CCPs Forced Organ Harvesting Meets With Growing Awareness in US

WASHINGTON—When Robert Moffit learned about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) forced organ harvesting industry through the recently published book “Killed to Order,” he was reminded of the horrors of human experimentation in the Third Reich that came to light during the Nuremberg Trials.“Well, very frankly, like most human beings on this planet, I never thought that anything like this would be surfaced again. But when I read this book, I was shocked, and I can understand why people don’t believe it, because it’s so terrible,” Moffit, senior research fellow of health and welfare policy at the Heritage Foundation and a former Reagan administration official, told The Epoch Times.“Millions of Americans know nothing about this,” he said. “It’s a real horror story and it’s got to be brought to light. That’s the only way that we’re going to get some change.”Forced organ harvesting was in the spotlight at the Heritage Foundation on April 7. Moffit sat down for a question-and-answer session with “Killed to Order“ author Jan Jekielek, senior editor at The Epoch Times, followed by a panel moderated by Heritage Foundation vice president Jay Richards with some of the leading activists on the issue.The panelists—author and investigator Ethan Gutmann, whose work on the issue has been published extensively and who also has a new book on the CCP’s forced organ harvesting of Uyghurs in Xinjiang; Wesley Smith, chair and senior fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism; and Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) who has introduced legislation to criminalize perpetrators of forced organ harvesting—discussed the implications of the practice and America’s role.State-Backed Organ HarvestingAs explained in “Killed to Order,” the CCP has been pursuing unethical medical experimentation and organ transplantation since the 1980s. But around 2000, a steady increase in the number of organ transplants was seen in China even though the country has a very limited organ donor registry, with extremely low rates of participation in its voluntary donation system.It was in 2005, Jekielek said, when he heard from an Israeli heart transplant surgeon that the surgeon’s patient had gone to China to get a new heart on a two-week schedule—something not possible under an ethical transplantation system, as the hospital would have to guarantee when the donor would die.“So two things we knew right away: Number one, that that catastrophic accident was being arranged by someone—someone is being killed for the organ. And the second part [was] how are you getting this two-week wait time, which is basically impossible, right? In a given time how rare it is to find that appropriate match, which sometimes still gets rejected,” Jekielek said.As independent investigators have concluded, it turned out the CCP was blood testing thousands of Falun Gong practitioners who had been imprisoned for refusing to give up their faith.Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice centered around the three principles of truth, compassion, and forbearance. It gained widespread popularity on a grassroots level after being introduced to the public in the early 1990s, and grew to 70 million to 100 million practitioners by the end of the decade, according to official state estimates. On July 20, 1999, the CCP launched a violent persecution of the practitioners, beginning with mass arrests. Many practitioners refused to renounce Falun Gong, and were subjected to torture, brainwashing, and forced labor.This detained population also gave the CCP the chance to exponentially expand its forced organ harvesting practice, as explained in “Killed to Order.”With elite American institutions training Chinese transplant surgeons, and corporate interests embedded in China, panelists said that for too long there has been ignorance and silence on the issue, but the tide is turning.International Complicity Meets Growing AwarenessAs the numbers of imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners grew, Chinese hospitals were competing with each other to be able to say they performed the most heart or liver transplants annually, Gutmann recalled, and these growing numbers to some extent were called into question by the international community. Beijing had claimed the organs were coming from death row prisoners, a claim that was met with criticism. In 2015, as China was on the verge of losing access to international medical forums and journals, the regime said it was ending the practice of taking organs from prisoners.However, the transplant numbers kept growing.“Then something started to break,” said Gutmann, who is also the co-founder of The International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China.Author and investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann (L) discusses the Chinese communist regime’s system of forced organ harvesting at a Heritage Foundation event in Washington on April 7, 2026. Irene Luo/The Epoch TimesIn 2016, Reps. Chris Smith and Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) held a hearing on organ harvesting in China, and the former head of The Transplant Society and United Network of Organ Sharing said they had no way of verifying that China was doing as it claimed, that they could provide no evidence China was no longer taking organs from prisoners.“It was an amazing hearing,” Gutmann said. “The other thing that started happening was this massive construction of the camps in Xinjiang, and that was accompanied by these massive health checks of every single Uyghur, as long as they were over the age of 12.”As detailed in his new book, the captive population in Xinjiang was suddenly given blood and DNA testing that the average Chinese citizen never received, and 28-year-olds were disappearing at an almost fixed rate. “The Xinjiang Procedure,” Gutmann’s new book, is fresh evidence that the CCP has expanded its organ harvesting systemically to Uyghurs.For many years, major medical organizations were silent on the issue or took Beijing’s claims at face value, Gutmann said, but in 2022 one such organization made the decision to ban Chinese papers on organ transplantation.“The International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation did a 180 on this whole issue,” Gutmann said. “The point is that they stuck with it, because they say there’s no evidence that they’ve turned, that China’s reformed in any way.“It means that Chinese transplant surgeons can’t come to their conferences, they can’t write for their journals and so forth. That’s a huge deal in China. That is a massive loss of face,” Gutmann continued.“What’s going on right now is we have an opening, a tremendous opening, because the old excuse used to be that both in the world of the press and within politics too, was, ‘you know, well, the doctors aren’t really signed on to this.’ Well, now you can say it’s a split. There’s a schism, okay, there’s a real schism between the heart and lung transplant surgeons and the transplantation society. That’s an opening. That’s an opening that could be filled by Congressman [Smith]’s bill,” Gutmann said.(C) Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) discusses the Chinese communist regime’s system of forced organ harvesting, at a Heritage Foundation event in Washington on April 7, 2026. Irene Luo/The Epoch TimesLegislation Against Forced Organ HarvestingRep. Chris Smith has been a vocal human rights advocate in Congress for more than three decades, and has held more than 100 hearings on the CCP’s human rights abuses.He has introduced legislation that would sanction perpetrators of forced organ harvesting, which passed the House unanimously last year. It was the second time the House passed such legislation with no movement on the Senate side.“I’ve asked, and I appealed again to the Senate leadership, bring it up under a [unanimous consent] (UC). I believe it will pass,” said Chris Smith, who added that he has a meeting on April 15 with the head of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. “And it’s taken me about a year to get the meeting, asking him, please put the bill up, or at least UC it. Don’t block it.”When the bill was introduced in the Senate this year, it had bipartisan sponsorship for the first time. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), would block the perpetrators from entering the United States or conducting U.S.-based transactions. The individuals would also lose any current U.S. visa and immigration benefits they have.“I think having two books coming out and both, raising the issue in a very, very profound way will, I think, be transformational,” Chris Smith told The Epoch Times. “It brings a lot of fresh research and accuracy to just how horrible and how pervasive it is … it is cruelty on steroids.“Knowledge is power. When you really make yourself aware, then you can act, and you can act prudently in trying to combat, in this case, an insidious evil … This is real, in-depth information that helps all of us go in the right direction. It’s a blueprint for action by really explaining the gravity of the situation and the pervasiveness of it,” he said.Terry Gilberg, talk show host and producer, at the event, Organ Harvesting: Communist China’s Hideous Shop of Horrors, hosted by the Heritage Foundation, in Washington, on April 7, 2026. Eva Fu/The Epoch TimesThose in the audience learning about the CCP’s forced organ harvesting for the first time shared the panelists’ sentiments, wanting the United States to condemn and criminalize the practice.Radio host Terry Gilberg said she had not been aware of forced organ harvesting in China.“It’s the issue that we need to know about,” Gilberg told The Epoch Times. “This has got to stop, but it’s a question of getting the message out to all Americans, especially in the hospitals, especially with the doctors, with the nurses, with the families that are begging, begging for some kind of organ.”Chuck Donovan, co-president of the Science Alliance for Life and Technology, said this was a new issue he would be writing about and contacting policymakers over.Chuck Donovan, co-president of the Science Alliance for Life and Technology, at the event, Organ Harvesting: Communist China’s Hideous Shop of Horrors, hosted by the Heritage Foundation, in Washington, on April 7, 2026. Eva Fu/The Epoch Times“I’ve had 50 some years working on issues in Washington. There are so often reasons of state or some big thing in the background that determines whether a policy like this, which should be easy, but somehow gets difficult to address, because it’s tangled up in other issues between nations,” he told The Epoch Times. “To me, the biggest issue is how bold is the United States willing to be in moral leadership. To me, it’s not as bold as it should be. So I sort of like to see that change. It’s very important. It’s huge.”Wesley Smith, who has authored a book on medical ethics, said the CCP’s practices must be denounced, because it’s a mindset that spreads.Wesley Smith (C) discusses the Chinese communist regime’s system of forced organ harvesting, at a Heritage Foundation event in Washington on April 7, 2026. Irene Luo/The Epoch Times“This is a virus, okay? It’s always been a virus that will go to country after country,” Wesley Smith said, pointing to a case where a woman who committed medically assisted suicide was put into a medical coma to prolong the period during which her organs could be extracted, which he worries could incentivize not preventing suicides. “It’s obviously spreading into our ideas about assisted suicide. And that’s the problem here. And so if we can stop it in China, if we can at least stop the normalization, I think that would be the first step.“China is the place where ethics go to die in terms of medical research. We need to curtail that kind of collaboration, which they yearn for because they want respect,” he continued. “We need to, as long as this is going on, and as long as they’re willing to tolerate it within their society and benefit from it, we need to treat China, I think, as a pariah nation.”