…I’m posting this scathing piece that I worked on with high-level North Korean defector Kim Kwang Jin. Written earlier this year, it’s a serious economic analysis with a very grim prognosis for the future of North Korea. Not for the casual browser.

CONGRESSMAN PITTS. “Madam Speaker, an article in last Monday’s Weekly Standard  reveals the systematic execution and harvesting of organs in China’s prisons. The article provides firsthand accounts of the targeted elimination of religious prisoners, prisoners of conscience, and political opponents of the regime. Minorities, including Falun Gong, Uyghurs, House Christians, and Tibetans have been executed, followed by organ transplant surgeries—some being performed while the victims are still alive, numbering in the tens of  thousands.

Furthermore, foreign companies are already making investments to benefit off of the thriving organ transplant market. Pharmaceutical companies like Roche and Isotechnika Pharma have been involved in clinical drug testing of transplant patients. A British firm, TFP Ryder Healthcare, is proposing a medical facility that would include an organ transplant center. Before they follow suit, U.S. companies must understand the unethical climate that exists in China. And our State Department and the U.N. must treat these actions as an abuse of China’s international agreements and human rights of their own people.”

Links and emphasis added. See the full Congressional record here. And a big fat shout-out to Arne Schwarz’s seminal research on Western companies trying to profit off of Chinese genocide. And finally, don’t forget to vote!

Photo by Simon Gross/3 Lotus Media

THE XINJIANG PROCEDURE

I received permission to extract my review from behind the National Review paywall. Thanks guys, I appreciate that.  Now I’m passing the savings on to you.

Reluctant Dragon – Ethan Gutmann reviews Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, by Ezra F. Vogel.

Over the past few decades, an increasing number of scholars have come to interpret Western history less as a linear progression and more as a periodic cycle punctuated by crises, of which our current economic disaster is the most recent. Yet even in the realist precincts of social science, some still long for a classic narrative structure, progressive motion, and world-historical heroes.

They have had slim pickings. In the early 1980s, attention fell briefly, unsatisfactorily, on Japan. As Japan’s growth flatlined, and the once-promising Soviet Union dissolved, the hero-meter edged toward China. Given China’s meteoric rise since that time, the needle has had little reason to wander. Employing projections from Chinese trajectories, academia generates serial predictions of China’s dominating the century, while interpretations of recent Chinese history bend slightly to explain and meet those projections. And for those who believe in the current and historical narrative of China’s linear progress, there is no greater patron saint than Deng Xiaoping.

Not without reason: Any Western academic who depends on access to Chinese officials and archives, any businessman who profits from China exports, must acknowledge a debt to the man who, at great personal risk, tirelessly, singlehandedly at times, tore down Mao’s barriers to the West. For many China hands and expats who actually witnessed the Chinese transformation from Mao to the present it became the defining event of their lives — to observe, to support, to participate in the mass-scale redemption of a great people. (I defy anyone who visits China to remain completely immune to that awe, excitement, and optimism.) Finally, for much of the Chinese elite and for a fair amount of poorer-but-patriotic young Chinese, Deng is the Ur-stone, the starting point where China finally stood up — for real this time — cast shame and fear aside, and began implementing its 19th-century nationalist dream of becoming a rich country with a strong army.

Ezra F. Vogel, emeritus professor at Harvard and former director of Harvard’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, has written a formidable biography that should please all of these audiences. In his preface — 24 pages acknowledging most major China hands, the D.C. policy crowd, a vast multitude of Chinese officials and Deng princelings, along with a sprinkling of dissidents for flavor — the comprehensiveness of Vogel’s interviews and archival research is presented as iron-clad. The result, laid out in 714 pages, not including appendices and footnotes, does not disappoint, nor does Vogel’s subject:

“On August 18, 1980, a Chinese citizen gave one of the most biting and comprehensive criticisms of Chinese officials made during the entire Deng Era. In scathing terms, he accused them of abusing power; divorcing themselves from reality and the masses; spending time and effort putting up impressive fronts; indulging in empty talk; sticking to rigid ways of thinking; overstaffing administrative organs; being dilatory, inefficient, and irresponsible; failing to keep their word; circulating documents endlessly without solving problems; shifting responsibility to others; assuming the air of mandarins; reprimanding and attacking others at every turn; suppressing democracy; deceiving superiors and subordinates; being arbitrary and despotic and practicing favoritism; offering bribes; and participating in other corrupt practices. The citizen? Deng Xiaoping.”

