This unsettling experience gave Carney his first inkling of how a human being becomes a thing. When he abandoned academia for investigative journalism (he writes for Wired, Mother Jones and other publications), his South Asian surroundings offered him many examples of the ways human bodies — in part or in whole — are transformed into commodities. He calls this the “red market,” a term that encompasses the trade (legal and illegal) in human bones, blood, organs, embryos, surrogate pregnancy and living children.

“The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers” is the alarming product of Carney’s research. It includes vivid, on-the-spot reports from Indian “bone farms,” where remains looted from graveyards are processed into skeletons for Western anatomy students (hundreds of reeking bones left out to bleach in the sun) and tsunami refugee camps where most of the residents bear the scars of kidney “donations.” Carney relays these tales with enough florid touches (“Toads the size of baseball mitts hop across the muddy track”) to make them seem downright hallucinatory.

Freakish as these stories can be — none more so than the dairy farmer who kept several men prisoner in sheds, some for more than three years, extracting their blood to sell to a nearby hospital — they are the secret face of the age of modern medical miracles. Poor people supply human flesh in various forms for rich people, while a well-meaning ethical system of anonymity and mandated “altruism” allows middlemen to siphon off most of the profits.

When the supply isn’t sufficient to the demand, some enterprising individuals take it upon themselves to even things up. One of the most heartrending stories Carney tells is of an Indian family who bankrupted themselves trying to find their son, who was kidnapped by an orphanage and essentially sold to an American adoption agency. The Midwestern couple that may have adopted the boy are resisting attempts to establish the child’s identity, even though the Indian father tells Carney he understands “it’s not realistic for us to ask for him back, but at least let us know him.”

Denial makes such injustices possible. Carney argues that the inequities of the red market were only exacerbated by regulations like the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, which prohibited the sale of human organs and tissue and was championed by then-Sen. Al Gore as a way to make sure that the human body could not be treated as “a mere assemblage of spare parts.” Although Carney is no fan of the market philosophy that would reduce our bodies to salable “widgets,” he thinks we need to face up to the fact that altruistic donation will never provide as much of these precious materials as we desire. “As a society we neither want to accept open trade in human tissue, nor do we want to reduce our access to life-extending treatments. In other words, we want to have our cake and eat it, too.”

He also thinks “absolute transparency of the supply chain” would go a long way toward eliminating the brokers, recruiters and suppliers who exploit those driven to trade their kidneys and blood for cash or to rent out their wombs. “Every bag of blood should include the name of the original donor, every adopted child should have full access to his personal history, and every transplant recipient should know who gave him an organ,” he writes. (Contrary to what you see in the movies, much of this information is sequestered by what Carney regards as “misguided” privacy laws.) Yes, the hustlers will immediately commence  forging documents, but even so, “a clear paper trail makes it easier to flag dangerous operators.”

And while he doesn’t come right out and say it, Carney obviously thinks the world’s privileged patients ought to revise their expectations and reconcile themselves to their mortality. He more or less implies that the handful of years most kidney transplant recipients gain from the operation may not be worth the cost in exploitation. (Most Indian “donors” get as little as $800 for their organs — though some are promised more — not enough to make a significant difference in their circumstances or lift them out of destitution for more than a year or so. This is out of the $14,000 or so paid by the recipient for the transplant.)

No doubt Carney doesn’t linger on this point because he knows it’s a nonstarter. Most people would countenance a good deal of dodgy behavior if it meant a few more years of life for themselves or a loved one. Nevertheless, it makes sense that they be made aware of how much their survival may have cost others, and Carney rightly decries the “depersonalization of human tissue” that obscures that cost. This challenging and revelatory book makes it a little bit harder to overlook the human being in every human body.

On the other hand, what they’ve done with all of that space is a little distressing — if all too typical. As I’ve noted in the past, it appears the evolution of the international airport will not be complete until the terminal and shopping center become virtually indistinguishable, and Hong Kong is a fine specimen of this unrelenting fusion, packed with restaurants and shops of all kinds.

I’m OK with Starbucks and souvenir kiosks, but it’s the saturation of high-end boutiques that always confuses me. Apparently there isn’t a traveler alive who isn’t in dying need of a hundred-dollar Mont Blanc pen or a diamond necklace. And what’s with all the luggage stores? Who buys a suitcase after they get to the airport? 

But does it matter that much? In a way, choosing a favorite airport is akin to choosing a favorite hospital: Conveniences and accouterments aside, nobody really wants to be there in the first place, and the easier and faster you can get the hell out, the better. Which brings us to HKG’s most impressive and appealing feature: its rail connection to the city. The sleek, high-speed Airport Express train is literally only steps from the arrival and departure halls. Within a half-hour of landing you can be alighting at Kowloon or Hong Kong Island — without ever having stepped outside. Returning to the airport, you can check your bags and get your seat assignment right there at the downtown station.

Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo-Narita and Shanghai are among other spots in Asia with similar railway links. And this is where it gets depressing. Why can’t American airports have public transport like this? Even our most expensive efforts are half-assed by comparison. Compare the best of Asia with, for example, my hometown airport, Boston-Logan. My commute to the airport by public transportation takes almost an hour and requires two changes, including a ride on the Silver Line bus, which, in addition to being at the mercy of automobile traffic, requires, at one point, that the driver step out and manually switch power sources to the bus.

Or how about JFK, where for hundreds of millions of dollars they finally got the AirTrain completed — an inter-terminal rail loop that can’t take you beyond the Queens subway. Heck, it can take 45 minutes, up and down a byzantine array of escalators, elevators and passageways, just to get from one terminal to another, let alone all the way to Manhattan. The distance from Shanghai airport to the city is about 20 miles — roughly the mileage from JFK to midtown. Shanghai’s bullet train covers this distance in seven minutes.

To be fair, not every Asian terminal is so astoundingly convenient. Seoul, Bangkok and Taipei top a list of those without high-speed rail options. Still, they make up for it in ways — overall convenience, friendliness and efficiency — that leave virtually any U.S. facility in the dust. (As an added touch, terminals like those in Seoul and Bangkok are stupendous works of architecture.)

I arrived at Taipei’s Taoyuan airport the other night without a hotel reservation. The first thing I saw when I cleared immigration was a large information desk staffed by about 10 people in crisp red uniforms. “Do you know if there is a hotel desk,” I asked, “where I can find a place to stay?”

“Right here,” the woman responded. She asked what my budget was, and what area of the city I preferred. She made a few phone calls, and just like that I had a room. She scribbled the directions on a receipt, in both English and Mandarin, then directed me to the taxi stand. I also got a city map and a sightseeing brochure. All for free; there was no service charge or commission.

To top it off, everybody at Taoyuan was unfailingly polite, from the immigration officer to the man at the currency booth.

And isn’t this how it should be? In the end, an airport is more than just a place to kill time, more than an annoying conduit between ground and sky. It’s an expression, a gesture, a statement. It’s a welcome to, and a farewell from, the place you’re visiting or coming home to. In much of the world — not only Asia but throughout Europe as well — they have figured this out.

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Do you have questions for Salon’s aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his website and look for answers in a future column.

“The current regime structure is very fragile. It’s not right for revolution at the moment, but that doesn’t mean mass political upheaval can’t take place in the future,” said Minxin Pei, a China politics expert at Claremont McKenna College in California.

In the latest test, China’s authoritarian government seems to have dispatched the threat of public protests with great efficiency. In response to an Internet appeal of unknown origin for simultaneous protests in 13 cities Sunday, police detained known activists, disconnected some cell-phone text messaging services and blocked online searches for the phrase “Jasmine Revolution” — the name of both the protest call and the wave of Middle East democracy protests that started in Tunisia.

As a result, only a handful of people protested in Beijing and Shanghai, though hundreds of onlookers made it difficult to discern sympathizers from rubberneckers. On Monday, many activists remained in detention or unreachable, state media mainly ignored the protests, and Internet connections to news sites and search engines were sporadic, usually a sign of heavy government monitoring.

Tens of thousands of large-scale though local protests take place every year over corruption, seizures of land for development and other acts of government misfeasance. Food safety scandals over milk laced with industrial chemicals and rice contaminated with heavy metals have shaken the confidence of middle class consumers.

Still few China watchers believe a revolution is at hand, following the mass demonstrations that swept the autocratic rulers of Tunisia and Egypt aside and are now violently engulfing Libya and roiling Algeria, Bahrain and Yemen. Conditions in China aren’t quite as desperate.

China is the world’s fastest-growing major economy, with economists predicting another year of better than 9 percent growth for 2011. While unemployment is surely higher than the nearly 5 percent urban joblessness rate, factory wages and conditions are improving for many. University graduates — a crucial group in Egypt’s uprising — are finding jobs in China, though they are poorly paid.

The military, at least at the leadership level, is not showing fissures in support for Communist Party rule, and the police state has suppressed any opposition leaders or organizations from emerging.

“If you look at Chinese people, their lives are improving. There’s no way they are going to put their lives on the line,” said Jing Huang of the National University of Singapore.

