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

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

Cynthia Sun’s “Beijing’s Playbook for Religious Persecution Inside and Outside China,” presented at Ave Maria Law School’s “Victims of Communism” conference on Feb. 18, 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,” said Sun, a senior researcher at the Falun Dafa Information Center and a fellow at the First Freedom Foundation.

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

Forced Organ Harvesting

Falun Gong practitioners are among those targeted by the 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 have been detained inside prisons, labor camps, and other facilities, with hundreds of thousands tortured while incarcerated, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.

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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.

The 2,828 who were arbitrarily detained were arrested unconstitutionally, Sun noted, as China’s constitution technically allows for religious practice, which 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.

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

“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 Pang died from hyperthyroidism, but his family and friends said he was healthy before his detention.

In several public events and interviews with The Epoch Times last year, 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 to prepare for surgery. When he woke up, he was shackled to the bed and had a nearly 14-inch scar 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 escaping China and finally arriving in the United States in 2020.

Sun noted that some experts estimate China’s organ transplant industry has grown to roughly $1 billion with so 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.

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

Communism in China

Communism began in China when the Chinese Communist Party 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 like the “Great Leap Forward” and the “Cultural Revolution” that would lead to the deaths of tens of millions 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 numbers surpass 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.

In his presentation on the rise of communism in China, Mosher said Mao’s Great Leap Forward led to a “manmade famine” due to the leader’s stubborn insistence to try and outpace Great Britain’s industrial production with a population traditionally geared toward agriculture. An estimated 23 million to 55 million 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.

Mosher said 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 born, and many of the working-age adults who would have raised families decades ago are left with elderly care. 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 noted. Boys were often valued higher, as males would stay home to care for elders and could also work for the family, whereas girls would eventually marry out and move in with their husband’s families. This led to some parents aborting pregnancies with female babies or abandoning them after birth.

Brookings estimates that China now has a pool of surplus men ranging between 20 million and 40 million, meaning that even as 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.