Congress Could Help Turn Tide Against Forced Organ Harvesting in China, Say Advocates

The U.S. Capitol building in Washington on April 8, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

In the Chinese prison where Yu Xinhui spent six years for his beliefs, one secret list filled everyone with dread.

Once or twice a year, without prior announcements, busloads of people on that list got frogmarched from the prison ward—never to return.

He recalled distinctly in 2006, how large vans with iron-barred windows, military police vehicles, and white ambulances popped up outside the prison building as military police swept through the site, floor by floor.

“Don’t look. Face to the wall. Lie on the bed,” the guards yelled, rattling off names that included three from his cell. Those inmates, stricken looking, stumbled away quickly, leaving all their belongings behind.

Mr. Yu, a practitioner of the meditation practice Falun Gong that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has waged a quarter-century war to wipe out from China, knew several fellow practitioners who had vanished in such a fashion.

“Nobody knew when it’d be their turn,” he told The Epoch Times.

‘Crucial Legal Precedent’

In 2006, forced organ harvesting was just entering public consciousness. Several whistleblowers that year came forward to The Epoch Times revealing the mass killing of Falun Gong practitioners at Chinese medical facilities while some investigators began their independent research.

Two decades later, on June 15, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Falun Gong Protection Act.

“In China, if you’ve got the money, there is no waiting list for you to get an organ. There’s a ready supply of these organs,” the bill’s lead sponsor Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) said on the House floor on June 25.

Han Yu, whose father was killed in China because of his belief in Falun Gong, at a rally at the United Nations Plaza in New York City on Sept. 24, 2019. Eva Fu/The Epoch Times

Mr. Perry called the measure “an action long overdue after 25 years.”

The bill was the first U.S. legislative action to directly address the slaughtering of Falun Gong practitioners on demand. Besides sanctioning anyone directly or indirectly engaged in forced organ harvesting, it carries civil and criminal penalties that could put offenders in prison for up to 20 years.

Moments before Mr. Perry spoke, his Democrat colleague Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.) evoked the “unimaginable suffering” of the victims as he rallied for support of the bill.

“Imagine the terror, and despair, of those who are imprisoned for their beliefs, only to have their organs forcibly taken from them,” he said. “This is not just a statistic, or a distant issue. These are real people—people with families, with dreams, who endure unbelievable pain and fear.”

To many inside China and overseas, the action seemed like a watershed moment.

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) walks through the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 12, 2024. Kent Nishimura/Getty Images

“It’s a crucial legal precedent for protecting international human rights,” Du Wen, once an adviser to senior Chinese officials on legal affairs in Inner Mongolia, told The Epoch Times. Mr. Du later sat in prison for 12 years under false political charges.

“If the United States can use law to showcase the CCP’s crimes, it’s very likely other allies will follow up. This will create international pressure on the CCP to change,” he said.

The development has sent a signal to anyone in China potentially involved in this dark supply chain: the world is watching, said Yuan Hongbing, a Chinese-Australian jurist and dissident who still maintains close connections within China’s inner political circle.

The past four decades of deepening U.S.-China relationships means most, if not all, Chinese officials have something to do with the West. As China’s economic and political landscape grows ever more volatile, many send their kids and families abroad and transfer wealth out of the country, positioning themselves to take refuge in United States if political crises befall them or the regime.

But the act, if enacted into law, means that “as long as they commit serious human rights crimes such as forced organ harvesting, they won’t be safe even if in America,” Mr. Yuan told The Epoch Times. It may prompt them to think of other ways out—including by exposing details of the regime’s “crimes against humanity” and atone for their transgressions, he said.

It’s now up to the Senate and the president to pass the bill and sign it into law.

Doctors carry fresh organs for transplant at a hospital in Henan Province, China, on Aug. 16, 2012. Screenshot via Sohu.com

‘Your Organs Are the Best’

In a population of around 1.4 billion, the practitioners of Falun Gong make up a sizable community. About one in 13 Chinese were practicing the meditative discipline when a ruthless persecution began to target them in 1999.

