Opinion Pieces
The Washington Times Op-Ed by Rep. Smith'Pass the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act''Thwart Xi Jinping's bid for immortality'By Rep. Chris Smith - Tuesday, May 12, 2026
OPINION: As President Trump prepares to meet General Secretary Xi Jinping in China, Americans should remember that the Chinese Communist Party stands at the center of a pernicious global industry that treats the human body as inventory. It generates as much as $1.7 billion a year, hidden behind shady networks of the corrupt and criminal and fueled by the oldest imbalance in medicine: Desperate patients need organs, and there are never enough lawful, voluntary donations to meet demand. In that shortage, traffickers offer what ethical medicine cannot provide: organs on demand, fast matches, short waits and no hard questions about where that kidney, liver, heart or lung came from. This market does not serve the powerless. It feeds on them. The vulnerable supply the organs. The wealthy and well-connected buy the product. Brokers launder the paperwork. Complicit medical systems provide the operating rooms. Criminal syndicates find the donors. Corrupt officials look the other way — or, worse, participate. When the state controls the hospitals, prisons, police and data, as in communist China, a human being can disappear into the system or get buried as a nameless statistic. Anyone who doubts that lives can be sacrificed for profit and longevity has only to listen to the conversation caught on a hot mic in Beijing in September. As Mr. Xi, Russian ruler Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un walked together toward a reviewing stand, the world heard an unguarded exchange about organ transplants, biotechnology and possibility of living to 150. It was not just macabre small talk among aging autocrats. It was a glimpse into a politics that treats human beings as interchangeable parts and power as something to be medically engineered to last forever. Autocrats dream of permanence, but forced organ harvesting is not healing. It is murder masquerading as medicine. Nowhere is the evidence more alarming than in China. For years, researchers, physicians, journalists, survivors and human rights advocates have warned of a transplant apparatus in China built on secrecy, speed and state control. Wait times are measured in days, and there are “on-demand” matches and a bureaucracy that blocks independent auditors. The earliest, most persistent allegations centered on prisoners of conscience, especially Falun Gong practitioners, who were detained, dehumanized and allegedly turned into a captive organ pool. Beijing insists it has reformed and no longer relies on executed prisoners. Yet without transparent registries, verifiable wait-time data and unfettered access to hospitals and detention facilities, there are no real assurances and no accountability. The danger is especially acute today in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where the U.S. has determined that the CCP is committing genocide against the Uyghur people. The machinery that bulldozes mosques, separates families and forces sterilizations cannot be trusted to respect the line between voluntary donation and coercion. Disturbing reports have also alleged that Uyghur organs are being marketed to foreign transplant tourists, including patients seeking so-called “halal” organs. China is the epicenter of concern, but the problem is global. Organ crimes flourish wherever coercion, poverty, corruption and demand intersect. Unless the international community demands sunlight, the practice will continue to flourish in the shadows. That is why Congress must finish the job and pass the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act. The House has already passed the bill twice with overwhelming bipartisan clarity. It is now in the Senate, where it has stagnated. I have held multiple hearings on this issue, the first in 1996. Evidence of the CCP’s complicity in forced organ harvesting is clear and compelling. The Senate must end delays and send this bill to the president’s desk. The legislation is not a press release. It is enforceable policy. It targets enablers of forced organ harvesting with sanctions. It requires public reporting so that governments, universities, hospitals, researchers, insurers and companies cannot hide behind plausible deniability. If you profit from coerced transplants, directly or indirectly, then you risk your money, your access to the United States and your ability to travel here. One law may not instantly change Beijing’s behavior, but it will change ours. It will help scrub American institutions of complicity and expose research relationships that should have been audited years ago. It will raise the cost for brokers and prestige-seeking medical institutions that look at China’s gleaming transplant hospitals and ignore the prisons, detention centers and military-linked systems that still treat the imprisoned and persecuted as spare parts for profit. The hot-mic moment mattered because it stripped away the mask. When strongmen muse about living forever, the temptation is not theoretical. They have the power to turn bodies into an exploited resource. Free societies must draw a brighter line and demand transparency. No one wants a Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin to live forever. Passage of the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act will make it clear that the United States will not tolerate a global transplant marketplace built on coercion. Tyrants will continue to seek immortality, but not with our expertise or money. Not with a dollar of American complicity. • Rep. Chris Smith, New Jersey Republican, is the co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. He is also chair of the Africa subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. |
