China: Harvesting Skin of the Executed for Cosmetics Exports
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The debate is endless.
Is China an economic partner or a strategic adversary with regards to America? Countless hours are dedicated to determining the nature of the relationship. Yet, at the end of the day, it should boil down to basic principle amidst all of the nuanced and persuasive arguments.
China, or more accurately it's Chinese Communist Party dictatorship and the environment it cultivates, is a Moral Adversary.
Exhibit 'A': Skin of Executed Prisoners Harvested for Cosmetics Exports
A Chinese cosmetics company is using skin harvested from the corpses of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in Europe, an investigation by the Guardian has discovered.Agents for the firm have told would-be customers it is developing collagen for lip and wrinkle treatments from skin taken from prisoners after they have been shot. The agents say some of the company's products have been exported to the UK, and that the use of skin from condemned convicts is "traditional" and nothing to "make such a big fuss about".
But wait, there's more.
When formally approached by the Guardian, the agent denied the company was using skin harvested from executed prisoners. However, he had already admitted it was doing precisely this during a number of conversations with a researcher posing as a Hong Kong businessman. The Press Complaints Commission's code of practice permits subterfuge if there is no other means of investigating a matter of public interest.The agent told the researcher: "A lot of the research is still carried out in the traditional manner using skin from the executed prisoner and aborted foetus." This material, he said, was being bought from "bio tech" companies based in the northern province of Heilongjiang, and was being developed elsewhere in China.
Not done yet...
For added measure and further solidifying the argument that China's CCP (and therfore China today) is a Moral Adversary:
Speaking from his office in northern China, he added: "The government has put some pressure on all the medical facilities to keep this type of work in low profile."
They know the act of harvesting human skin from killed prisoners and aborted fetuses is reprehensible. Hence the orders for silence.
One struggles to rid the images of lampshades from the skin of Jews in Nazi concentration camps after that chilling revelation about Chinese government's demand of silence. In the years since World War II, the images that define it are not of bombing runs, Panzer blitzes or even, arguably, the hallowed beaches of Normandy. The images that define World War II to this day are those of the prison camps, the gas chambers, and the piles of gold fillings.
Personally, the most powerful image for me was not of any of the above, but rather one of a simple looking lamp...made of the skin of an executed Jew. That image has remained powerfully ingrained in me since that damp, rainy rural Central Illinois day in junior high school.
The above image shows, in addition to the lamp that had the greatest personal impact, organs in containers and tattooed skin fancied more for covering frames than for covering the flesh of the human being on which it once grew. In Nazi Germany, and sprawled throughout Europe, Jews were sentenced to death en masse, their shattered bodies harvested of what was of use or value before being discarded.
The world stood repulsed. Sickened. Ashamed.
Today, in China, those sentenced to death by courts or aborted in clinics are similarly harvested. In this instance, it is for their skin's value in, of all things, the Chinese cosmetics industry.
While no opponent of the death penalty for extreme crimes such as child molestation, it must be stated plainly that death can have no incentive, beyond justice, such as this.
Can there be any question that the Chinese CCP is itself a reprehensible Moral Adversary?
Death must have no incentive beyond justice.