During Beijing’s military parade on Sept. 3, Chinese leader Xi Jinping was recorded in an unexpected hot mic conversation with Russian and North Korean leaders about longevity, mentioning “living 150 years,” “immortality,” and “organ transplants.”
The exchange occurred as Xi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and North Korea's Kim Jong Un walked side by side at the front of a group of foreign leaders toward the Tiananmen Square rostrum to view the parade.
The brief, less-than-a-minute audio of the longevity discussion was captured on a livestream provided by state broadcaster CCTV to outlets like AP and Reuters.
A translator, relaying Xi’s remarks in Russian, was heard
saying, “In the past, people rarely lived to 70, but nowadays at 70, you’re still a child.”
Putin’s translator then
responded in Chinese: “Biotechnology is advancing rapidly.” After an inaudible segment, he continued: “Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, potentially even achieving immortality.”
Kim, smiling and looking toward Putin and Xi, listened as a separate translator repeated the remarks in Korean.
Off-camera, Xi responded in Chinese: “Some predict that in this century, humans may live to 150 years.” As Xi spoke, the video shifted to a wide shot of Tiananmen Square, and the audio faded out.
Speaker Johnson Responds
In response to a question from an NTD reporter about the hot mic comments, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said: “I will tell you that we've heard some horrific stories of these organ transplants and all of this in China, that they take it from 'unwilling donors,' ... to put it mildly. And the fact that they were caught on a hot mic—it's the first I've heard of that—is very telling. It tells you where their worldview is, in contrast to ours—speaking of evil.“We've heard ... terrible stories of the Uyghurs, for example, this persecuted religious minority that they're using to harvest organs from,” he said.
“The United States, we're going to stand for morality and ethics, and we're going to stand against that. There's legislation that you know that would address it, and we might need to put that at the top of the priority list, if that's what's happening,” Johnson said, in likely reference to the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting
Act of 2025.
Current affairs commentator Li Linyi told the
Chinese edition of The Epoch Times that the conversion alludes to allegations of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) involvement in a state-sponsored organ harvesting industry.
In 2006, The Epoch Times first reported on the CCP’s killing of prisoners of conscience for organ harvesting based on
whistleblower testimony.
The China Tribunal, in its 2019 final
judgment, concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that forced organ harvesting has been occurring in China, with Falun Gong practitioners being the primary victims. The tribunal found that China's transplant industry relies significantly on organs sourced from these persecuted groups and other political dissidents, constituting crimes against humanity.