Yu Xinhui doing Falun Gong exercises in Bangkok, Thailand in 2009. Courtesy of Yu Xinhui

Practitioners strive to align themselves with core values of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, and exercise their bodies to keep fit. But their sheer number as well as the practitioners’ healthy, peaceful lifestyle are also what make them vulnerable. In them, the regime sees a convenient target to feed the industrialized organ harvesting machinery.

Even 18 years ago in the Chinese prison, the matter was already an open secret around Mr. Yu.

“Don’t go against the communist party,” one prison doctor, who took to Mr. Yu because of their shared hometown, once told him. “Do as it orders. Otherwise, you won’t even know how you die. When it happens, where your heart, liver, spleen, and lungs will be taken, you won’t even know either.”

“Your organs are the best,” the doctor had said. Falun Gong practitioners, he said, “often exercise their bodies, when their bodies are healthy, so of course their organs are good too. So do you think we’d rather pick you or these other prisoners?”

Exposing the story to the world hasn’t been easy. One of the first two people to come forward was “Annie.“ Using an alias to protect her identity, Annie told The Epoch Times in March 2006 that her neurosurgeon ex-husband had harvested corneas from Falun Gong practitioners. She learned about it because he would have ”terrible nightmares and would wake up shrieking and terrified.” After The Epoch Times published Annie’s story, she said assailants tried to kill her ex-husband.

Whistleblowers Annie and Peter at a press conference in Washington, D.C., on April 20, 2006. It was their first public testimony about large scale organ harvesting atrocities in China. The Epoch Times

“Peter,” a Chinese investigative journalist based in Japan, spoke to The Epoch Times the same month, with details about a detention facility in Sujiatun where organs were being harvested. Peter received threatening anonymous calls telling him to play down the matter.

As stories like these emerged, and as investigators started to collect evidence, the Chinese regime made superficial changes to try to tamp down the pressure from outside. Outwardly, the regime established an organ donation system in 2015, and it promised to stop taking organs from executed prisoners, who Beijing previously claimed were the source of their vast reservoir of available organs.

But investigators have found no evidence that the abuses stopped. A 2019 analysis of China’s organ donation data, found compelling evidence that the data was falsified. The same year, the London-based China Tribunal, after 12 months of probing, concluded that the gruesome abuse were still taking place on a mass scale.

Uyghurs Muslim in Xinjiang, and House Christians who are also persecuted for their faith, are known to be victims of the CCP’s organ harvesting too, albeit on a smaller scale.

“Forced organ harvesting is of unmatched wickedness, even compared—on a death-for-death basis—with the killings by mass crimes committed in the last century,” tribunal chairman Sir Geoffrey Nice said in the judgment.

Counsel to the China Tribunal, Hamid Sabi (L), and chair of the China Tribunal, Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, on the first day of public hearings in London on Dec. 8, 2018. Justin Palmer

State Level Momentum

Caroline Harris Davila, a freshman representative to the Texas legislature, was a staffer in the state Senate when the tribunal ruling came out. Reading the testimonies filled her with horror and a desire to “do something—to show that this is not okay,” she told The Epoch Times.

The issue isn’t that far away. Her friend personally knows someone whose family members disappeared in China for practicing Falun Gong.

For them, “it was just kind of a known thing. That your family member or friends would just disappear one day and you never really found out what happened,” she said.

When Dr. Tom Oliverson, a physician and chairman of the state’s House Insurance Committee, began crafting a bill to ban state health insurance funds from supporting organ transplant surgeries from China, she quickly jumped on it. The legislation passed the legislature unanimously and became law in June 2023.

From there, the pace of change quickened.

Tom Oliverson, Texas State Representative and chair of the Insurance Committee speaks to the media after testifying at a hearing about the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) forced organ harvesting before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China in Washington on March 20, 2024.Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

Two more states, Utah and Idaho, have since followed suit, spurred by State Armor, an advocacy group that lobbies for policy changes to “counter the threat of Communist China.” A fourth state, Arizona, nearly got the measure into law if not for a governor’s veto, while Missouri also proposed similar moves.

State Armor’s founder Michael Lucci, who comes from Ms. Harris Davila’s district, credited Texas for the blueprint of what he thinks every state should act on.

