House China Committee Told of Abuse of Uyghurs in CCP’s ‘Reeducation’ Camps

China’s state-sanctioned practice of forced organ harvesting also came under scrutiny

Gulbahar Haitiwaji (L), a Uyghur who wrote a book about what she experienced while held in two “re-education” camps and police stations for more than two years, and Qelbinur Sidik (R), a member of China's ethnic Uzbek minority who was forced to teach Chinese in separate detention facilities for Uyghur men and women, testify during a special House committee hearing on the CCP on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 23, 2023. Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo

Uyghur women held in “reeducation” camps in the far-western Xinjiang region of China are subjected to sterilization, sexual abuse, electric shocks, and brainwashing, two firsthand witnesses recounted during a House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party hearing on March 23.

“Genocide is occurring, this time at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), the committee chairman, said at the start of the hearing.

“The [Party’s] genocide against Uyghurs and other Muslims groups is real,” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), the panel’s ranking Democrat, stated. “Not only is it going on to this day, it is expanding. It is not too late to confront these atrocities so that the famous saying ‘Never again’ can actually become a reality.”

China has used “combating extremism” as a pretext for locking up more than 1 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang, where detainees are subjected to forced labor, torture, political indoctrination, forced abortion, and other inhuman treatment in the regime’s internment camps.

In 2021, the Trump and the Biden administrations both formally declared China’s treatment of the Uyghur minority ethnic group as “genocide” and “crimes against humanity.” Several countries have followed suit, including Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, and the Netherlands.

Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) speaks during the first hearing on national security and Chinese threats to America held by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party on Capitol Hill in Washington on Feb. 28, 2023. Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

The hearing, Gallagher said, could, at the very minimum, raise awareness.

“The least we can do on this committee is to make sure that in 50 years—when the Xinjiang genocide is remembered as one of the abominations of the 21st century—no corporate executive, no policy maker, no investor, no university president can look their grandchildren in the eye and claim they didn’t know,” he said.

‘Grateful for Xi Jinping’

One of the two Uyghur women to testify at the hearing was Gulbahar Haitiwaji, who now lives in France.

“I was chained to the bed for 20 days,” she said through a translator, recalling how she was punished in 2017.

Haitiwaji was lured back to China in late 2016 to take care of what she was told was “an issue” with her retirement pension. She was held in two education camps for more than two years before she was able to return to France in August 2019, with the help of the French government and her daughter’s campaigning.

While incarcerated, Haitiwaji recalled she was forced to sit on a restraining device called the “tiger chair” while being interrogated. Also, she said she was subjected to “brainwashing education” for 11 hours a day and was tested about what she had learned at the end of each week.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping attends the opening of the first session of the 14th National People's Congress in Beijing on March 5, 2023. Lintao Zhang/Getty Images

“We have to learn songs that [praise the] Chinese Communist Party and the government,” Haitiwaji said. “Before eating, we have to [say] … we are very grateful for China’s Communist Party, and we are grateful for [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping, and after ... eating, we have to praise them and thank them.”

Uyghurs in these camps are forbidden from speaking their native language, Haitiwaji added, and women like her are given sterilization shots.

After returning to France, Haitiwaji published a memoir in January 2021 about her experience in the Chinese camps, under the title “How I Survived a Chinese ‘Reeducation’ Camp: A Uyghur Woman’s Story.”

“After my book [was] published, China’s government accused me, [saying] that I am a terrorist,” she said. “Since then, I [have] lost contact with my family.”

‘Horrible Screaming From Torture’ 

Qelbinur Sidik, a member of China’s ethnic Uzbek minority, was a Chinese-language teacher by trade. In 2017, she was assigned to a new position, although it wasn’t until she arrived at her job that she realized that her students were Uyghurs at a concentration camp guarded by military police with rifles.

“For each meal, they eat one Chinese bun and water, and even going [to the] toilet is monitored,” Sidik said through a translator. During her six months of teaching there, she said none of her students had a shower.

Her students would also be called from her classroom for interrogation, Sidik said, and she would hear “horrible screaming from torture” because the interrogation rooms were close by.

Sidik said she knew of four torture methods that were used on her students: electric baton, electric helmet, electric glove, and tiger chair.

She said her students who were being tortured would miss her classes for weeks or months.

