Epoch Times - How Doctors in China Become Killers for the State
Aired: 2025-10-04
Duration: 01:40


=== Doctors as Agents of the State (01:40) ===

[00:00:00]  In a state like China, the medical profession does not have actual professional autonomy.
[00:00:05]  Like it's an arm of the state.
[00:00:07]  And I like that's the key.
[00:00:10]  So when you say like doctors have become killers, it's how you define a doctor, I suppose.
[00:00:15]  Because the thing that goes into doctor, so we have a lot of connotations to the term doctor, like, well, they understand themselves to be a doctor.
[00:00:24]  So there's like this Hippocratic Oath, there are professional associations, you have kind of like all this kind of institutional scaffolding around this role.
[00:00:34]  So in a state like China, some of those things are present, but they're also controlled by the Communist Party.
[00:00:40]  And so I think that goes some way to explaining kind of what we see.
[00:00:47]  Because if kind of the medical field is an arm of the state, then it becomes less surprising, perhaps.
[00:00:57]  Because, you know, the doctors are perhaps acting in their capacity, not merely as doctors, but as agents of a state entrusted with a certain responsibility to conduct this particular activity.
[00:01:12]  They don't have much choice in.
[00:01:14]  Because they can't say, well, no, I don't want to do that.
[00:01:18]  Or the consequences of saying, no, I'm not going to do that are extreme.
[00:01:23]  Yeah, like, I mean, I've heard people being concerned with their own lives.
[00:01:30]  If you're a doctor at a military hospital and the supervisor says, we're going to, you know, retrieve organs now, you can't just say, oh, sorry, boss.