“I think I was stealing the language from the bill before they even got it signed by the governor,” Mr. Lucci told The Epoch Times. “All 50 states could do something on this bill, it will make sense everywhere.”

He spoke just before walking into a meeting with lawmakers in Ohio. He has gotten a late start, having just launched the organization in January, and it takes time to “do the education part” on this issue that many elected officials have little prior knowledge about, he said.

“In 2025, I bet you 10 states will do this bill.”

‘Something Has to Happen’

The regime has never lessened its efforts to shut down discussion of the issue. In 2008, when Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas was giving public speeches about his investigation into the abuse, a Chinese-speaking man identifying himself as a police official, called in during a live Q&A to threaten him: “Are you afraid of death? You are brutally interfering in our Party’s internal policies.”

David Matas, international human rights lawyer, before an event on forced organ harvesting at Harvard University in Boston on March 8, 2024. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

In recent years, such lashing out has morphed into something less visible in the form of diplomatic pressure on lawmakers who take a stance, economic coercion toward companies and academic institutions, weaponizing Chinese students, and building inroads in the medical community.

“It is a lot of saber rattling. And this is how China manipulates people and other states and countries,” Utah state Rep. Candice Pierucci, who helped bring the unanimous passage of an anti-forced organ harvesting bill through her state, told The Epoch Times. “Quite frankly, I don’t care what they say what they’re going to do—this is the right thing to do.”

She called the regime “tone deaf” for trying to “bully” politicians out of taking action.

“They’re overplaying their hands,” she said. “They should be the ones issuing an apology.”

Many lawmakers in states that have either acted on the bill or are considering it, expressed a disbelief that such crimes still takes place in the 21st century.

The Idaho bill’s principal sponsor Jordan Redman was looking into forced organ harvesting just as Shen Yun Performing Arts was in town. The dance performance, which presents vignettes of traditional China prior to communism, also featured a segment from modern day China, depicting a family tragedy as a result of organ harvesting.

Doctors prepare for a kidney transplant in a file photo. Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP/Getty Images

During the intermission, Mr. Redman was peppered with questions from his two children, aged 9 and 11, who struggled to wrap their minds around such “pure evil,” he said.

“It is kind of mind boggling to think that that could happen, and still does happen today,” he told The Epoch Times. But he’s seeing a groundswell of support to change that both on a state level and nationally.

“The hardest part is just helping people understand that this is a real thing that happens,” he said, but once that happens, “it’s hard to turn your back on it, then something has to happen.”

Sunlight

Survivors and those who have knowledge about the regime’s human rights records in China, have been hoping for change to happen.

Zhang Guoliang, a Falun Gong practitioner who is a United Airlines captain, spent four years in Chinese jail because of his faith.

“Everyone under the CCP’s detention and persecution can become a victim of forced organ harvesting,” Mr. Zhang told The Epoch Times. “This is dictated by the CCP’s system—as long as the system is running, no one inside could feel safe.”

Falun Gong adherents take part in a rally calling for the end of the Chinese Communist Party’s 25 years of ongoing persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China at the National Mall in Washington on July 11, 2024. Larry Dye/The Epoch Times

While a lot of evidence remains anecdotal due to the opaqueness of the Chinese system, the House bill, which includes a clause about investigating the issue in China, could allow the United States to unearth more data on a governmental level and encourage more people who have stayed silent because of pressure to speak out.

Mr. Yu is still haunted by his prison experience and the practitioners who disappeared. Like many other who are detained, Mr. Yu underwent multiple blood tests and other health checks in prison but was never given the results. He learned later, how narrowly he missed death.

His father is a senior military official in Guangzhou. When Mr. Yu made it out of prison in 2007, his father told him that a prison warden had said, your son only lived because of his military connections.

Mr. Yu is now focused on helping others. For his brethren in China, whose lives are still on the line, exposing the “hideous” cruelty to sunlight is itself a layer of protection, he said.

He’s hoping the Falun Gong Protection Act, having passed the House chamber, will swiftly pass through the Senate too, and then be signed by the president.

“It’s an act that can save lives,” he said.