Is it possible for any businessman — Western or Chinese — who has dealt with the Chinese bureaucracy to read that paragraph without grinning in pure joy? How remarkable that, 31 years on, under Vogel’s hand, Deng still has that electrifying effect. Yet there is one serious caveat: Vogel, an unerringly powerful and reasonable writer, admires his subject to the point where he finds himself hewing to the straight Communist-party line at unexpected moments — a bit the way Deng, near the end, found himself defending horrific decisions with rancid dogma. In short, this is a great — and somewhat flawed — book about a great — and deeply flawed — leader.

Vogel focuses on Deng’s top-down transformation of China, but does not neglect Deng’s personal history: his early radicalization, his ascent in the party during the Guomindang and Japanese wars, his famous ups and downs in accordance with the whims of the mercurial Mao, and his brilliant rise to power over the hapless Hua Guofeng. Throughout, Vogel uncovers scattered premonitions of the China that Deng would create.

For example, Deng’s brief experience in France not only gave him convictions, and possibly contributed to his eventual genius in foreign relations, but also brought home to him China’s backwardness and spurred his belief that China should study foreign ways. One of Deng’s first acts when he came to power was to force his officials to see the West for themselves, thus creating a political consensus for allowing foreign investment in China’s Special Economic Zones. As a young Communist operative, Deng also lived in the Soviet Union briefly during the 1920s New Economic Policy, a form of state capitalism. Deng would promote a similar model during the 1980s: dissolving the collectives, while declaring family farms “socialist” — i.e., kosher for Communists — and quietly releasing the entrepreneurial energy of household businesses. Deng was disarmingly straightforward on the macro level: Socialism does not mean poverty, he said, although “some will get rich first.”

Deng’s authoritarianism was also evident early on: In 1926, he was writing that “centralized power flows from the top down. It is absolutely necessary to obey the directions from above.” Later, he would speak of democracy within the Chinese Communist Party, and, in 1978, he briefly supported Beijing’s Democracy Wall — a place where citizens could put up posters criticizing the government. But as the posters grew more daring — attacking Mao, and even Deng himself — he ensured Wei Jingsheng’s arrest and the fall of the Democracy Wall. Vogel quotes a provincial official: “Lord Ye loved looking at a book with pretty pictures of dragons . . . but when a real dragon appeared, he was terrified.”

By 1987, intraparty democracy was nowhere to be seen and Deng simplified his original equation: “Do not yield to the feelings for democracy.” Vogel’s evidence suggests that when Deng had spoken of political reform, it had largely been a reaction to Mao. Deng subsequently deemed the legal system capable of preventing a single individual from dominating, and thus he had no use for the checks and balances of democracy. As political freedoms evaporated under Deng’s revised constitution, he launched a nationwide campaign against spiritual pollution, followed by another against bourgeois liberalization. He introduced the one-child policy, with its mass abortions, sterilizations, and predictable female infanticide. In addition, Deng made it clear that he would not become “China’s Khrushchev” by delegitimizing Mao’s memory. While Deng would restore politically suspect Chinese officials, the demons of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution would go unpurged — and they burn in the Chinese psyche today. If the temple of Marxism was now neglected, he enshrined Chinese patriotism in its place. Those who followed Deng stuck with the template.

Vogel believes that Deng ultimately had no ideological objections to private enterprise and accepted competition as its driving force, but was determined to keep the Communist Party in control. Vogel’s personal support for Deng’s approach finds its way into the text. For example, commenting on the influx of foreign factories into capitalist pacesetter Guangdong Province, Vogel writes:

“Guangdong’s progress cannot be explained simply by ‘opening markets,’ for many countries with open markets did not achieve the progress that Guangdong made. Instead, in Guangdong, a Communist organization that less than a decade earlier had engaged in class warfare became an effective vehicle to promote modernization.”

