The CCP's organ trafficking admission - a sign of things to come?

The Chinese Communist Party admitted to breaking its own law against organ trafficking, and admitted to it in a big way (BBC):

About 1.5 million people in China need transplants, but only about 10,000 operations are performed annually, according to the health ministry . . . the government passed a law in 2007 banning trafficking as well as the donation of organs to unrelated recipients. But in practice, illegal transplants - some from living donors - are still frequently reported by the media and the Ministry of Health . . . In a rare admission of the extent to which this takes place, China Daily - citing unnamed experts - said on Wednesday that more than 65% of organ donations come from death row prisoners.

In other words, the CCP just admitted that over 6,000 organ "donations" came from the condemned, 2007 law be damned.

Of interest to many readers of this column, the cadres of course did not make any admission about organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners. Then again, they don't really admit to killing them either, so this is no surprise.

What is important (and as with most important things regarding the CCP, it has been largely ignored) is this: the CCP admitted, once again, that it can't or won't enforce its own laws among its own members. After all, who else could be selling the organs taken from prisoners but the very Communist regime that supposedly made such organ selling illegal?

While most of the rest of us may not have noticed that whopping admission, the cadres certainly did: they were so nervous about it the rushed out anti-Uighur propaganda without notifying their "Xinjiang" counterparts. Even worse, the BBC got to the cadres in occupied East Turkestan before Zhongnanhai did.

That this would so badly scare the regime will surprise most people. After all, they have the friendliest Administration in Washington since Nixon. The elites in the free world are still seeing the mounds of American debt held by Beijing in economic terms (where it appears powerful) rather than in geopolitical terms (where it's practically worthless). Perceptions like that mean something, and for the CCP, it means a lot.

Still, reality trumps perception in the end - no matter how late that end comes. The one thing the cadres fear the most is the Chinese people rising up to take their country back. Amidst massive unemployment (as the Epoch Times noted earlier this week), the cadres were clearly worried that another example of their refusal to follow the rules could cause problems.

At the same time, with the next CCP Congress only three years away, and most cadres looking to take advantage of the transition from Hu Jintao, information like this could easily be used by one faction against another. So, off it goes into China Daily, leaving the party apparatus scrambling to distract the people's attention.

Lest anyone forget, Hu Jintao is the first leader in CCP history whose exit is considered common knowledge (Mao died in power, while Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin hung on as Central Military Commission Chairman for years after handing over the ostensibly omnipotent role as CCP General Secretary). As any other "lame duck" can attest, the people supposedly following Hu's orders are starting to look beyond him. Even in most democratic countries, factions within the incumbent party will start leaking against each other in an effort to gain the upper hand for their champion come convention or primary time - except that the leader is still considered legitimate and everyone accepts that the voters will decide the successor.

Neither of the above applies to the Chinese Communist Party. Thus, every factional battle has the potential for disaster - and the cadres have three more years of this coming, unless Hu has enough power left to tell everyone to calm down for the good of the Party.

That may be more wistful than it initially appears, for the factions within the CCP are marching straight into the classic "prisoner's dilemma" - concern for weakening the tyranny is trumped by the fear of the other faction (or factions) doing it anyway and getting the upper hand in the process.

European Communists, whose leaders almost always died in power, never had these problems unless the Soviet leader himself was gravely ill - and even then there was a faction interested in keeping that news under wraps to preserve their position. Ironically, in an attempt to ensure a smoother transition from one leader to the next, the Chinese Communists stumbled into this new problem without any guide to solve it.

By 2012, the factional warfare could end up with enough exposures to lead to a full-blown revolution. It may seem improbable, but it can't be seen as impossible. Hard as it is to believe, the Chinese Communist Party's attempt to modernize itself could very well be what seals its doom.