America Must Face China’s Continuing Medical Atrocity

Samal escaped China to her native Kazakhstan in 2018. It was there that she, amid bouts of sobbing, described night-shifts at a Xinjiang province detention center, removing intestines from corpses. Many bodies were still warm. Many bore the marks of torture. Samal worked assisting her friend, a Uyghur veterinarian, in a fortified compound of three medical clinics, four floors down from a massive detention center. In assembly line fashion, they would prep several corpses a night and send them on for further “cleaning” by a team of eleven Mandarin-speaking doctors. 

Camp authorities stated they were following Islamic burial traditions in largely Muslim Xinjiang. Yet Samal knew that China bans such rituals under the province’s brutally enforced assimilation policies. Moreover, the vet spotted containers of human livers and kidneys in the screened off, adjacent clinics. One day he warned her: “This place, they’re telling you it’s a vocational school… but people are dying here… You know what happens to the bodies… . You can be an organ donor. They can do that to you.” Hours later, Samal fled.

On June 17, Congress took an encouraging step toward sanctioning forced organ harvesting in China when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee unanimously moved forward the “Falun Gong and Victims of Forced Organ Harvesting Protection Act” (S4009). Sponsored by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), it provides for State Department reporting and sanctions on China’s forced organ harvesting, whether targeting Falun Gong or other religious minorities. The House overwhelmingly passed a similar bill, introduced by and Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) and Rep. William Keating (D-MA) last year. 

Satellite photos of Xinjiang’s vast detention complex, holding a million Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims, led the US government to declare a CCP “genocide” in 2021.  The State Department described officially directed rapes, forcible sterilizations, and torture inside the camps.  Adding  forced organ harvesting to the list of horrors is overdue.

Samal’s story is among many evidencing that China continues to forcibly harvests organs from prisoners, who under international ethical rules have no capacity to freely give consent. Falun Gong practitioners in the West first began reporting forced organ harvesting following the suspicious deaths of their relatives imprisoned after a 1999 Beijing directive to “eliminate” their community. China claimed that it stopped harvesting “donated” prisoner organs after 2015 but Samal’s and other testimony gathered by Mr. Gutmann in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkey disproves this.   Since 2017, Xinjiang’s young, healthy prisoners of conscience have apparently become the main victims. 

Former Xinjiang detainees consistently reported having blood samples and tissue typing done upon entering the camps.  Ovalbek, a young Kyrgyz ethnic with U.S. asylum, told us that prison doctors also scanned his heart. According to former detainees’ estimates from a wide range of detention centers, between 2.5 and 5 percent of the prisoners, typically young adults, disappear annually. Rahima  related awakening one night in detention to discover that her 27-year-old bunkmate, Araya, was gone without a trace. Relatives of dead detainees told of watching as sealed body bags, with explicit do-not-open warnings, are lowered into graves or sent for cremation while armed detachments keep guard. Meanwhile, no independent observer has had free access to these camps.

The reports of Falun Gong and Uyghurs remarkably corroborate the other. Separated by religion, ethnicity, language, and geography, they attest to identical evidence of forced organ harvesting. Testimony from surgeons, prison guards, and international investigators provide further substantiation. Chinese medical journals revealed that many were executed on the operating table. 

The implications are staggering. China’s transplant industry is possibly the world’s largest. Last July, China’s Xinjiang Health Commission announced plans for six new organ transplant centers, despite the province’s anemic population and organ donation rate.  Photos of airports near detention camps show clearly marked, export-only fast lanes for shipping organs to China’s coastal hospitals. These hospitals have suspiciously short waiting periods, where even heart transplants can be scheduled within two weeks, as Israeli heart surgeon Dr. Jacob Lavee attested. 

After confirming that China relied on organs from death-row prisoners,  Huang Jiefu, who served as head of China’s voluntary organ donor committee ( as well as deputy health minister, and a CCP central committee member), famously announced in late 2014 that China was stopping the practice. But buried within Huang’s statement was a semantic trick. “Once the organs from willing death-row prisoners are enrolled into our unified allocation system, they are then treated as voluntary donation from citizens,” Huang explained. 

 America’s transplant sector generally focused only on the headlines that China stopped using prisoner organs without independently verifying whether organ donations are voluntary. In 2016 congressional testimony, a prominent Harvard transplant surgeon acclaimed Huang’s “courageous leadership” in changing China’s transplant procurement protocols. American transplant surgeons backed Huang’s appointment to WHO’s task force on best transplant practices. Though the International Society of Heart and Lung Transplantation launched a rigorous academic boycott of China in 2022, numerous American medical schools receiving NIH funds continue to legitimize China’s transplant system with training, joint research, conferences, and grants.

The Xinjiang reports expose the continuity of a depraved, dual-purpose CCP policy — persecuting religious minorities while extending the lifespans of ailing communist party and military elites and high-paying medical tourists. A medical perversion so heinous warrants a U.S. response to hold China accountable. The full Senate should now quickly vote on S.4009. 

The United States may not be able to end forced organ harvesting in China but it can prompt the withdrawal of our institutional and corporate complicity and help preserve our own medical ethics.  It can also dramatically raise the stakes for Beijing.