Congressional Hearing Spotlights Forced 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.

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.

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.

“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.'”

“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.

Ethan Gutmann, investigative journalist and author of the “Xinjiang Procedure,” was one of three hearing witnesses who have written books on the issue.

He 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.”

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.

The 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.”

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.

“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.”

“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.

“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.

Such stories need to get out, Brownback said.

“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.”

“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.”

And 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.”