Forced Organ Harvesting, China’s Booming Industry

Congress held hearings earlier this month from eyewitnesses who testified about one of the most chilling human rights abuses of the modern era– forced organ-harvesting, the removal of internal organs from a living patient without his consent.

For years, Congressman Chris Smith, R-NJ, who chairs the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), has sought to shine a spotlight on China’s alleged forced organ harvesting industry.

Driven not only by demand within China but also by transplant seekers from dozens of countries—including the United States and Canada—the practice has grown into a flourishing international enterprise.

International investigators have documented China’s barbaric practice of surgically removing organs from prisoners and dissidents while victims are still alive.

According to human rights experts, thousands of innocent people have been killed through this process, with their organs immediately matched to recipients and sold for transplant. The practice has been described as matching “the cruelty and wickedness of medieval torturers and executioners.”

In the May 16 hearing, eyewitnesses who survived or escaped the Chinese gulag testified that the Chinese Communist Party has built this vast industry through the forced harvesting of organs from death row prisoners, as well as from millions of prisoners of conscience in Chinese prison camps.

They described evidence that imprisoned members of Falun Gong, the Uyghurs, and other persecuted ethnic and religious minorities have been targeted as organ sources, enabling China’s transplant system to perform large numbers of transplants with remarkably short waiting times.

The way this allegedly works is by Chinese authorities timing the executions of prisoners to correspond with the short window of time in which a donor’s organ retains enough freshness to be successfully transplanted.

Instances of a liver or heart being delivered to a patient on demand are unheard of in the rest of the world, where the process involves a referral to an organ-matching agency, blood and antigen tests, being matched with a voluntary organ donor, and eventually receiving the organ transplant. The process typically takes years.

China’s Camps of Terror

“This Commission has received rare and extraordinary eyewitness accounts from inside the Chinese gulag itself,” said Rep. Smith in his opening statement. “Ali Motevalian’s written testimony details his incarceration in a prison hospital near Shanghai, and Kalbinur Sidik’s testimony describes the detention camps of the Uyghur Region.

“Together, their accounts shatter Beijing’s fiction that its transplant system is voluntary and compliant with international standards. The Chinese Communist Party told the world it had ended the use of executed prisoners’ organs. These eyewitnesses say otherwise,” Smith said.

Inside the prison hospital system, in 2020 and 2021—years after Beijing told the world it had stopped taking organs from prisoners—Ali testified he saw “unconscious, shackled men brought by armed personnel directly into surgery rooms. They never returned. He saw bodies taken on carts toward the rear of a building where an incinerator operated.”

“A second eyewitness, Kalbinur Sidik, brings us inside another part of the Chinese gulag: the camps of the Uyghur Region,” Smith told the Commission. “Her account, which she will give herself before this panel, shows a system where human beings are reduced to commodities with their organs sold to the highest bidder. Police in these camps systematically perpetrate brutality and abuse on the imprisoned with impunity.”

The prison hospitals and modern-day gulags described in these testimonies are not places of medical care or rehabilitation, the New Jersey congressman said. “They are crime scenes—part of a system of coercion, medical abuse, and genocide.”

“Organ crimes are not just a China problem,” he emphasized. “It is a global one that flourishes wherever coercion, poverty, corruption, secrecy, and demand intersect. That is why Congress must act.”

Five U.S. states have passed laws prohibiting health insurance coverage for organ transplants linked to China. Critics applaud the move but contend it is only a meager first step against an abuse that demands a far more vigorous response.

Faith of Any Kind Must be Crushed

The Communist regime’s relentless campaign against religion stems from a simple fear: people of spiritual faith answer to a higher power than the Party and thus threaten totalitarianism.

The most widespread organ harvesting allegations in China centered first on people of the Falun Gong faith—peaceful men and women targeted by the Chinese Communist Party for eradication merely because of their religious beliefs.

Later came mounting evidence of organ harvesting from people of other faiths; from the Uyghurs, Tibetans, Christians, death row inmates, and others treated as property of the state.

Witnesses described the monstrous system whereby the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) profits from murdering healthy 28-year-old Uyghurs to sell their organs to the rich. In China, a wealthy CCP member can order a heart, kidney, liver, or other organs needed to survive. The organs come from young adults who are executed.

Ethan Gutmann, a China studies expert at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, explained to the Commission that the target age is always 28 because that’s “when your organs have reached maturity and yet you haven’t started to deteriorate.”

