At a congressional hearing on Capitol Hill, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), Co-Chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), heard chilling testimony from expert witnesses about the barbaric, systemic, and lucrative practice of forced organ harvesting and trafficking in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and beyond.

                “Today, this Commission examines one of the most barbaric human rights atrocities of our time: the forced harvesting of organs from prisoners of conscience, death row inmates, and other vulnerable people—especially in Communist China,” said Smith during his opening remarks.

                Smith explained how Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Christians, death row inmates, and other religious and ethnic minorities in China are targeted and tortured for their organs, which are then implanted into Chinese Communist Party elites or sold to the highest bidder.

                “What we are examining today is the conversion of the imprisoned and persecuted into inventory. Hearts. Livers. Kidneys. Lungs. Corneas. Taken from the living. Sold to the desperate. Hidden behind hospital walls. Protected by secrecy, corruption, fear, and state power,” the China policy expert and human rights lawmaker continued.

                Smith, who chaired his first congressional hearing on forced organ harvesting thirty years ago, underscored the importance of his Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2025 (HR 1503), which passed the House with broad bipartisan support and by a margin of 406 to 1, and urged the Senate to immediately take up his legislation for a vote.

                “The Senate has not acted on the bill, but they must. Delay is denial. 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,” stated Smith.

                “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. 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.”

Policy experts, investigative journalists present evidence

                Ethan Gutmann, a Senior Research Fellow in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and the author of The Xinjiang Procedure (2026) and The Slaughter (2014), testified about the nature of China’s forced organ harvesting “market,” drawing from the first-hand accounts of medical and direct witnesses and his extensive research on the gruesome practice.

                “If we use one million detainees as the baseline population across camps, prisons, forced-labor facilities, and other carceral environments, that means 25,000 to 50,000 Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic detainees harvested per year. If two to three organs are taken from each victim, that is enough to support a transplant volume of at least 60,000 successful transplants annually,” he told lawmakers.

                “On that basis, my minimum estimate for the cumulative death toll from forced organ harvesting in Xinjiang is over 200,000,” Gutmann continued.

                The Hon. Sam Brownback, the former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, explained how the practice of forced organ harvesting is a byproduct of the CCP’s broader war on religion and human dignity: “Disfavored religious communities are particularly targeted by the perpetrators of the forced organ harvesting scheme, with Falun Gong practitioners systematically catalogued based on biometric markers and then murdered for their organs.

                “The organs of Uyghur Muslims are marketed to wealthy Middle Easterners as ‘halal,’ in an unimaginably cynical perversion of their Muslim faith,” Amb. Brownback continued.

                Jan Jekielek, the Senior Editor of The Epoch Times and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Killed to Order, described how Chinese prisoners of conscience are dehumanized and commercialized, tissue-typed and made available for rapid transplant matching.

                “This is why I titled my book Killed to Order,” explained Jekielek. “Because that is exactly what it is: organs delivered on a schedule, matched in advance, extracted from living human beings who are then discarded.

                “It is industrialized forced organ harvesting made possible by the CCP’s unique combination of totalitarian control, mass dehumanization, and the willingness to turn human beings into spare parts for profit, power and elite longevity,” he argued. 

Detention camp survivors provide eyewitness accounts

                The hearing, entitled “A Market Built on Victims: Stopping Illegal Organ Trafficking in China and Beyond,” also featured the eyewitness accounts of two Chinese detention camp survivors, Kalbinur Sidik and Seyed Alireza “Ali” Motevalian.

                Sidik, who was forced to work as a Chinese-language instructor at a detention camp in Sangfanggou Village No. 5, Ürümchi City, said: “Every Monday, no classes were held for the detainees. Instead, blood was drawn from them. They were given unidentified injections. Afterwards, they were given small white pills.

                “Every day in the classroom, detainees were constantly replaced,” she continued. “Older and stronger prisoners were taken away, while new ones arrived. Familiar faces disappeared, and we were expected to accept whatever explanation the guards gave us.”

                Motevalian, who was wrongfully imprisoned in the PRC and spent extended periods of time inside the Shanghai Prisons General Hospital, described an institutional pattern of prisoners being restrained or sedated, forced to provide thumbprints on consent forms, and taken to surgery, never to return. He also detailed the presence of mobile freezer carts, which were moved quickly by guards to waiting vans; the separate handling of bodies or coffins towards an incineration area; and the occurrence of “sleepers,” or unconscious or deeply sedated prisoners, being brought into the surgery area by armed People’s Armed Police personnel.

                “Prisoners were restrained or incapacitated, thumb-printed, taken to surgery, and did not return. A freezer cart then moved quickly from the surgery area to a waiting van, while the body or coffin was handled separately toward the rear incineration area. Unconscious restrained prisoners were also brought from outside under armed PAP escort and taken directly toward surgery,” said Motevalian, whose submitted testimony was read at the hearing.

                “Based on the repetition, the layout, the behavior of guards and Laodong workers, the separate handling of the freezer cart and body, the lack of ordinary specialist medical care, and the large, controlled surgery area, I understood this as non-consensual organ procurement inside the prison hospital,” he concluded.

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