Qelbinur Sidik, a member of China's ethnic Uzbek minority who was forced to teach Chinese in separate detention facilities for Uyghur men and women, holds up images as she testifies during a special House committee hearing on the CCP in Washington on March 23, 2023. Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo

Female prisoners were given an unknown drug every Monday, Sidik said, and their periods would stop after taking it.

“Even some women who were breastfeeding babies, the breast milk will stop after taking that medicine,” she said.

Sidik added that guards at the camp were raping female prisoners and even inserting electric batons into their private parts to rape and torture them. She recalled witnessing the death of a girl who was about 18 to 20 years old, who died from bleeding nonstop for two months.

Eventually, Sidik left her job and escaped to the Netherlands, where she lives now; her husband, a Uyghur, remains in China.

After she went public with her experiences in the camp, she said she received threats from Chinese police, who contacted her using the social media accounts belonging to her sister and husband.

“I [have] lost contact with my family members, including my husband. I’m not sure whether my husband is still alive or not,” she said.

‘Organs Are Harvested on Demand’

Rep. Neal Dunn (R-Fla.), a committee member, spoke about how he was disturbed by the Chinese regime’s practice of forced organ harvesting.

“How is it that in China, wait times for hearts and lungs are significantly shorter than in other countries?” Dunn said, adding that some patients are even told of their surgery dates well in advance.

“This seemingly unlimited supply of organs tells us [that] organs are harvested on demand.”

Hamid Sabi (L), the legal counsel to the Independent Tribunal Into Forced Organ Harvesting in China and tribunal Chair Sir Geoffrey Nice QC on the first day of public hearings in London on Dec. 8, 2018. Justin Palmer

As evidence, Dunn presented findings by the China Tribunal, an independent people’s tribunal chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who previously led the prosecution of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes.

“The Tribunal’s members are certain—unanimously, and sure beyond reasonable doubt—that in China, forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims,” he said, citing the tribunal’s 2018 interim judgment (pdf).

The tribunal also concluded that the Chinese regime had been harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience for years “on a significant scale,” with Falun Gong practitioners being the primary source of the organs.

Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that combines meditative exercises and moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. By 1999, seven years after the practice was introduced to the public, there were 70 million to 100 million adherents in China, according to estimates.

The Chinese regime, seeing the practice’s popularity as a threat to its rule, launched a brutal campaign to eradicate the practice in July 1999, targeting innocents in a violent, deadly suppression that experts have described as a genocide.

Falun Gong practitioners march to raise awareness about the Chinese regime's brutal persecution of the spiritual practice, including forced organ harvesting, in New York on May 13, 2022. Larry Dye/The Epoch Times

The China Tribunal presented its full judgment in March 2020, detailing a range of evidence to support its conclusion that the state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting continues unabated in China. It pointed out that imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghurs were subjected to widespread blood tests and other medical tests, but other prisoners were not tested.

While the tribunal couldn’t draw a definitive conclusion that imprisoned Uyghurs were also victims of forced organ harvesting, it said that “the vulnerability of the Uyghurs to being used as a bank of organs is ... obvious.”

‘Barbaric’

Another witness at the hearing, Adrian Zenz, senior fellow and director of China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, told lawmakers that Chinese transplant doctors have been removing prisoners’ organs while they are still alive, killing them in the process.

He cited a paper published in the American Journal of Transplantation in April 2022 that found instances of Chinese transplant doctors breaking the “dead donor rule,” which states that organ donors must be dead before procurement of organs begins, and organ procurement must not cause the death of the donor. Chinese doctors removed organs from death-row prisoners and prisoners of conscience before they were diagnosed correctly as brain dead, which is a precondition to organ extraction, according to the paper.

“We found that the physicians became the executioners on behalf of the state and that the method of execution was heart removal,” author Matthew Robertson said in a statement at the time of the paper’s publication. “These surgeries are highly profitable for the doctors and hospitals that engage in them.”

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Zenz’s remarks prompted committee member Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-Fla.) to express concern about a future dominated by the Chinese Communist Party.

“I find the Chinese Communist Party not only repressive and brutal, it’s also barbaric,” Giménez said. “And if we don’t do something about it, and we don’t stop this, then my fear is that my children and my grandchildren will one day face a world where they’re going to be dominated by this party.”