[Joint House and Senate Hearing, 119 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
A MARKET BUILT ON VICTIMS:
STOPPING ILLEGAL ORGAN TRAFFICKING
IN CHINA AND BEYOND
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
ONE HUNDRED NINETEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
MAY 14, 2026
__________
Printed for the use of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available at www.cecc.gov or www.govinfo.gov
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
63-846 PDF WASHINGTON : 2026
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
Senate House
DAN SULLIVAN, Alaska, Chair CHRIS SMITH, New Jersey, Co-chair
TOM COTTON, Arkansas ZACHARY NUNN, Iowa
JEFF MERKLEY, Oregon ELISE STEFANIK, New York
TAMMY DUCKWORTH, Illinois DALE STRONG, Alabama
ANDY KIM, New Jersey JEN KIGGANS, Virginia
LISA BLUNT ROCHESTER, Delaware JAMES P. McGOVERN, Massachusetts
THOMAS SUOZZI, New York
SUHAS SUBRAMANYAM, Virginia
JAMES WALKINSHAW, Virginia
EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
Not yet appointed
Scott Flipse, Staff Director
Mary Vigil, Deputy Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
----------
Statements
Opening Statement of Hon. Chris Smith, Co-chair, Congressional-
Executive Commission on China.................................. 1
Statement of Ethan Gutmann, senior research fellow in China
Studies, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation; author of
``The Xinjiang Procedure'' and ``The Slaughter''............... 4
Statement of Ambassador Sam Brownback, senior fellow, Pepperdine
University; former U.S. Ambassador at Large for International
Religious Freedom, former U.S. Senator and Governor of Kansas,
and author, ``China's War on Faith''........................... 7
Statement of Jan Jekielek, senior editor, The Epoch Times, host
of ``American Thought Leaders,'' and author, ``Killed to
Order''........................................................ 9
Statement of Kalbinur Sidik, survivor of China's genocide and
eyewitness to forced labor camps; author of the forthcoming
book ``Heart Full of Light: Love, Loss, and Survival Inside
China's Gulags''............................................... 13
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements
Gutmann, Ethan................................................... 31
Brownback, Sam................................................... 32
Jekielek, Jan.................................................... 33
Sidik, Kalbinur.................................................. 36
Smith, Hon. Chris................................................ 39
Submissions for the Record
Submission of Seyed Alireza Motevalian........................... 41
Submission of Levi Browde and James Yu, Falun Dafa Information
Center......................................................... 45
CECC Truth in Testimony Disclosure Form.......................... 54
Witness Biographies.............................................. 55
(iii)
A MARKET BUILT ON VICTIMS:
STOPPING ILLEGAL ORGAN TRAFFICKING
IN CHINA AND BEYOND
----------
THURSDAY, MAY 14, 2026
Congressional-Executive
Commission on China,
Washington, DC.
The hearing was held from 10:00 a.m. to 11:48 a.m., in Room
2247, Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC,
Representative Chris Smith, Co-chair, Congressional-Executive
Commission on China, presiding.
Also present: Representatives Strong, Stefanik, and
Walkinshaw.
OPENING STATEMENT OF CHRIS SMITH, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM NEW
JERSEY AND CO-CHAIR, CONGRESSIONAL-
EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
Co-chair Smith. Last September, the world heard something
chilling. As Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-un walked
together in Beijing, a hot mic picked up an unguarded
conversation about organ transplants and the possibility of
living up to 150 years. This was not macabre small talk among
aging dictators. It was a glimpse behind the curtain, a glimpse
into a world where human beings can be treated as
interchangeable parts to prolong the lives of autocrats.
But forced organ harvesting is not healing. It is murder
masquerading as medicine. Today this Commission examines one of
the most barbaric human rights atrocities of our time, the
forced harvesting of organs from prisoners of conscience, death
row inmates, and other vulnerable people, especially in
communist China. Let me be clear--ethical organ transplantation
is noble and lifesaving. What we are examining today is the
polar opposite. It is the conversion of the imprisoned and
persecuted into inventory--hearts, livers, kidneys, lungs,
corneas--taken from the living, sold to the desperate, hidden
behind hospital walls, protected by secrecy, corruption, fear,
and state power.
I've chaired several hearings on forced organ harvesting,
the first being 30 years ago on June 18th, 1996. And as Jan
knows, we had many hearings focusing especially on what was
being done, horribly, to the Falun Gong. And since then, the
evidence has become even more disturbing, more detailed, and
more compelling. The most persistent allegations in China
centered first on the Falun Gong practitioners--peaceful men
and women targeted by the Chinese Communist Party for
eradication, genocide. Later came mounting evidence concerning
Uyghurs, already victims of genocide in the Uyghur region,
Tibetans, Christians, death row inmates, and others treated as
property of the state. Experts like Ethan Gutmann have
documented how this atrocity expanded from death row prisoners
to prisoners of conscience and religious detainees.
The China Tribunal concluded that forced organ harvesting
has been committed in China for years on a significant scale.
Witnesses at previous hearings have warned us about military
hospitals, impossibly short wait times in order to procure an
organ, organs available on demand, and a transplant system that
cannot withstand scrutiny. And yet Beijing now asks the world
to believe that the problem has somehow been solved. It says
the transplant system now meets international standards and
once again, the disappointing and corrupt WHO takes Beijing's
claims at face value, just as they did in the early days of
COVID.
But today this Commission has received rare and
extraordinary eyewitness accounts from inside the Chinese gulag
itself. Ali Motevalian's written submission details his
incarceration in a PLA-linked prison hospital near Shanghai,
and Kalbinur Sidik's provides testimony from the detention
camps in the Uyghur region. Together their accounts shatter
Beijing's fiction that its transplant system is voluntary,
transparent, and compliant with international standards. Ali
Motevalian has spent years inside China's prison system. His
submission describes coerced thumbprints on so-called consent
forms, bondage, tranquilizers, last rooms of terminal patients,
prisoners taken into surgery and not returned, mobile freezer
carts, and bodies moved toward incineration.