Yet one wonders if even Deng would have made this claim. Did other Asian countries with open markets do so badly? Weren’t foreigners simply trying to get a toehold? Foreign perceptions of unprecedented opportunities of scale in the China market — isn’t that precisely the same impetus that has driven foreign businesses to overlook massive start-up losses over the last several decades? Don’t ethnic Chinese do well pretty much everywhere — the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia — regardless of whether they are organized by the Chinese Communist Party? And if the entrepreneurial energy of the Chinese is somewhat heroic, why should the party take the credit? These questions shed light on the odd flatness of a few of Vogel’s middle chapters — particularly those that deal with the regulation of township and village enterprises. There is nothing particularly heroic here; much of what took place during the Deng era consisted of commonsense subtraction of preposterous regulations that never should have existed.

It might also be asked whether Deng truly understood the full possibilities for corruption in an alliance between authoritarian ownership and unfettered capitalism. For example, Deng freed the Chinese military to enter the private sphere, with horrendous spinoff effects — such as Operation Aurora (a military-dotcom hacking spree that violated the privacy not only of governments but also of Western corporations, on an epic scale), and the use of Chinese military hospitals as illicit organ-harvesting centers victimizing Uighur activists and followers of Falun Gong (I estimate that 65,000 prisoners of conscience were murdered through these means in the decade immediately following Deng’s death).

Deng was equally ill-prepared for other possibilities. As Vogel reminds us, Deng was indirectly brought into power by the 1976 Tiananmen demonstrations with their anti-Mao undertones. But when Deng’s legacy was similarly threatened in 1989 by the events at Tiananmen (Vogel calls it the “Tiananmen tragedy” rather than a massacre), Vogel follows an insightful discussion of the insurrection’s causes with this description:

“What began as an unplanned peaceful outpouring of mourning for Hu Yaobang was transformed into parades, political forums, campouts, angry protests, hunger strikes, and clashes that spiraled out of control.”

To which “clashes that spiraled out of control,” exactly, does Vogel refer? Traffic disruptions? A broken window at the Hall of the People? Overloaded sanitary facilities? Or is Vogel indirectly referring to the three individuals who threw paint on Mao’s portrait? If so, he might mention that they paid a rather steep price. I met one of them after his recent release — the man can barely speak. If Vogel is referring to the troops who ultimately shed blood, he should be clear.

Instead, in his discussion of Deng’s decision to clear the square by any means necessary, Vogel invokes a dizzying series of willfully evenhanded arguments: Deng was too tough, Deng was not tough enough; Deng was moving too fast towards democracy, Deng was moving too slow. Ultimately, these are revealed as obfuscations, when Vogel gives a long last word to the Chinese Communist Party defense:

“In late May 1989, once the situation in Tiananmen Square began spinning out of control, the strong actions taken by Deng represented the Chinese people’s only chance for keeping their nation together. . . . China could not have stayed together had the leadership allowed the intellectuals the freedom they sought. . . . What we do know is that in the two decades after Tiananmen, China enjoyed relative stability and rapid — even spectacular — economic growth.”

The repeated claim that the Communist Party is responsible for economic growth (when Taiwan’s GDP did not decrease when it moved to a multi-party system) is now followed by the buzzword “stability.” Yet that “stability” was shattered exactly one decade after Tiananmen by the Communist Party’s crackdown on Falun Gong — indisputably the largest sustained action by Chinese security forces since the Cultural Revolution.

In several passages, Vogel questions the sincerity of the Western outcry over Tiananmen by invoking the muted reaction to the Guomindang’s murder of local leaders in 1947 and the Korean suppression of students in 1980. It is summarized by the following statement:

“For the Westerners, the killing of innocent students protesting for freedom and democracy in Beijing was a far worse crime than the decisions of their countries that had brought about the deaths of many more civilians in Vietnam, Cambodia, and elsewhere.”

After casting doubt on the sincerity and validity of our concern, Vogel stakes a claim for his own humanitarianism:

“All of us who care about human welfare are repulsed by the brutal crackdown on June 4, 1989.”

Yet the deeper Tiananmen tragedy has little to do with Vogel’s framing of it. It never was about the number of dead students, or whether people were slaughtered in the square itself, or whether the Tank Man survived. The tragedy was that, at a time when freedom and political reform were advancing across the world, China was stepping backward. So the tragedy will be found in the opportunity cost, the lost years of an authoritarian China — a Web-based Democracy Wall that never happened, stunted intellectualism, justice never realized, dead never commemorated, and, most of all, a moral hunger forced to subsist on patriotic junk food. Ultimately, given China’s military trajectory, this is a tragedy that may pull us in as well.

