inmates (or "patients," as the PRC and its apologists would prefer) were being transferred from the closely-guarded hospital at Sunjiatun- where the involuntary harvesting of the organs of members of the persecuted sect was reputed to be happening on a large scale- to a number of smaller, widely-scattered harvesting sites all over the country, the Chinese government consented to throw the facility open to international inspection.

Surprise! "Ain't nobody here but us sick people." PRC officials and their apologists insisted that the reports had been disproven. Of course, they had not. But in a society as closed as China's, such matters are not easily investigated without the open cooperation of the government. Which, of course, it is not inclined to give- whether out of guilt, or simply the instincts of a totalitarian society in which information is carefully controlled as a matter of principle.

But there is absolutely no doubt that the Chinese are making money hand over fist by selling an unseemly number of internal organs to rich people in foreign lands. Despite the difficulty of obtaining documentary evidence in such a rigidly-controlled totalitarian society, Canadian human rights activists are convinced that the practice of executing people for their organs is indeed going on in China.

The official posture of the United States government is that it is "concerned" both about the persecution of the Falun Gong (concerning which there can be no doubt, any more than there can be honest doubt about Chinese persecution of Christians who meet in private homes rather than attending services in the State-run Chinese puppet churches), and about the persistent reports of involuntary organ harvesting.

This is not a question the State Department- or the world- should allow to go away without better evidence than a conveniently-timed, staged visit to a previously secretive hospital.