His account strikes at the heart of Beijing's favorite
defense. The Chinese Communist Party told the world it had
ended the use of executed prisoners' organs. And I just point
out, parenthetically--and Sam will remember this, Sam
Brownback--Harry Wu brought over a guard who brought evidence
that was absolutely compelling. He testified in the late 1990s.
He pointed out that the ambulances would be lined up one after
the other. They would shoot the prisoner, not to kill, but just
to put them into a coma, take their organs, and then that
individual would die. And you know, that was almost 30 years
ago. The hearing 30 years ago didn't have that, but Harry Wu
was just amazing, what he brought forward. There were people in
the administration then that didn't want to hear that, and we
tried, but they didn't want to hear it.
Inside the prison hospital system in 2020 and 2021, years
after the world was told that China had stopped taking organs
from prisoners, Ali says he saw unconscious, shackled men,
known as sleepers, brought by armed personnel directly into the
surgery rooms. They never returned. My God, what a nightmare.
This is not voluntary donation. This is execution by organ
extraction. Ms. Sidik brings us inside another part of the
Chinese gulag, the camps of the Uyghur region. I will not
summarize her testimony in detail because in just a few minutes
she will speak for herself. Her account shows a system where
human beings are reduced to commodities, where the state
controls the body as well as the mind, and where coercion and
fear are used to destroy dignity. The prison hospitals and
gulags described in this testimony are not places of care,
rehabilitation, or education. They are crime scenes, part of a
system of coercion, medical abuse that knows no parallel, and
genocide in China.
Organ crimes are not just a Chinese problem. It is a global
one that flourishes wherever coercion, poverty, corruption,
secrecy, and demand intersect. That's why Congress must act.
The House has twice passed my legislation with overwhelming
bipartisan support. Most recently, H.R. 1503, the Stop Forced
Organ Harvesting Act, passed the House 400 to 1, a full year
ago, and it's still languishing in the Senate. But it passed a
full year ago. It would criminalize forced organ trafficking,
impose serious sanctions, require reporting, deny visas, and
create penalties of up to 20 years in prison and up to $1
million for knowingly being complicit in this crime. The bill
is not a press release. It is enforceable policy. It says to
brokers, traffickers, corrupt officials, complicit doctors,
hospitals, researchers, insurers, and middlemen, if you profit
from coerced transplants directly or indirectly, you are
risking your money, your visa, your access to the U.S., and
your freedom. Because if we can get you, you're going to jail
for these heinous practices.
The Senate has not yet acted on the bill. And I appeal to
them. I believe that they must. Delay is denial for that poor
25- to 30-year-old--as Ethan Gutmann has told us over and over
again, average age 28--who is killed, murdered just for their
organs. Every day without consequences is another day of
perpetrators operating in the shadows. Witnesses are
intimidated, evidence disappears, and families never learn what
happened to their loved ones. Forced organ harvesting is
barbaric. It is systematic. It has stayed enabled. It's a big
business. And speaking frankly, no one wants Xi Jinping or
Vladimir Putin to live forever. I suspect on this point there
would be broad bipartisan agreement. But behind that dark money
is a deadly serious point. No dictator, no party boss, no
wealthy patient, and no broker should be able to purchase
longevity with the organs of the poor and the persecuted. That
is all the more reason to pass the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting
Act and make unmistakably clear that the United States will not
stand by in the face of such cruelty, not with our expertise,
not with our money, not with one dollar of American complicity.
Thank you.
I would now like to introduce our very distinguished panel.
And let me just say, parenthetically, I'm grateful that C-SPAN
is here. You know, they can go to any hearing they want. They
are private, as you know. They have chosen to be here. And this
is a story that they now will be telling the entire American
public. I'm very grateful that they give these distinguished
witnesses the opportunity to be heard, again, throughout this
country. Hopefully that leads to greater mobilization to stop
this.
We will start with Ethan Gutmann, senior research fellow in
China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation,
and co-founder of the International Coalition to End Transplant
Abuse in China. He is the author of ``The Slaughter''--I've
read that book--co-author of the influential 2016 investigative
report ``Bloody Harvest/The Slaughter: An Update,'' and author
of the newly published book ``The Xinjiang Procedure,'' based
on interviews with Uyghur and Kazakh refugees throughout
Central Asia. His work has been essential to exposing the scale
and brutality of forced organ harvesting in China. We are
extremely grateful for his continued leadership.
We'll then hear from my good long-term friend Ambassador
Sam Brownback, who served in the House, the Senate, he was a
Governor, he was Ambassador at Large for International
Religious Freedom, and just a force for good in the world,
especially religious freedom. He just today, or in the last
couple days, released his brand-new book, and I'm looking
forward to reading it, called ``China's War on Faith.'' Thank
you, Sam, for that tenacious leadership for all these years.
You just never quit. You are a national treasure. I am very
grateful to you. Ambassador Brownback and Ethan Gutmann have
testified multiple times before this Commission and multiple
committees of Congress on issues related to forced organ
harvesting, human trafficking, and, of course, religious
freedom.
Then we'll hear from Jan Jekielek, senior editor of The
Epoch Times and host of ``American Thought Leaders.'' He is a
journalist, documentary filmmaker, and author of the new book
``Killed to Order: China's Organ Harvesting Industry & the True
Nature of America's Biggest Adversary.'' And I encourage people
to read that. I've started it. I haven't finished it yet, but I
am looking forward to reading it in its entirety. His work has
helped bring wider public attention to forced organ harvesting
and the dangers of continued international complicity. We
welcome him to the Commission, thank him for his great
leadership for these many years--and we've known each other for
a lot of years now--on this and so many other issues. He's a
great friend of the China Commission.
We'll then hear from Kalbinur Sidik, a survivor of China's
genocide and an eyewitness to the forced labor and internment
camp system in the Uyghur region. Of Uzbek ethnicity, she
served for many years as an elementary school teacher before
being forced to work as a Chinese language instructor in
internment camps. She's testified several times--including
before the Uyghur Tribunal in London. I want to thank her for
being here. She'll be coming in through Zoom, right? Yes. Thank
you.