Vogel has a bit about that on the last page — and it is tantalizing to think that his final admonition is aimed not only at us, but also at the Chinese Communist Party. It’s a slightly forced what-if, but Vogel has fairly earned the right to channel his subject. Vogel asks: What would Deng say about China’s superpower ambitions if he were still alive?

“He would say that China should never behave like a hegemon that interferes in the internal affairs of another nation. Rather it should maintain harmonious relations with other countries and concentrate on peaceful development at home.”

Vogel is correct; every inch a soldier, Deng was no militarist. He cut troop levels nearly in half and reduced Chinese military expenditures from 4.6 percent of GDP down to 1.4 percent by 1991. How different from the rapidly expanding defense budgets that would follow.

But as long as we’re doing what-ifs: What if Deng had opened the door a crack — not just to competing capitalist enterprises, but to competing political parties? Perhaps Vogel wouldn’t need to bring Deng back from the dead, because we probably wouldn’t be headed toward conflict with China. And Deng Xiaoping could sleep the sleep of heroes.

October 17, 2011, National Review

Mr. Gutmann is an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the author of Losing the New China.

Google the keywords “Cisco, Falun Gong, lawsuit and China” and you won’t get far in our memory-hole society. So here are my best picks for journalists and everyone else. Copy, distribute, and quibble if you like. But read to the last entry, because it’s important to accurately reflect history and the collective gathering of evidence.  This investigation has never been a silver bullet, but a slow chain reaction. A long time coming perhaps, but be assured that it has now gone critical.

1)   The Great Firewall of China

1997: Groundbreaking article on the early efforts to censor the Chinese web written by the only journalists to actually make it inside the PSB: Geremie R. Barme and Sang Ye.

In an equipment-crowded office in the Air Force Guesthouse on Beijing’s Third Ring Road sits the man in charge of computer and Net surveillance at the Public Security Bureau.

2)   The Anaconda in the Chandelier

2002: Prescient essay on Chinese (and Western) self-censorship by Perry Link.

Normally the great snake doesn’t move.  It doesn’t have to.  It feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions.  Its constant silent message is “You yourself decide,” after which, more often than not, everyone in its shadow makes his or her large and small adjustments–all quite “naturally.” 

3)   Government Counterstrategies

2002: Critical chapter from the RAND publication You’ve Got Dissent! by Michael S. Chase and James C. Mulvenon which traces the first hacking attacks on North American Falun Gong websites back to China.

The name of the organization, “Information Service Center of XinAn Beijing,” sounded innocuous enough, but the street address told a very different story. The address, #14 East Chang’an Street…in Beijing, is that of the Ministry of Public Security, China’s internal security service…

4)   Who Lost China’s Internet?

2002: Ethan Gutmann’s seminal investigation into Cisco System’s role in constructing the great firewall and its early collusion with China’s “Golden Shield.”

…to ensure that all pipes lead back to Rome–they needed the networking superpower, Cisco, to standardize the Chinese Internet and equip it with firewalls on a national scale. According to the Chinese engineer, Cisco came through, developing a router device, integrator, and firewall box specially designed for the government’s telecom monopoly…Michael confirms: “Cisco made a killing. They are everywhere.”

5)   More on Cisco in China and My Conversation with Cisco

2005: Rebecca MacKinnon posts the first Cisco System “Golden Shield” PowerPoint documents on Rconversation.com and Cisco representatives react.

• Alberstein confirmed the authenticity of the Cisco pamphlets promoting police surveillance equipment to the Chinese Public Security Bureau acquired by businessman and author Ethan Gutmann from a Chinese trade show.
• Cisco confirms that it does indeed sell networking and telecommunications equipment directly to Public Security and other law enforcement offices all over China. 

6)   Testimony of Harry Wu

2006: In the wake of Shi Tao arrest, Harry Wu entered the Cisco PowerPoint into the Congressional record at a House hearing on “The Internet in China: A Tool For Freedom or Suppression?”