Whether by gunshot or lethal injection preceding extraction, killing victims through organ harvesting ensures organ freshness and substantial profits for China’s transplant industry.

Consequently, patients from China and abroad — including North America, Europe, Japan, South Korea and the Gulf States — face minimal wait times. Premium payments can secure organs within two weeks; in urgent liver failure cases, waits have reportedly been as short as four hours.

“Let me be clear,” Rep. Smith told the Commission. “Ethical organ transplantation is one thing. It can be noble and life-saving. But what we are examining today is the opposite. Imprisoned and persecuted people are turned into mere factory inventory. Hearts. Livers. Kidneys. Lungs. Corneas. Taken from the living. Hidden behind hospital walls. Protected by secrecy, corruption, fear, and state power.”

Collaboration with American Institutions

The May congressional hearing also focused on the role of American institutions in allegedly bolstering China’s organ transplant industry.

Testimonies revealed that U.S. universities, medical schools, and research hospitals have trained Chinese transplant surgeons who later returned to China and became leaders of transplant programs linked to human rights scandals.

Another concern raised during the hearing was the transfer of transplant-related technology and knowledge through academic research collaborations. Witnesses argued that such partnerships have allowed Chinese transplant centers to benefit from American advances in transplant medicine, despite burning questions about the source of organs used in China.

Critics contend that such collaboration lends wrongful legitimacy to institutions accused of forced organ harvesting while enhancing their international prestige.

Smith said he chaired his first hearing on forced organ harvesting thirty years ago, on June 18, 1996. Since then, the evidence has become more detailed and horrific as organ harvesting mushroomed into ‘big business.’

“The House has twice passed my legislation with overwhelming bipartisan support,” the congressmen told a press conference. “The Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2025 passed the House 406 to 1. It would criminalize forced organ trafficking, impose serious sanctions, require reporting, deny visas, and create penalties of up to 20 years in prison. It would impose up to a $1 million fine for knowing complicity.”

“This bill blows the whistle on brokers, traffickers, corrupt officials, complicit doctors, hospitals, researchers, insurers, and middlemen,” Smith told the House panel. “If you profit from coerced transplants, you should be prepared to lose not only your money but your visa, your access to the United States, and your freedom.

The Senate has not acted on the bill; it has languished in the Foreign Relations Committee for almost a year.

“Every day without consequences is another day perpetrators operate in the shadows, witnesses are intimidated, evidence disappears, and families never learn what happened to their loved ones,” argued the New Jersey congressman.

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America’s Organ Procurement Industry

While nothing approaches the moral depravity of China’s forced organ harvesting system, organ procurement and transplantation have become a multibillion-dollar enterprise in many countries, including the United States.

The New York Times ran a long feature last July about a federal inquiry into these programs, after complaints surfaced about doctors being pressured to do organ surgery on patients without their consent.

In numerous cases, the investigation said, patients thought to be in a vegetative state showed signs of pain or distress while being readied for the organ retrieval procedure.

Organs themselves cannot be legally bought or sold. But U.S. organ procurement organizations collectively receive billions of dollars a year in “for facilitating procurements”— a polite way of saying ‘organ snatching.’ Most of that revenue derives from state and federal grants and Medicare reimbursements.

Families Pressured to Authorize Organ Donation

The NY Times investigation criticized Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates, which was coordinating donations in the state. It found that the organization’s employees repeatedly pressured families to authorize a donation, emphasizing its humanitarian value and how it would endow the patient’s life with “more meaning.”

In addition, they tried to push hospital staff to remove life support and allow for surgery even if there were indications of growing awareness in terminally ill, unconscious patients.

The federal investigation centered on an increasingly common practice called “donation after circulatory death.” Unlike most organ donors, who are brain-dead, patients in these cases have some brain function but are on life support and not expected to recover. Often, they are in a coma.

Once family members agree to donation, they, in effect, give the go-ahead to withdraw life support. The employees of an organ procurement organization begin testing the patient’s organs and lining up transplant surgeons and recipients. Every state has at least one procurement organization, the Times article said.

Typically, the patient is taken to an operating room where hospital workers withdraw life support and wait for death. The organs are considered viable for donation only if the patient dies within an hour or two. If that happens, the procurement team waits five more minutes and then begins removing organs. Strict rules are supposed to ensure that no retrieval begins before death or causes it.

The report described an incident in which a 50-year-old patient began stirring less than an hour after being taken off life support and started looking around. Shockingly, the organ retrieval procedure was not immediately ended, nor was the patient given any explanation for what was being done to him.