[The prepared statement of Co-chair Smith appears in the
Appendix.]
So Mr. Gutmann, please. The floor is yours.
STATEMENT OF ETHAN GUTMANN
Mr. Gutmann. In the Chinese transplant industry, humans are
the only element that can't be fully controlled. That's why I
swear by field research. And over time I've learned that all
testimony, even that which doesn't support my ongoing thesis at
any given time, is valuable. Yet I've also been observing the
often skeptical Western world. That includes me, back in 2006.
And all witnesses are taking a big risk. Camp refugees who
observed the organ harvesting selection process or were nearly
harvested themselves, as I guess we're going to be hearing from
some of those today--they matter. But the testimony of a
medical practitioner who is directly involved in the transplant
process has a more complex level of risk. And they may matter
more, in some respects.
Now I'll briefly focus on these medical witnesses, because
there's a continuity there that's very interesting, over time.
I'm going to recap current harvesting rates one more time with
feeling; I'm sorry about that. I'm going to touch on Uyghur
deportation from Central Asia. And I'll close with a few
personal thoughts on policy.
Now regarding ``The Slaughter,'' we have two witnesses from
that--15 years ago in a Westminster hearing, Enver Tohti, a
former Uyghur hospital surgeon, confessed that he used his own
hands to extract the kidneys and liver of a wounded, but
salvageable, human being on a Xinjiang execution ground. In
2013, Dr. Ko Wen-je of National Taiwan University agreed that I
could publish the story of his quest for organs on behalf of
his Taiwanese patients. This happened in a mainland hospital,
probably Wuxi People's Hospital. When Ko expressed doubts about
the quality of executed prisoner organs, his mainland
counterparts assured him that all the organs would come from
Falun Gong.
``The Xinjiang Procedure''--I just have to promote these
things, I'm sorry--adds to this collection. In 2007, an
accidental witness, Cat--that's Mr. Sugawara--was assisting his
Yakuza chieftain prepare for a liver transplant in a Beijing
police hospital. Wandering into the wrong room, Cat found a
bound and sedated young man, wrist and ankle tendons severed. A
Chinese surgeon soothingly explained to Cat that the young
liver donor was Falun Gong. In 2017, Sayragul Sauytbay, a
teacher in a Kazakh and Uyghur camp, gained exclusive access to
organize the camp's medical files. A red checkmark next to
blood results signaled that the individual had been preselected
for harvesting. Several camp refugees that I interviewed
recalled guards imposing color coding, from pink vests to
wristbands, a few nights before the actual disappearances.
In 2018, Samal, an ethnic Kazakh woman--that is a
pseudonym--was recruited by a Uyghur veterinarian to extract
human intestines in preparation for the systematic extraction
of organs. Why intestines? Because their workspace was in a
secret medical compound, four floors under a Uyghur and Kazakh
concentration camp, with substandard ventilation. And an
update: While Dr. Ko of Taipei knew that the Falun Gong were
being harvested, according to his Chinese colleagues, Ko became
``the teacher of ECMO to mainland China.'' That was--let me
translate that--that is directly instructing Chinese surgeons
to exploit an off-label procedure for live organ harvesting.
As mayor of Taipei and as a Presidential candidate for the
Taiwan presidency, Ko could have been the ultimate medical
witness. Instead, Ko was recently sentenced to 17 years in
Taiwanese prison on corruption charges. And I'd love to see a
plea deal there. Along with a hunger for medical witnesses,
there is a hunger for scale. And the full publication of
witness evidence in chapter 5 concludes: 2.5 to 5 percent
forced disappearance rate in the camps, average age 28 to 29,
specifications taken at night, final blood DNA test to
establish health and identity. Assuming 1 million in the
Xinjiang camps, forced labor factories, and other carceral
environments, that's 25,000 to 50,000 Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and
other Turkic groups harvested per year. Two to three organs
extracted per individual to reach the minimum requirements for
China's transplant industry volume, 60,000 successful
transplants per year. That means a minimum cumulative death
total in Xinjiang of over 200,000 now, and counting.
Now some analysts recently speculated that the camps are
closing, and it may be inside baseball, but I would welcome a
question on that. Either way, forced labor organs are the same
as concentration camp organs. And per capita, the medical
attention that Xinjiang receives is extraordinary. Beijing
recently pledged six more human organ transplantation medical
institutions in the region by 2030. Now the roundup of Uyghurs
from China's neighbors is also extraordinary. My interviews
established that 88 percent of Tajikistan's Uyghurs and 87
percent of Kyrgyzstan's Uyghurs have been deported back to
Xinjiang. I also documented a new Chinese military base just
north of Tajikistan's Qolma Pass, about 30 miles from a Tajik
mine speculated to contain 50 percent of the world's uranium.
The energy and mineral reserves of the Pamir and Kyrgyz
Mountain ranges are the South China Sea of China's western
frontier. With Russia at war, without a U.S. presence, a new
nine-dash line is theoretically possible.
Regarding policy--I'll close with this. I like all the
bills. But I support passing the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting
Act first because it follows the surgical lead. The
International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation put
the Chinese transplant industry, and implicitly the
transplantation society, on notice with an academic boycott of
China in 2022. Withdrawal of legitimacy by the political side
should now be immediate and comprehensive. Nothing changes
without embarrassment and trauma. One day after my press
conference on Dr. Ko, Taiwanese medical authorities withdrew
immunosuppressive drug coverage for Taiwanese patients who
received Chinese organs. We could do that here. And instead of
attempting to police the entire import-export medical industry,
we could immediately investigate Thermo Fisher for providing
the DNA tests used on an estimated 10 million Uyghurs and
Kazakhs.
A word on limitations. The Party responds to embarrassment
by hiding, adapting, altering the production process, and
adding new layers of complexity. We've seen this in forced
labor. Beijing loves games. So we might need to consider
changing the stakes of the game. I don't have a 20-point plan
here, just a parting thought. Falun Gong is a Han Chinese-
majority Chinese spiritual movement. And they have no choice.
