Congressional Hearing Spotlights Organ Harvesting in China

WASHINGTON—As U.S. and China delegations convene in Beijing, a bipartisan panel of lawmakers is casting a spotlight on the regime’s forced organ harvesting, saying it’s past time to put the abuse to an end.Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, opened a May 14 congressional hearing by recalling a hot mic incident on Tiananmen Square last September.A conversation was captured between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin as they walked together, musing about living to 150 through continued organ transplants.“That was not macabre small talk among aging dictators,“ Smith said at the hearing. ”It was a glimpse behind the curtain—a glimpse into a world where human beings can be treated as interchangeable parts to prolong the lives of autocrats.”Smith called what the leaders discussed “murder masquerading as medicine.”Thirty years after Smith’s first hearing on the topic of organ harvesting, the evidence has become “more disturbing, more detailed, and more compelling,” he said, as religious and ethnic groups—including Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Christians—face greater risk.Though Beijing now insists that its transplant system conforms to international standards, he said, “extraordinary” eyewitness accounts reviewed by his commission say otherwise.‘Enough Is Enough’One testimony came from Seyed Alireza Motevalian, an Iranian-born refugee and businessman in China. As recently as 2021, he saw unconscious, restrained Chinese prisoners brought in on stretchers and sent to surgery rooms in prison hospitals, never to return—a repeated pattern he linked to organ harvesting.Kalbinur Sidik, who worked as a Chinese-language teacher in Uyghur detention camps in Xinjiang, testified that she saw blood drawn from detainees every week. The detainees were then given injections of unidentified substances and small white pills that the Chinese nurses described as nutrition supplements, she said. Healthy men disappeared.Sidik said the special police officer and driver who escorted her said the authorities had converted a local detoxification center into an organ extraction hospital.Kalbinur Sidik, survivor of China’s genocide and eyewitness to forced labor camps and author of forthcoming book “Heart Full of Light: Love, Loss, and Survival Inside China’s Gulags,” testifies online from the Netherlands, before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 14, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times“They said, ‘Right now in our country, the halal organ trade is booming,’” she said via a translator.“Halal organs” are reportedly taken from Muslim ethnic minorities and marketed to wealthy Muslims.“These are Nazi-like atrocities that are being committed in 2026—it’s getting worse,” Smith told The Epoch Times. “The American public, we all need to mobilize and say, ‘Enough is enough. This has got to stop.’”Concerns of forced organ harvesting targeting prisoners of conscience first emerged in 2006. Whistleblowers told The Epoch Times they’d witnessed the killing of Falun Gong practitioners for their organs in underground facilities.Under international pressure, the Chinese regime announced it would transition to having a voluntary organ donation system. But a 2019 study published in the scientific journal BMC Medical Ethics, having analyzed the country’s organ donation data, found it “too neat to be true.”“These figures don’t appear to be real data from real donations. They’re numbers generated using an equation,” said study author Matthew Robertson, a doctoral student at the Australian National University.The researchers also compared the figures with data from 50 other countries in a database managed by the World Health Organization and found that none of the other countries’ datasets fit any formula.In 2019, the independent China Tribunal in London released findings after a year of investigation into the issue. It concluded that the Chinese regime had forcibly harvested organs from prisoners of conscience “on a significant scale,” and that Falun Gong practitioners were the primary victims.Ethan Gutmann, investigative journalist and author of the “Xinjiang Procedure,” was one of three hearing witnesses who have written books on the issue.Ethan Gutmann, a China studies research fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and author of “The Xinjiang Procedure,” testifies before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 14, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch TimesHe estimated the average age of victims to be 28.Smith said he finds that difficult to comprehend.“These are young people with great futures. They’re very healthy,” and the Chinese authorities “kill them to get their organs,” he said in the interview.His thoughts then returned to the hot mic moment.If Xi needs a new liver, Smith said, the Chinese leader will “look to the very people he despises, like the Falun Gong or like the Uyghurs.”“That is perverted,” he said. “It’s wrong, it’s ugly, it’s cruel.”‘Extractable Body Parts’Last May, the House passed two bills—the Falun Gong Protection Act and Smith’s Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act—aiming to impose sanctions on forced organ harvesting perpetrators. Both now await further movement in the Senate.Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.), coming out of the hearing, said he hopes the Senate will take action.Beijing is “using forced organ harvesting as a tool of repression in their repression toolbox, and it’s really important for the United States not to let those kinds of human rights issues slip off of the agenda,” he told The Epoch Times.Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.) speaks during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 14, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch TimesThe issue should be “near the top” of the U.S. policy agenda on China, he said.“We have important issues to discuss with China, around trade, around technology, around security, all of those things are important,” he said.“But if we don’t have a robust global human rights framework that can protect the freedoms, the religious freedoms, the political freedoms of every person on the planet, then all those other conversations aren’t very meaningful, are they?”Rep. Dale Strong (R-Ala.) similarly said the issue needs to be brought to the forefront.“Illegal harvesting of body parts shouldn’t be occurring in any country,” he told The Epoch Times. “We’re exposing some things here that need to be exposed—should have been exposed a long time ago.”Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek, whose book “Killed to Order” recently made the New York Times best-seller list, said the lesson from decades of investigating organ harvesting is that “the regime is capable of anything at others’ expense.”As the United States, “built on a foundational belief and the God-given right of every individual,” celebrates its 250th anniversary, the Chinese Communist Party rejects this truth at its core, he said at the hearing.Jan Jekielek, Epoch Times senior editor and author of “Killed to Order” testifies before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 14, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times“It views its own citizens not as people with dignity, but as a collection of extractable body parts,” he said, and it looks at Americans through “exactly the same lens.”Among the volumes of corroborating information on the subject, one source he cited was a 2022 medical study in the American Journal of Transplantation, which identified dozens of Chinese language papers on organ transplants where doctors appeared to have taken the organs without confirming the persons’ brain death, an indication that the individuals were killed.“Killed to order is just kind of the norm of how transplantation is done … they’ve written that into their scientific methods,” Jekielek said in an interview.If Washington intends to confront the issue, Jekielek has a suggestion.“President Trump likes to have great relationships with a lot of America’s prime antagonists,” he said in an interview. In that spirit, he said, the U.S. president could approach it by asking his Chinese counterpart whether or not he wants this on his legacy.“Does he want his legacy as the ruler of China to be forced organ harvesting—this atrocity and evil yet to be seen on this planet?”‘No More Free Pass’Hearing witness Sam Brownback, former ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom and author of the just-published “China’s War on Faith,” said the biggest takeaway from the event should be “no more free pass.”“China doesn’t get a pass anymore,” he told The Epoch Times.If the regime insists on being a “hardcore authoritarian communist country” and committing atrocities, he said, Washington should take the same confrontational stance that it took with the Soviet Union.He cited Falun Gong practitioner Cheng Peiming, who went public in 2024 with the story of how part of his lung and liver were removed forcibly in China in 2004, leaving a roughly 14 inch scar around his chest.Such stories need to get out, Brownback said.Amb. Sam Brownback, former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large of International Religious Freedom, testifies before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 14, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times“You need somebody to pull a shirt up and show you, ‘here’s the cut,’ so that people can see this has happened,” he said.  “You need to go through the numbers.”Compared with the often years-long wait time for an organ in the United States, Chinese hospitals’ ability to schedule organ transplants within a very short period of time defies understanding, Brownback said.“The CCP is conducting three religious genocides as we speak—against Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghur Muslims, and Falun Gong practitioners,” he said at the hearing.Smith noted the massive profit the regime gleans from the illicit organ trade.“We’ve got to shut it off with a tourniquet, shut it down completely,” he said, urging the Senate to take up on the issue.“For the victim who tomorrow is going to be slaughtered for their organs, delay is denial,” he added. “I can’t say it strong enough. We don’t have a moment to lose.”Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 14, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch TimesAnd on one part there would be broad bipartisan agreement, he said at the hearing.“No one wants Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin to live forever.”