Through several telephone inquiries to local managers of Cisco Systems in China, it was confirmed that nearly all of China has been employing Cisco’s surveillance technology in provincial, district and county police agencies…

7)   Helping Big Brother Go High Tech

2006: A Business Week investigation accurately captures the state-of-play as American companies continue to transfer surveillance technologies that are employed against Falun Gong and other dissidents.

Hao says the Tianjin branch has a database containing 30,000 practitioners of the banned sect as well as additional names of other unauthorized religious groups. Some of the data were drawn from China’s elaborate hukou, the household registration system that helps the government monitor and control the population. The digitization of hukou, an enormous task that is part of the Golden Shield project, has involved American technology…”Aside from the public security bureau’s use of technology for criminal cases, the most important [use] is the tracking and suppression of Falun Gong followers,” says Hao.

8)   Overview of the Public Security Sector

2008: Created by Cisco operatives in China in 2002, a PowerPoint with far greater detail than previous versions is leaked to Wired Magazine.

The Golden Shield Project:

Public Network Information Security Monitor System

Cisco.com

• Stop the network-related crimes
• Guarantee the security and services of public network
• Combat “Falun Gong” evil religion and other hostiles 

9)   Hacker Nation

2010: In a case of chickens coming home to roost, Gutmann’s essay explores the legacy of surveillance technology transfer on Chinese internal security and traces the evolution into China’s current cyber-assault on America.

…as a result of what Hao describes as a joint venture between the Shandong Province public security bureau and Cisco Systems…“As far as following practitioners,” he says, “the Golden Shield includes the ability to monitor online chatting services and mail, identifying IPs and all of the person’s previous communication, and then being able to lock in on the person’s location—because a person will usually use the computer at home or at work. And then the arrest is carried out.”

10)   Suit Claims Cisco Helped China Pursue Falun Gong

2011: John Markoff of the New York Times reports on legal action against Cisco.

Terri Marsh, a lawyer for the Human Rights Law Foundation in Washington, said the group had compiled detailed information about Cisco’s role in the design of Chinese information centers that host Falun Gong database applications connected to network surveillance and tracking systems.

UPDATE: And 11) Cisco Poised to Help China Keep an Eye on Its Citizens

Western companies including Cisco Systems Inc. are poised to help build an ambitious new surveillance project in China—a citywide network of as many as 500,000 cameras that officials say will prevent crime but that human-rights advocates warn could target political dissent. 

Kissinger’s piece is here. Mine is here.

In this shaky, unsustainable age of free content and bargain-rate kindle, it is understandable that National Review would want to keep my review of Tim Johnson’s new book behind the paywall. Fair enough. Lord knows, I can relate. But David Kilgour informs me that he is putting it up for free on his website tonight. So go to David’s website and look around, lots of interesting stuff there. Alternately, since the barn door is open, you can read my take on the book here.

Back in 2009, I gave a talk at the Foreign Press Association in London. I’ve lost 35 pounds since then (made you look!) and I have also revised the numbers slightly based on new information (and some mulling as well). That’s what this post is about.  Since 2009, I have been quoted in several places, most recently here) on my estimates of how many Falun Gong were harvested during the last decade or so.

[UPDATE: I was also quoted recently (and fairly extensively) in CQ Global Researcher v.5-14 on the subject of Falun Gong organ harvesting and trafficking. Here's a teaser: "At least 62,000 were victims of organ harvesting operations from 2000-2008, according to Matas and Kilgour and Ethan Gutmann, an investigative journalist." Anyway, you can buy the entire report here] 

The truth is that outside of a few, select individuals in the Chinese military hospitals and the 6-10 office, we don’t know the answer to that question. But I believe estimates are possible, and even useful, as long as we do not engage in false precision and stay reasonably conservative. My estimates are based on a sample of approximately 50 Falun Gong refugees from the Laogai system. Not what I would like, but good enough for a wartime sample. Yet I also flag that inherent imprecision by coming up with a low estimate and a high estimate. I don’t truly believe in either extreme. The truth is probably found somewhere in the middle and that’s why I provide a best estimate, or a median.