Their sacred mission is to change China. And they deserve our
support. Yet small nations rise--often it's a delayed
response--when mass murder and wanton neglect have placed their
future survival as a people in question. The potato famine,
Ireland; Ukraine, Stalin's mass starvation; Israel, the gas
chambers; East Turkestan, organ harvesting. Re-entering history
is a bloody affair, yet these nations came back from the dead.
Even if it begins as a cynical negotiation tactic, a tacit
threat, a Uyghur state--even a democratic Uyghur state--is
possible. And the liberation of Central Asia is also possible.
For the Party, that's the nightmare scenario. And the most
improbable scenario of all is the systematic reform of the
Chinese transplant system. But if our first objective is to
stanch the bleeding, apply immediate and consistent pressure:
pass this bill. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ethan Gutmann appears in the
Appendix.]
Co-chair Smith. Mr. Gutmann, thank you so very much for
your testimony. And your expertise enlightens this committee,
and really enlightens all that we do. Thank you so much.
Ambassador Brownback.
STATEMENT OF AMBASSADOR SAM BROWNBACK
Ambassador Brownback. Thank you, Chairman Smith, Senator.
Good to see all of you. And thank you for doing this,
particularly today when the summit is taking place in China. I
think this is just such an incredibly timely thing. And while
these are hearings and things that you're familiar with and
have been familiar with for years, the public is not familiar
with these topics. Unfortunately, in my experience in social
movements, you've got to really rub the public's face in this
stuff for them to get it. And once they do, then they'll kind
of, Okay, what should we do? And thank you for rubbing people's
face in this stuff that you've known about and heard about for
20-30 years, as have I.
Even just yesterday, I was with Mihrigul Tursun. She's
featured in our book, ``China's War on Faith.'' She's a Uyghur.
She was told, finally, toward the very end of her
incarceration--Okay, you can pick the way you die. We'll either
shoot you three times, three bullets, or you can sign your life
and your organs away to us. Now, if you pick the three bullets,
we're going to charge you for each of these bullets a very
large sum of money and you can do it for free this other way.
And how cynical can a group of people be? This is her speaking
yesterday about the technique that was used. Her children, who
were born in Egypt, ultimately actually were the tool that got
her out.
Disfavored religious communities are particularly targeted
by the perpetrators of forced organ harvesting schemes. Falun
Gong practitioners--which we've heard about--systematically
catalogued based on biometric markers and then murdered for
their organs; Uyghur Muslims--and you've heard this before,
their organs harvested and marketed to wealthy Middle
Easterners as halal, in an unimaginably cynical way. I don't
like even repeating this because these charges are so horrific
that people have a hard time even getting their mind around it.
But this is happening, and has been happening, and continues to
happen. And it's an evil regime that perpetrates it.
We have here today, and Mr. Chairman if I could take just a
moment to introduce Peter Xu. You may remember his name. You
advocated for him, as I did, a number of years ago. He spent
five different times in Chinese prisons. He's been out here
helping promote the book. He was considered the Billy Graham of
China. They nearly killed him when they took him down from--
they put him in a cross formation till he nearly died, then
they took him down. They said to him, Okay, sign the confession
that God's a hoax, Jesus doesn't exist. And he looks at the
warden, and he says, Thank you for allowing me to participate
in the sufferings of Christ. This is amazing testimony of an
individual who is here--I've got to recognize Peter Xu.
[Applause.]
And then the other person--Bob Fu is hosting these
gentlemen. You know Bob. But Pastor Pan of the Mayflower
Church, that got all 64 members of theirs out in a daring
episode that I believe should be a Hollywood movie, is here
with us as well. Pastor Pan. [Applause.] Wonderful men. They
bear witness, and as they bear witness, they get family members
persecuted back home. These are not free shots that people get
to take. They get hit. Pastor Pan has relatives still in China
being threatened. I would ask our State Department to allow
them to come if they're allowed out of China. Allow them to
come here to the United States. Here's a brave man being
willing to speak out and the family members back home are still
persecuted. I hear this constantly from members of this
persecuted community--of the various religious persecuted
communities.
You have experts that know more of the specifics of it. I
want to talk mostly about policy. No. 1, the United States
should lead a global coalition of governments, academics,
medical, financial institutions, and religious groups to openly
condemn forced organ harvesting and take concrete steps to end
the international complicity in this practice. We need a big
coalition to come together to say, This is horrific. It
deserves no place in a modern world. And we should condemn it.
The White House or Congress should host a global summit of
religious, democratic, and political leaders calling for
religious freedom for everyone everywhere, including in China.
This is a hallmark issue for us. And on our 250th birthday, the
founding of the country is based, the early settlers, primarily
on seeking religious freedom. It's still a hallmark human right
of the soul, the right that's closest to who we are as beings.
And these are the people who are the most persecuted. It would
help--and it would help them substantially.
We asked President Trump to raise with Xi Jinping the
release of Pastor Ezra Jin. And he said that he's going to seek
that release. Jimmy Lai. I would add the nine Catholic bishops
currently in detention in China that we don't know their
whereabouts--nine Catholic bishops. We don't know where they
are. They're incarcerated. I would ask as well that Pope Leo
criticize China publicly for the ongoing genocides in that
country--of the Muslim Uyghurs, of Falun Gong, of the Tibetan
Buddhists, and seek the release of these nine Catholic bishops
that are detained in China. And Mr. Chairman, I've got another
set of additional recommendations that I want to submit for the
record.
One of them--we host the G-20 summit this year. We should
have in that a major section on religious freedom. As we bring
these world leaders of the top countries here, we should be
talking about religious freedom and publicly condemning forced
organ harvesting at that event. This would be something that--
Dr. Gutmann points out the embarrassment factor. It's a true
issue, and you and I both know it. You've got to raise the
profile of these issues to the point that governments are
embarrassed before something happens. We should do that at the
G-20 summit as well. And then finally, our media, Hollywood,
academia, big business, must start shining a light on these
horrific practices being conducted by the Chinese government,
and no longer look the other way. We cannot look the other way.
