Forced Organ Harvesting Displays Chinese Regime’s Ongoing Human Rights Abuses

Falun Gong practitioners are among those targeted by Chinese regime authorities for forced organ harvesting.

(L–R) Robert Destro, former assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor; Cheng Peiming, a Falun Gong practitioner who had his organs forcibly removed in China; and Dr. Charles Lee, forced organ harvesting investigator, speak during a press conference in Washington on Aug. 9, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

NAPLES, Fla.—The Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing campaign of forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience illustrates how communist regimes continue to commit human rights abuses in the 21st century.

At Ave Maria Law School’s “Victims of Communism” conference on Feb. 18, Cynthia Sun gave a presentation titled “Beijing’s Playbook for Religious Persecution Inside and Outside China.” Her talk revealed how the Chinese regime defies its own constitution by arresting religious practitioners, jailing and torturing them, and submitting some to forced organ harvesting.

“Practitioners are systematically arrested, detained, sentenced to lengthy prison terms of up to 20-plus years for their faith, and this is across every province in China,” Sun, senior researcher at the Falun Dafa Information Center and a fellow at the First Freedom Foundation, said.

Steven Mosher, author of “The Devil and Communist China,” discussed in his conference presentation how communism arose in China before causing the deaths of tens of millions of people.

Forced Organ Harvesting

Falun Gong practitioners are among those targeted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for forced organ harvesting.

Falun Gong—also known as Falun Dafa—is a spiritual meditation practice based on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Falun Gong was introduced to the public in the early 1990s and grew in popularity, with an estimated 100 million people practicing at the time, Sun said.

Feeling threatened by Falun Gong’s popularity, the CCP and its then-leader Jiang Zemin launched a systematic elimination campaign in July 1999. Since then, millions of practitioners have been detained in prisons, labor camps, and other facilities, with hundreds of thousands tortured while incarcerated, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.

Sun described six main methods of social and religious persecution in China: mass detentions and harsh sentences, digital surveillance and high-tech repression, deaths, torture and forced labor, forced organ harvesting, and transnational repression and malign influence.

“Last year, at least 2,864 [Falun Gong] practitioners were documented to have been harassed by police, either in their own homes or in public,” Sun said.

She said 2,828 people were arbitrarily detained. Sun noted that they were arrested unconstitutionally, as China’s constitution technically allows for religious practice, a law the CCP defies.

“The detention process is often brutal, with practitioners enduring violence and psychological abuse aimed at forcing them to renounce their fate—that’s the end game,” she said.

Sun described two of the many cases of Falun Gong practitioners detained by the CCP.

Pang Xun, formerly a host on Sichuan People’s Radio, was beaten to death in Leshan Jiazhou Prison on Dec. 2, 2022, after Chinese authorities arrested him for distributing flyers in a park. One of Pang’s close friends exposed his death by posting a video on social media platform X, then known as Twitter, which showed bruises and markings on Pang’s corpse.

“That’s actually one of the few [pieces of] footage that has actually made it outside of China due to VPNs,” Sun said.

The authorities claimed that Pang died from hyperthyroidism, but his family and friends said he was healthy before his detention.

Cynthia Sun, senior researcher at the Falun Dafa Information Center and fellow at the First Freedom Foundation, speaks at Ave Maria Law School's "Victims of Communism" conference in Naples, Fla., on Feb. 18, 2025. Jacob Burg/The Epoch Times

The other case involved the forced extraction of organs from a living Falun Gong practitioner, Cheng Peiming.

In several public events and interviews with The Epoch Times in 2024, Cheng detailed his harrowing experience of having part of his lung and liver removed during his detention by the CCP.

Police officers held Cheng on a bed while doctors forcibly anesthetized him in preparation for surgery. When he woke up, he was shackled to the bed and had a scar nearly 14 inches long on the side of his torso.

After doctors prepared Cheng for another surgery, he managed to escape from the hospital in the early morning hours, eventually leaving China and arriving in the United States in 2020.

Sun said some experts estimate that the Chinese regime’s organ transplant industry has grown to roughly $1 billion, with many on the organ waitlist.

“China’s transplant industry boasts suspiciously short wait times [of] as little as two weeks for certain organs, suggesting a vast on-demand supply or organ bank,” Sun said.

According to Sun, in June 2021, independent experts from the United Nations “expressed concerns that prisoners of conscience are forcibly subjected to blood tests and organ examinations such as ultrasound and X-rays, while other prisoners are not required to undergo such examinations.”

“The results of the examinations are reportedly registered in a database of living organ sources that facilitates organ allocation,” she said.

Communism in China

Communism began in China when the CCP was founded in 1921 in Shanghai.

Following the Chinese Civil War, Mao Zedong took control of the CCP and led a revolution before assuming dominance over China in 1947. Mao instituted policies such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution that would lead to the deaths of tens of millions of people within the nation.

While the exact number of deaths attributed to Mao’s policies ranges between 45 million and 80 million based on various sources, the total surpasses those killed under the totalitarian regimes of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

“The Chinese Communist Party is ... the biggest killing machine in human history,” Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, said at the conference.

Population Research Institute President Steven Mosher speaks at Ave Maria Law School's "Victims of Communism" conference in Naples, Fla., on Feb. 18, 2025. Jacob Burg/The Epoch Times

In his presentation on the rise of communism in China, Mosher said Mao’s Great Leap Forward led to a “manmade famine” as a result of the leader’s stubborn attempt to outpace the UK’s industrial production with a population traditionally geared toward agriculture. An estimated 23 million to 55 million people died from starvation, according to various sources.

However, even after Mao’s death in 1976, the CCP instituted other policies that would damage China for decades, Mosher noted, particularly the “one-child policy.”

“What better way to supervise the population than to take control of their fertility?” he asked.

First announced in 1979, the policy was the CCP’s attempt at population control to trigger economic growth under a planned economy, according to a report from the Brookings Institute. At the time, China faced significant shortages of capital, natural resources, and consumer goods.

Mosher said that early on, some women were arrested after having a second or third pregnancy and were forced to have abortions, with late-term procedures being done by cesarean section.

“The women were opened up like tin cans,” Mosher said.

The consequences are staggering: China’s older population is declining and aging faster than new children are being born, and many of the working-age adults who would have raised families decades ago are caring for their elderly parents. The policy prevented 400 million births, according to the CCP’s own data.

“China’s population is aging and dying more rapidly than any human population has ever aged and died,” Mosher said.

One of the most pernicious qualities of the “one-child policy” was gender discrimination at birth, Mosher said. Boys were often valued more than girls, as a boy could stay home to care for elders and could also work for the family, whereas a girl would eventually marry out and move in with her husband’s family. This led to some parents aborting female babies or abandoning them after birth.

Brookings estimates that China now has between 20 million and 40 million surplus men, meaning that even though the CCP now encourages young adults to marry and have three children, there are no longer enough women for all Chinese men to have families of their own.