Yet as adept as the Chinese leadership has become in learning from the mistakes of other authoritarian regimes and keeping the economy humming, it has steadfastly refused to open up the political system. That insistence on “maintaining stability,” in the government’s phrase, is now seen by many in China as exacerbating social problems: rampant government corruption, glaring gaps between the haves and have-nots and withering public trust.

“History will prove that stability cannot be placed above all else and that quite possibly will destroy all else. This ossified mentality that stability overrides all else will nip in the bud all our efforts to bring health to Chinese society,” said often outspoken Tsinghua University sociologist Sun Liping in a commentary last week on the Renmin Wang website.

Rather than social upheaval, Sun’s diagnosis is that Chinese society is speeding toward extinction, crushed by government power that ruthlessly protects vested interests.

One of those who wanted to take part in Sunday’s protests, lawyer Liu Shihui, posted a message on Twitter — “I have a date with the Jasmine Revolution group” — but never made it. At the doorway to his home in the southern city of Guangzhou, five men stopped him, hooded him and beat him with sticks of bamboo.

“It was cruel,” he said by telephone from a hospital Monday as he received treatment for cuts and possible fractures on his legs. “They didn’t say a word. They just started beating.”

It isn’t just activists who suffer. An analysis of the stampede in the coastal town of Xiangshui found that locals had good reason to be worried about the chemical plant’s safety. After a 2007 explosion killed eight people, the local government prevented reporters from investigating the accident, said the analysis posted on a web site run by the national prosecutor’s ministry.

The government has become so adept at silencing critics and suppressing protests, starting with the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in 1989, that scholars worry that it is becoming a well-worn tool. When that happens, police states can tire, and Claremont McKenna’s Pei said, regimes that look very stable sometimes collapse, like the communist bloc in Europe in 1989, Indonesia a decade later and seemingly Egypt this year.

The original, anonymous call for a Chinese “Jasmine Revolution” echoed some of the tactics of these earlier movements. The appeal said people should gather not just this past Sunday afternoon, but on every Sunday afternoon.

AP Beijing Bureau Chief Charles Hutzler has covered China for more than a decade. Associated Press reporter Cara Anna contributed to this report.

“The Egyptian people rose up in a revolution to topple a 30-year dictatorship,” said one of the leaflets coasting over the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas. “The North Koreans too must revolt against a 60-year-old dictatorship.”

The strain of poverty and inefficient government in North Korea, which has been targeted by international sanctions, matches or exceeds that of Arab autocracies currently buffeted by street protests. Its human rights record, along with those of Myanmar and Zimbabwe, is routinely condemned in international forums.

But there are no clear signs that these countries will face the same kind of upheaval sweeping Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.

“Everything depends on local conditions,” said Charles Ries, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based RAND Corp. who recently oversaw economic issues while stationed at the American Embassy in Baghdad.

North Korea, after all, has a cult-like leadership rooted in its World War II-era separation from the south; Myanmar brutally stamped out revolts in 1988 and 2007; and Zimbabwe has a shaky coalition government and plans elections later this year.

Dissidents and authoritarian governments on other continents are undoubtedly reviewing the playbook of their counterparts in the Middle East — social media networking for the protesters, and hasty reform pledges and thugs in civilian clothes for the leaders. Unrest even spread to Djibouti, a city-state across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen, where protesters reportedly clashed with security forces on Friday.

Fear of bloody retaliation, sharp curbs on information, tactical decisions to avoid a showdown and the lack of a trigger — severe food shortages or a fuel price hike, for example — are deterrents to popular revolt in repressive systems.

Protesters in Egypt and the region used Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to organize, and benefited from pan-Arab media outlets such as Al-Jazeera television that spread word of the uprisings.

But there is no sign of an organized opposition in North Korea, where most people do not have access to outside TV and radio, or the Internet. The leadership had long-standing ties to ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. On Jan. 23, two days before protests broke out in Egypt, ruler Kim Jong Il, who rarely meets foreigners, hosted the head of Cairo-based Orascom Telecom, which built a 3G telephone service network in North Korea.

Dissidents in military-ruled Myanmar, also known as Burma, want to know more about what happened in Egypt despite a state media blackout.

“Everyone is trying to find out information and is interested,” said Mark Farmaner of the Burma Campaign UK, which is based in London. Dissidents are “talking about whether they can learn anything from this, and what examples there are,” he said.

However, Farmaner said there no signs that anti-government groups want to try a revolt similar to the 18-day uprising in Egypt, where a military council took power and promised to oversee a democratic transition. The military sided with protesters in pushing out Mubarak.

In Myanmar, “the army has always been prepared to shoot when it’s ordered to,” Farmaner said. “There’s no separation of president and military in any way.”

Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has called for dialogue with Myanmar’s leaders, reflecting concern that a popular upheaval that could end in bloodshed.

“We are interested in the parallels in Egypt and the parallels with Burma but the institutions are not exactly the same. I think protests are one way of bringing about change but not necessarily the best way,” she told the BBC in early February, before Mubarak was ousted.

There are plenty of precedents for politically potent ideas taking flight across continents. Ries, the former U.S. diplomat, said European thinkers provided some intellectual backbone for the American Revolution, which did the same for the French Revolution, which in turn inspired Haitian slaves in their revolt against French colonizers, all in the space of a few decades in the late 18th century.

“You look at other places where there are huge numbers of people who have little to lose by banding together and applying these new techniques,” Ries said of today’s uprisings. “It also exposes, in a sense, the impotence of repression against huge numbers.”

Some Arab countries, however, have not yielded to protests, responding instead with deadly force. Prof. Hurst Hannum, an international law expert at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, cautioned against predictions of a worldwide “outbreak of ‘democracy.’”

In an e-mail, he recalled the “rather premature” thesis of Francis Fukuyama, a U.S. academic whose 1992 book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” declared that Western-style democracy would prevail over other systems in the wake of communism’s fall.

On Feb. 3, state-run radio in Zimbabwe accused Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, a former opposition leader, of trying to spark anti-government uprisings similar to those in Tunisia and Egypt. Tsvangirai said before he joined the governing coalition that he would not lead his followers into danger and that he stood for peaceful change.

State radio is controlled by loyalists of President Robert Mugabe, who has been in power for three decades.

Political scientist John Makumbe wrote an essay titled “Is Egypt possible in Zimbabwe?” in which he speculated that the military would crack down on any revolt, but he drew inspiration from the uprisings to the north.

“Thank you, Tunisia and Egypt, for making us realize what is possible with people power,” he wrote on the website of Nehanda Radio, an independent station.

The North Korean system, which survived a famine in the 1990s, has long defied predictions of collapse. Kim Jong Il, who inherited power from his father, has tightened his grip with perks for the military and a propaganda machine that seeks to rouse national pride by demonizing declared enemies.

North Korean state media have not reported events in Egypt, and it is doubtful that the leaflets of the South Korean activists, who also send short-wave radio broadcasts to the north, will reach or convince many people. But they draw a clear dynastic parallel — some images show Mubarak and his son, Gamal, once thought to be his successor, and Kim Jong Il and his third son and heir, Kim Jong Un.

Paik Hak-soon, an analyst at the Sejong Institute research center near Seoul, speculated that top government and trade leaders in North Korea were “definitely aware” of what is happening in Egypt. But a similar uprising is unlikely, he said.

“There are so many differences in terms of ideology, in terms of power structure, in terms of domestic and external relationships,” Paik said. “North Korea is basically an isolated, socialist regime, protected by a most reliable and most supportive big power, China.”

China itself portrayed the protests as the kind of chaos that comes with Western-style democracy, underscoring how wary it is of any potential source of unrest that might threaten its power. As Mubarak’s hold slipped, Chinese censors blocked the ability to search the term “Egypt” on microblogging sites, and user comments that drew parallels to China were deleted from Internet forums.

In Myanmar, many people with access to satellite dishes followed the historic events in Egypt, quietly wishing for the same thing.

“Tears welled in my eyes when I watched the Egyptians, overjoyed after Mubarak left. I want to tell them that your fight has paid off but we don’t know where our future lies,” said a 53-year-old private tutor in Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city. The tutor spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the authorities.

2. China reveals new partners in its version of capitalism: American banks
JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley will expand to China, says the New York Times. Following in the footsteps of giants like Goldman Sachs, UBS and Credit Suisse, the two firms plan to enter into partnerships with Chinese firms and get involved in the world’s second-largest economy. I wonder if they’ve heard of subprime mortgages there.

3. China appeals to the Jack-and-the-Beanstalk in all of us by announcing plans to build a counterfeit version of the world’s tallest building
All right this one’s kind of funny. Wang Hongzhong, the chief of the district slated to host the “seven star hotel,” called the new spacescraper a “streamlined building like the Khalifa Tower in Dubai.” The original monstrosity is the tallest thing man has built ever at a height of 2,717 feet. It’s also great for BASE jumping.

4. China’s real people believe they can treat lepers less awfully
Read this story from Slate’s Brian Palmer and this story from USA Today. In short, China is finally trying to move residents out of their (horribly inhumane) leper colonies to decent facilities.

Now, calm down by watching this adorable slow-moving loris getting tickled: