The Slaughter
Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China's Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem
-
-
3.3 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $24.99
-
- $24.99
Publisher Description
The inside story of China's organtransplant business and its macabre connection with internment camps and killing fields for arrested dissidents, especially the adherents of Falun Gong.Mass murder is alive and well. That is the stark conclusion of this comprehensive investigation into the Chinese state's secret program to get rid of political dissidents while profiting from the sale of their organs--in many cases to Western recipients. Based on interviews with top-ranking police officials and Chinese doctors who have killed prisoners on the operating table, veteran China analyst Ethan Gutmann has produced a riveting insider's account--culminating in a death toll that will shock the world. Why would the Chinese leadership encourage such a dangerous perversion of their medical system? To solve the puzzle, Gutmann journeyed deep into the dissident archipelago of Falun Gong, Tibetans, Uighurs and House Christians, uncovering an ageless drama of resistance, eliciting confessions of deep betrayal and moments of ecstatic redemption. In an age of compassion fatigue, Gutmann relies on one simple truth: those who have made it back from the gates of hell have stories to tell. And no matter what baggage the reader may bring along, their preconceptions of China will not survive the trip.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gutmann's account of China's repugnant practice of harvesting organs from prisoners is a vital step toward exposing a state-sanctioned practice. A Brookings analyst turned journalist, Gutmann (Losing the New China) delves into the industrialization of organ harvesting from not-quite-dead prisoners as they are executed. This practice coincided with the rise of Falun Gong, a Buddhist revival movement that grew to huge proportions by the late 1990s, spurring a crackdown by the Communist Party. Gutmann explores the hideous economics of selling healthy prisoners' organs to citizens, as well as to foreigners traveling to China for "transplant tourism," on a "kill to order" basis (organs taken from a live patient have a lower rejection rate). In interviews with former prisoners, doctors, ex-policemen, and human rights activists, Gutmann shows how this practice has been obscured, in part because Falun Gong lost its public relations battle for Western media sympathy. Though the author's scrupulousness costs this complicated, murky story vital narrative cohesion, his analysis of how China gulled the rest of the world is astute, and effectively shows that hiding the fate of Falun Gong prisoners is a "denial of an outright atrocity."
Customer Reviews
Boring
Long, monotonous, read more like a novel of the resistance than it did the actual factual details of the organ procurement. This book reminded me more of a fictional novel.