Shrewd observers will note that I originally gave a best estimate of approximately 85,000, and now I’m saying about 65,000. I’ll give you the rationale for those new numbers in a minute, but here’s the main reason they changed: I sat down with the Laogai Foundation researchers in DC and they informed me that they had revised their total estimate of the Laogai System (defined as labor camps, prisons, black jails, psychiatric hospitals, long-term detention centers, the lot) down from 4-6 million to 3-5 million. I have reasonable confidence in their logic surrounding this point, so I have revised my estimates accordingly.

Second (and with much smaller effect on the results): Because of the uncertainty surrounding whether harvesting of prisoners of conscience was ongoing all the way into the Beijing Olympics, and to err on the conservative side, I have lopped a year off my estimates (in other words, the Falun Gong incarceration estimates are from 2000-2009, while the harvesting ends in 2008). I frankly don’t know if harvesting of Falun Gong stopped, stopped and then started again, or never stopped at all. The interviews I have done with refugees covering the more recent period yield only fragmented clues, and the Chinese health authorities are certainly acting as if they want to put the issue to bed once and for all. I have heard David Matas assert that it is ongoing, and that’s certainly worth paying attention to. Yet it is also true that he is basing his argument on discrepancies in the Chinese government figures. That’s fine, but we come at this problem using different methods, and as I’ve explained before, I don’t use Chinese government figures.

At any rate, here are my revised figures in a simplified form. For example, I’ve eliminated the cost figures because they haven’t changed. Look for a comprehensive analysis in my book (or a nice, long, journal article at a reasonable word-rate, whichever comes first). And please feel free to contact me if you have serious, non-trivial queries on any of this.

The basics

• Total prisoners in Laogai System at any given time
• Low estimate: 3,000,000
• High estimate: 5,000,000

• Falun Gong base population in 1999
• Low and high estimate: 70,000,000

Average Falun Gong in Laogai System

• % Falun Gong in Laogai System at any given time (compared with other prisoners)
• Low estimate: 15%
• High estimate: 20%

• % Falun Gong base population in Laogai System at any given time
• Low estimate: 0.64%
• High estimate: 1.43%

• Falun Gong in Laogai System at any given time (on average)
• Low estimate: 450,000
• High estimate: 1,000,000

• Replacement rate of Falun Gong in Laogai System (average stay)
• Low and high estimate: 3 years

• Total Falun Gong in Laogai System at some point between 2000-2009
• Low estimate: 1,350,000
• High estimate: 3,000,000

• % Falun Gong base in Laogai System at some point between 2000-2009
• Low estimate: 1.93%
• High estimate: 4.29%

Examinations

• Percentage of Falun Gong examined in custody
• Low and high estimate: 30%

• Falun Gong examined in custody
• Low estimate: 405,000
• High estimate: 900,000

• Percentage of Falun Gong examined “for show”
• Low and high estimate: 50%

• Falun Gong examined as serious candidates for harvesting
• Low estimate: 202,500
• High estimate: 450,000

Totals

• % Falun Gong examined in custody selected for harvesting
• Low estimate: 2.50%
• High estimate: 15.00%

• Total Falun Gong harvested from 2000-2008
• Low estimate: 9,011
• High estimate: 120,150

• Gutmann estimate: median Falun Gong harvested 2000-2008
• 64,581

• Kilgour/Matas estimate of Falun Gong harvest 2000-2005:
• 41,500

• Kilgour/Matas: Falun Gong harvest per year:
• 6,917

• Kilgour/Matas estimate with three additional years (2000-2008)
• 62,250

• Discrepancy between Gutmann and Kilgour/Matas estimate:
• 2,331

Read it here. Over 5000 words, so get comfy.

I watched as Chinese citizens were herded into vans in Beijing. Most returned a few days later, many didn’t quit. The police chartered new vans and special trains. This time, many did not return. I don’t know the exact meaning of Falun Gong’s sacrifice; China’s future is unknown. But spare a moment today to think of the families who were left behind.

I’ll be speaking at Parliament today, 4pm, Committee Room 6, Committee Corridor, Palace of Westminster, MP Julian Huppert chairing.

Update: My talk was essentially the same one I gave at the CECC in Washington (see below, although I added a few tweaks designed to prick the conscience of the new UK government). Annie Yang spoke eloquently (as she always does; that’s a depiction of her son during her arrest in the picture below). Finally, my buddy Jaya Gibson has his prepared remarks on Internet freedom posted on his blog).