Now, we've got such an integrated economy with China. And I
hope and pray we're in the process of breaking that apart, and
breaking our supply chains, and moving them to other places.
I'm seeing positive trends on foreign direct investment in
China going down substantially, and a lot of that coming to the
United States and other places, going up, which is favorable
toward us. That's the right trend. It's going to take several
years to disentangle these two economies, but we really have
got to be clear-minded that we have to move this way. This is a
communist regime in China that seeks our removal from
leadership on the world stage.
Whichever one of these systems--and I contend that--and I'm
going to end with this point--that we're in a clash of
civilizations now. And one point of that is the communist group
and authoritarians that look at the world and individuals as
tools to be controlled, or economic entities alone. And they
are pushing aggressively and attacking us today. On the other
side is Western civilization, the United States leading a
Western civilization that's built on a Judeo-Christian ethic
that everybody is created in the image of God. They are
entitled to incredible dignity. They have inherent worth of who
they are. And they have rights by virtue of who they are as an
individual. They have rights. These two systems are in conflict
and clashing.
I think we've just got to start being much more clear-eyed
about what the stakes are, because whichever of these systems
wins will direct how societies move over the rest of this
century. And we're in this fight. And we're in it now. And
we've got to sound the alarm to the public and move forward
aggressively to win this fight. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Ambassador Brownback appears in
the Appendix.]
Co-chair Smith. Thank you very much, Mr. Ambassador, for
your very eloquent and powerful statement and testimony. I'd
now like to recognize Jan Jekielek for such time as he may
consume.
Mr. Jekielek. Mr. Chairman, Mr. Co-chairman, distinguished
members of the Commission, I want to thank you for the
opportunity to testify today.
STATEMENT OF JAN JEKIELEK
Mr. Jekielek. How many of us in the United States would
knowingly participate in a system that rips organs from
unwilling donors and treats human lives as disposable
commodities? It should be zero, but it's not. What is happening
in China is something far more systemic and industrialized than
the organ trafficking in black markets that one might normally
think about. It is communist China's state-sponsored killing of
its own citizens on demand to supply a multi-billion-dollar
transplant industry.
I'll start with a telling example from my book, ``Kill to
Order: China's Organ Harvesting Industry & the True Nature of
America's Biggest Adversary.'' ``An affluent German woman with
a rare AB blood type struggled with alcoholism for years and
faced liver failure. In systems like Germany's, finding a match
might take years or not happen at all. Yet she obtained three
livers in China around 2015 to 2019, each in just months, for
approximately $400,000, involving a visit to China for each
procedure. Her continued drinking combined with antirejection
medications led to quick rejections of each liver--one about
every 2 years.'' In any ethical transplant system, such as that
of the United States, vital organs typically come from
catastrophic accidents. To reduce the chance of rejection,
blood type and histology are also matched. Thus the supply of
organs is always much less than the demand. Yet wait times in
China are often measured not in years, not in months, but in
weeks or even days.
In another well-documented case, an American man traveled
to China and received a perfectly matched kidney in just 2
weeks. According to the 2009 book ``Larry's Kidney,'' he was
aware someone was killed for it. Now compare that to here,
where the average wait time for a new kidney isn't 2 weeks, but
156 to 260 weeks. This is only possible because of two
essential tools the Chinese Communist Party that governs China
has refined over decades. No. 1, it's the regime's creation of
what are called black classes, designated enemy groups that the
rest of the population is taught to hate, fear, and even see as
subhuman. First it was the landowners, then
counterrevolutionaries, and then the intellectuals during the
Cultural Revolution, with others following. This is the
pattern--designate a group as subhuman, flood the information
space with propaganda, and the population becomes
psychologically prepared for atrocities against the target
group.
The second key tool is the infrastructure to incarcerate a
large number of people at will. Prisons, black jails,
reeducation camps, and forced labor camps are just part of an
incarceration system that has the capacity for millions. In
1999, the CCP designated Falun Gong practitioners as a black
class targeted for eradication, setting the stage for this
kill-to-order forced organ harvesting.
Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa, is an ancient Qigong or slow-
motion exercise practice rooted in the principles of
truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. This is also
translated as being true, good, and enduring. Falun Gong
features extensive teachings by its founder, Master Li Hongzhi.
It's also characterized by an unusual lack of organizational
structure, no collection of funds, no roster, no hierarchy, and
no worship of a deity. It spread by word of mouth in the 1990's
in China, growing, by government estimate, to 70 to 100 million
people from all walks of life doing it.
There are different theories as to why then-leader Jiang
Zemin of China ordered the persecution of Falun Gong. Perhaps
it was because the sheer number of practitioners had grown
greater than Communist Party membership. Perhaps he was jealous
of the founder. Or perhaps the CCP, with its decades of
totalitarian rule, simply couldn't abide the individual agency
that practicing Falun Gong fostered in people. If one were to
design a system that could withstand totalitarian control and
overreach, I believe it might look something like Falun Gong.
Large numbers of Falun Gong practitioners refused to be
reeducated. And this happened at a scale that had never
happened before in this black class creation mechanism. And
this is what caused the mass incarceration of Falun Gong
practitioners.
This is happening in 1999-2000. In 2005, the U.S. State
Department estimated that half of all the people in China's
reeducation-through-labor camp system were Falun Gong. In 2006,
the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, reported
that Falun Gong practitioners accounted for 66 percent of
torture cases that he documented. I recount in chapter 5 of
``Kill to Order'' all sorts of evidence, like that gathered by
Ethan Gutmann here, among others, research over 20 years by
many, many different experts. And the regime basically took a
massive population of healthy people and dehumanized them,
incarcerated them, and started blood typing, tissue typing, and
organ scanning them, and creating a data base. When a
transplant is needed, whether for a Chinese elite or a foreign
transplant tourist, a match can be made and a victim killed to
order.