“The patient had no idea what was going on but was becoming more aware and agitated by the minute,” records noted.

After 40 more minutes — when the patient’s organs would no longer qualify for donation — the attempt was called off, and he was moved to an intensive care unit. He later sat up and spoke with his family, case notes report.

Most of the patients in the cases the investigators reviewed eventually died, hours or days after the aborted organ retrieval. But some recovered enough to leave the hospital, according to the Times’ report.

He Cried, Pulled His Legs to His Chest and Shook His Head

A congressional committee heard testimony about a Kentucky man, Anthony Hoover, who had an overdose in 2021. He was unresponsive for two days before his family agreed to donate his organs.

Over the next two days, the procurement organization moved toward surgery even as the patient’s neurological condition improved, the investigation found. During one exam, records show, he was “thrashing on the bed.”

Even though the man cried, pulled his legs to his chest and shook his head, officials still tried to move forward with the surgery, the NY Times reported.

The hospital staff “was extremely uncomfortable with the amount of reflexes patient is exhibiting,” case notes read. “Hospital staff kept stating that to go ahead with the organ retrieval would amount to euthanasia—mercy-killing,” which is essentially is no different, they insisted, from murder.

An organ procurement coordinator assured them it was not the same thing. Nevertheless, a hospital doctor flatly refused to withdraw life support. In a shocking turnaround, Mr. Hoover eventually recovered and left the hospital.

There is no record of hospital staff apologizing to the man they came so close to killing for his organs.

The federal investigation has since examined about 350 controversial cases in Kentucky over the past four years in which plans to remove organs were ultimately halted. In 73 of these cases, unconscious terminally ill patients began to stir and awaken, which would have made stripping them of their organs a clear act of murder.

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Putin and XI Discuss Outwitting Death With Harvested Organs

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin were recently caught on a hot mic discussing longevity and organ transplants during a military parade in Beijing. The conversation sparked intense controversy over China’s infamous forced organ harvesting practices.

According to the Washington Times, the conversation, broadcast by Chinese state media, featured Xi noting that living past 70 is now “commonplace,” with Putin responding that “biotechnology advances in organ transplantation” could help people “become younger and perhaps even achieve immortality.”

Xi then suggested humans “might live to 150 years old” during this century.

To many observers, the exchange captured the remarkable hubris of two 72-year old totalitarian leaders casually speculating about dramatically extending their own lifespans thanks to organ transplants.

The remarks quickly spread across Chinese social media, where they revived suspicions about China’s booming transplant industry depending on murder and organ snatching from helpless prisoners.

Critics note that China maintains hospitals and wings specifically for organ transplants for Chinese Communist Party leaders, with organs potentially sourced from persecuted groups. House Speaker Mike Johnson acknowledged hearing “horrific stories” about unwilling organ donors in China.

China officially ended the use of organs from executed prisoners in 2015, but recent reports indicate Beijing is building six new organ transplant facilities in Xinjiang, where an estimated 1 million Uyghurs are held in detention camps.

Evidence compiled by Dr. Jacob Lavee, director of heart transplantation at Sheba Medical Center in Israel indicates that Chinese transplant hospitals use a vast supply of organs sourced from living political and religious prisoners.

Chinese academic studies confirm that a number of these people, selected based on blood type, health, age and sometimes even dietary habits, are killed through the organ extraction process.

Dr. Enver Tohti, a Uyghur surgeon now residing in London, provided harrowing testimony quoted by the NY Post. In 1995, near Urumqi, Xinjiang, he was ordered to remove the liver and kidneys from a prisoner who had been shot but was still alive.

The prisoner physically resisted when the scalpel cut into him, and active bleeding indicated the heart was still pumping, leading Dr. Tohti to realize the man was still alive during the organ excision.

Dr. Tohti has stated under oath that the man died during the procedure. “That man had been shot but, technically, I killed him,” he confessed, “and that still haunts me to this day.”

Following this event, Dr. Tohti fled China and eventually sought asylum in London, where he continues to campaign globally against state-sanctioned organ harvesting.

Rep. Chris Smith, co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, called the hot mic conversation between Putin and XI a “wake-up call” and urged Senate action on his legislation targeting forced organ harvesting.

“No dictator, no party boss, no wealthy patient, and no broker should be able to purchase longevity with the organs of the poor and persecuted,” Smith said. “That is all the more reason to pass the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act and make unmistakably clear that the United States will not stand by in the face of such cruelty.

“Not with our expertise. Not with our money. Not with a dollar of American complicity.”