The years 2000 to 2005 saw a massive surge in growth of
transplant hospitals in China. Falun Gong refugees who fled to
the United States have given harrowing accounts of blood tests
and other costly and suspicious medical exams while detained in
China. A recent survey identified 113 facilities across China
in which these health screenings took place, with the most
recent incident reported in 2024. Shockingly, one respondent
described how, even in 2023, even non-detained practitioners in
Anqing City, Anhui Province, were summoned for these detailed
exams.
We now have the first known survivor. Cheng Pei Ming, a
Falun Gong practitioner, was taken for surgery against his will
while detained, and awoke with a 14-inch gash in his side. This
was back in 2004. He was later rescued to America through a
series of unlikely events--kind of a miracle that he survived.
But basically our own medical scans showed that he's missing
part of his liver and part of his lung. The liver has since
regenerated. So after years of very little, frankly, there's
been some amazing resolutions that have been put forth--that
Co-chair Smith has put forward, and so forth. But really,
internationally, there's been very little meaningful action.
The CCP extended this atrocity--now we're looking at 2015-ish--
to another group. As mentioned, they further dehumanized the
Uyghur Muslim population and mass incarcerated them. Up in
Xinjiang, they've even gone door to door to people's homes
collecting DNA and blood samples.
Compounding this danger is new technology. Now there's
technology that can perfuse organs for extended periods,
basically in a box, potentially for days instead of hours. This
is a revolutionary breakthrough. For us, you know, this will
save a great many lives, but from the perspective of the
Chinese, this is a way potentially to even export forced organs
out of the country, if they get their hands on it. This is why
I titled my book ``Kill to Order.'' This is a deadly boutique
selection and delivery of human body parts, organs matched in
advance, delivered on schedule, extracted from living human
beings, who are then discarded for the purposes of power,
profit, and elite longevity.
Yet American universities and hospitals continue to partner
with Chinese transplant centers, train Chinese transplant
surgeons, conduct joint research. NIH has funded such projects.
American companies supply critical immunosuppressive drugs and
medical technologies used in these procedures. And many
American media continue to ignore, even whitewash, these
crimes. Perhaps most prominently, a former New York Times
correspondent testified at the 2019 China tribunal, that the
Co-chair mentioned earlier, that she was prevented from
pursuing evidence of forced organ harvesting by her editors at
the Times. Now this is not an isolated crime. It's part of a
much broader pattern of egregious abuses. The U.S. Government
has determined that the CCP is committing genocide against
Uyghurs, and several international legal experts have concluded
that the campaign against Falun Gong also demonstrates
genocidal intent.
So what can be done here? I want to take this moment to
commend Co-chair Smith for your tremendous persistent efforts
over many decades confronting China's large-scale forced organ
harvesting from prisoners of conscience and for championing
China's persecuted innocents even longer than that. You grasped
the totalitarian nature of the CCP long before most people did.
This is manifested in your bill, H.R. 1503, the Stop Forced
Organ Harvesting Act of 2025, which passed the House last year
nearly unanimously. This is powerful, important legislation
that should be passed. Another commissioner here, Senator
Merkley, is co-sponsoring S. 4009, the Falun Gong and Victims
of Forced Organ Harvesting Protection Act, a Senate update of
H.R. 1540, which passed the House unanimously. This is likewise
critical legislation that will make a real difference.
The Senate has a historic opportunity now to pass two bills
to finally confront this egregious crime. Eight countries have
enacted binding national laws addressing this issue. It's time
for the United States to finally do the same. I have a number
of additional recommendations across the board, but in the
interest of time perhaps we can do them in the question and
answer. Happy to discuss. I also wanted to mention that now we
have many think tanks in Washington, DC, and civil society
organizations; there's even a satellite Rotary Club dedicated
entirely to ending forced organ harvesting. There's kind of a
broad civil society interest in this. And as mentioned earlier,
the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation
has barred all Chinese submissions involving transplants from
human donors. You know, this is finally getting traction at
that level, thankfully.
So to conclude, here we're on the eve of the 250th
anniversary of America's founding. And we should remember that
this country was built on a foundational belief in the God-
given rights of every individual and the inherent dignity of
every human being. The Chinese Communist Party rejects this
truth at its core. It views its own citizens not as people with
innate dignity but as a collection of extractable body parts.
And here's the hard truth: The CCP looks at America and
Americans through exactly the same lens. Just as it calculates
the value of a prisoner's cornea or kidney or heart, it
calculates how to extract America's technology, markets, its
alliances, and ultimately its sovereignty.
Earlier today in Beijing, Secretary of State Marco Rubio,
who has championed earlier versions of S. 4009 as senator, said
China's rise cannot come at our expense. The lesson of the
CCP's decades of kill-to-order forced organ harvesting is that
the regime is capable of anything at others' expense. Let us
honor the 250th anniversary of this nation's founding by
confronting this atrocity. Thank you. I look forward to your
questions.
[The prepared statement of Jan Jekielek appears in the
Appendix.]
Chair Smith. Jan, thank you so very much for your
leadership over the many decades as well, and for your new
book, which I think will open up many eyes, and again, for
being here today and sharing your expertise with the
Commission.
I'd now like to ask Ali to translate. We will be hearing
from Ms. Sidik, she's in the Netherlands, by way of Zoom. So if
that could be arranged for her to come in now. Remember, she's
an eyewitness to China's genocide and to the internment camp
system. You know, here's somebody who lived it--like many
people who have testified in the past, and like some people who
are actually in this audience--and suffered. And just let me
say one brief thing about Bob Fu while she's coming on. Bob Fu
has been a mentor to so many of us for so long. I've been to
China, along with Frank Wolf and along with my good friend the
Ambassador, many, many times. And again and again, Bob provided
unbelievable insight to us on the house church movement and all
the rest. So thank you, Bob, for that with ChinaAid. Is she
ready?
STATEMENT OF KALBINUR SIDIK
Ms. Sidik [through Translator]. Honorable Chair,
distinguished members, and respected committee members, thank
you for giving me the opportunity to testify today. My name is
Kalbinur Sidik. I am from Urumqi. Our homeland is Turkestan.
I'm a witness to the detention camps and I am ethnically Uzbek.
For 20 years, I worked as a Chinese language teacher and
held important administrative positions at Urumqi No. 24
elementary school. Never did I imagine that one day I would be
forced to teach inside a detention camp or that I would become
a witness to the crimes committed by the Chinese Communist
Party against Uyghurs and other minority peoples. Today I stand
before you to speak about atrocities, including the possibility
of organ harvesting. I'll tell you only the truth, only what I
personally witnessed and experienced.
In March 2017, I was sent under a six-month contract to
teach in a men's camp located on a mountain in No. 5
Sangfanggou Village, Urumqi City. The authorities told us we
would be teaching students in a literacy training course. But
they were not students. They were prisoners. They were fathers,
young men, businessmen, religious figures, intellectuals,
people from all walks of life. They were ordinary citizens.
There were also elderly men among them. They had been taken
from their homes, imprisoned behind barbed wire, triple iron
gates, surveillance cameras, armed guards, and locked cells.
Every Monday, no classes were held for the detainees.
Instead, blood was drawn from them. They were given
unidentified injections. Afterwards, they were given small
white pills. Chinese nurses told me these are vitamins or
calcium supplements . . . since the detainees never see
sunlight, the government ordered us to take care of them this
way. But I did not believe them. How could the government that
imprisoned, starved, tortured, and humiliated these people
suddenly care about their vitamins? No. That was impossible. At
that time and even now I believe there was another purpose
behind it.
I also witnessed healthy men disappearing. I clearly
remember one man named Ozman. He was active in class and eager
to learn. He was a wealthy businessman and appeared very strong
and healthy, at first. Among hundreds of people, I could easily
recognize his face. Then one day, he disappeared. When I asked
what happened to him, I was told he suffered from high blood
pressure and diabetes and had died on the way to the hospital.
There was another man who sat at the far end of the first row
in the classroom. He too was hard working. And I still remember
his face vividly. Later he also disappeared. I was told he died
from kidney poisoning. I did not believe these explanations.
Every day in the classroom detainees were constantly replaced.
Older and stronger prisoners were taken away while new ones
arrived. A familiar face disappeared and we were expected to
accept whatever explanation the guards gave us.
Later, when I testified before parliaments in various
countries, I was asked about the disappearance of detainees and
organ harvesting. I told them what I had heard while working in
the camps. The special police driver who transported me and the
police officer assigned to accompany me often talked among
themselves. They said, Right now in our country the halal organ
trade is booming. The detoxification center in Miquan County,
Urumqi has now become an organ transplant center. I did not
witness the surgeries. I did not personally see organs being
removed. But I heard these conversations.
Later, after hearing my testimony, a close relative and
friend of mine living in Europe, and married to a foreigner,
spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. She personally told
me that Miquan's detoxification center had indeed been
transformed into an organ extraction hospital. In 2018, she and
her foreign husband were sent there for medical examinations
before leaving for Europe. During that process, she saw many
young detainees wearing prison uniforms, lined up under heavy
Chinese police supervision, entering designated rooms. She also
observed that the number of doctors had increased greatly and
that doctors were carrying unusual containers in their hands as
they exited the rooms.
She told me this and begged me to speak about it in my
testimony. So for the second time, I heard directly from
someone I personally knew, someone who claimed to have seen
with her own eyes that this place had become an organ
harvesting hospital. In the camps, I witnessed blood
collections from detainees, injections, forced medications,
disappearances, and secrecy surrounding everything. Therefore,
if you ask me today whether I believe the Chinese Communist
Party turned Uyghurs in the camps into a source of profit
through so-called halal organ trade, my answer is, yes. Yes. A
hundred times, yes.
While I was in those camps, I witnessed horrors beyond
words. Chinese police humiliated detainees to a level no human
being should endure. They stripped them of their humanity. They
did not call them by their names, but by numbers. They tried to
break their minds, destroy their faith, and erase their
destiny. Let me tell you more about what I witnessed, so the
world will never forget about the genocide that's taking place
in East Turkestan.
When I first entered the men's camp, I walked into a
building surrounded by barbed wire, electric doors, armed
police, soldiers, locked gates. The detainees were brought out
from their cells. Chains and shackles were on their hands and
feet. Many still had unshaven beards because they had only
recently arrived. Their eyes looked at me with desperation, as
if I had come to save them. But I could not save them. I could
not even help them. Guards surrounded me everywhere. The cells
were dark. The windows were still shut. The detainees slept on
bare concrete floors with only a thin blanket. For all three
meals they received only a small Chinese bun and watery rice
soup. They were allowed to use the toilet only for a very short
period of time.
During the entire six months I was there they were never
once allowed to bathe. Their bodies were weakened. Their faces
changed. Healthy people became thin, pale, and exhausted. I
taught four hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon,
sometimes even for additional hours during inspection periods.
But gradually I realized the purpose there was not education.
The purpose was control. Later, detainees were forced to
memorize red songs, patriotic songs praising the Chinese
Communist Party and Xi Jinping, and political slogans. The
detainees were forced to praise the same Communist Party that
had imprisoned them. They were forced to express gratitude
toward the very system destroying them.
During lessons, police would call detainees out not by
name, but by number, then take them for interrogation. The
interrogation room was next to the classroom. Shortly after
they were taken away, heartbreaking screams could be heard.
They were tortured with devices such as electric batons,
electric tiger chairs, electric gloves, and electric helmets.
After my six-month assignment in the men's camp ended, I was
sent to a women's camp located at Tugong, Saybagh District,
Urumqi. There I saw many women and girls. Most were highly
educated. Their hair had been cut short. They wore gray prison
uniforms with blue numbered vests over them. Their faces were
pale and lifeless.
About 90 percent of these detainees were between 18 and 40
years old. The remaining 10 percent were older women, some even
in their seventies and eighties. These women and girls were
also given medication and unidentified injections. As a result,
many of them completely stopped menstruating. Some had studied
abroad. During lessons, they were forced first to thank the
Chinese Communist Party and the government before telling their
stories. One woman said she had recently given birth and still
had a nursing baby, but her breast milk had stopped. Another
young woman said she had been preparing for marriage when she
was suddenly taken to the camp. And she no longer even knew
where her fiance was. Yet she was forced to thank the
government for providing such a great opportunity to learn the
national language.
Others said they had been taken directly to the camp
immediately after returning from studies abroad. From the way
these women painfully sat and stood, I could sense the severe
abuse they had suffered. Tears constantly streamed from their
eyes. In this camp, I heard about rape and sexual violence
committed by Chinese police. I heard that guards use electric
batons and other weapons to abuse these detainees. I personally
witnessed the body of a young girl around 18 to 20 years old
being carried away before my eyes. I later heard that she had
bled to death. Outside the camps, the control continued. The
Chinese government placed so-called Chinese parent relatives,
Han Chinese men, inside the homes of Uyghur women, especially
in homes where husbands had been taken to the camps. Even in
their own homes, these women faced various forms of abuse and
humiliation.
People are afraid to speak. Phones were monitored.
Relatives abroad became a source of danger. My daughter, at the
time, was in the Netherlands. And we lived constantly in fear
and anxiety, under pressure from neighborhood committees,
assigned police officers. We were also forced to undergo
sterilization procedures at Changleyuan Hospital in Tianshan
District. Even though I did not want this, I had no choice. My
safety and the safety of my family depended on obeying
government demands. That's why I say we no longer had ownership
over our bodies. I am one of the fortunate few who managed to
escape after enduring tremendous suffering. The people inside
the camps cannot speak to you. They have no way to make their
voices heard. I'm standing here today, and at enormous personal
cost, to tell you this truth--because the men who disappeared,
the women who were abused, and the mothers separated from their
children, and the families destroyed by this genocide, need
witnesses.
Honorable Chair, distinguished members of the committee, I
ask you not to turn away--turn your eyes away--from this
tragedy. The horrific violence taking place in East Turkestan
is not merely a crime. It's part of the system that sees
Uyghurs, the original inhabitants of this land, as less than
human. This is genocide. The world once said, never again. Yet
in East Turkestan, it is happening again. I ask the U.S.
Congress never to forget the Uyghur genocide. I urge you to
continue your investigations and hold the Chinese Communist
Party accountable. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Kalbinur Sidik appears in the
Appendix.]
----------
Co-chair Smith. Thank you very much for that very powerful
testimony. It's shocking. And it hopefully is a wake-up call to
even more people who will hear it today. And we will amplify it
through this Commission, I can assure you.
I'll ask my questions last, but I'd like to yield to my
good friend and colleague, Mr. Strong of Alabama, and then to
Congresswoman Elise Stefanik from New York.
Representative Strong. Thank you, Representative Smith, for
holding this hearing. Thank you to the staff for their hard
work. Thank you to all the witnesses for being here today, for
bringing attention to China's forced organ harvesting and
trafficking.
This first question is for any of the witnesses that would
like to answer. Can you provide an assessment of whether any
U.S. entities, such as hospitals, universities, or research
partners, have collaborated with the CCP transplant
institutions engaging in illegal organ harvesting and
trafficking practices?
Mr. Jekielek. I can speak to it briefly, but in terms of
the details, probably afterwards. I understand that there is
actually information that has been gathered at HHS. There's
some sort of report that's been gathered by HHS that touches on
this question, that you know, perhaps needs to be dislodged
from under a lot of bureaucracy. That's one quick answer.
There's an example. The Select Committee wrote a letter to
Harvard University about a number of research partnerships that
they had. I believe that was last year, or within the last
couple of years. We trained over a hundred transplant surgeons
here in the United States from different institutions. That's
an obvious connection. I think it would be an amazing effort to
try to catalog all of this. This is something that I'm actually
in the process of trying to do, but obviously institutions are
uninterested in being terribly cooperative and in providing
that information, if they can avoid it. So that's a roundabout
answer for you. Perhaps some of the others here can provide
some more exact specifics.
Representative Strong. Any other insight from any of the
other witnesses?
Mr. Gutmann. You know, I did mention Thermo Fisher, because
they stand out. What our witness here was talking about really
didn't begin in 2016 or 2017. It was signaled in 2013 by an
unusual tactic, which the police of China used on Falun Gong,
actually, initially. And they were coming into people's homes.
These were people not in detention. But they were coming into
their homes and doing a blood test and a DNA cheek swab. This
happened in five to six provinces. There's a little dispute
about the sixth. The point is that the DNA cheek swab indicated
a new method. Human Rights Watch interpreted it as a
surveillance tool. I think that's probably right. But it's also
completely compatible with tissue matching--tissue typing and
cross matching. So that is followed by Thermo Fisher supplying
the DNA kits for testing the entire Uyghur and Kazakh
population of Xinjiang. Now this is not something that Han
Chinese--they were exempt. And they're practically half the
population. But the entire population, everybody above the age
of 12, had to be tested. And the DNA kits, apparently, were all
supplied by Thermo Fisher. They made a killing in this market.
Representative Strong. Let me ask you this right here. Do
any of the witnesses have factual data related to how these
body parts are coming to America? And, you know, they've got to
get here somehow. Any of that going on?
Mr. Gutmann. Can I just jump in on that? I don't believe
parts are coming to America really. I mean----
Representative Strong. There are people that believe they
are.
Mr. Gutmann. Well, that's fine, but it's certainly not my
experience in China on the ground, as they like to have
complete control of organ harvesting. And I've never seen
absolutely persuasive evidence, other than certainly there's
good speculation, and probably correct, about fetal body parts
or fetal tissue being sold to our great universities. I don't
think there's any question that they've moved on from Planned
Parenthood and China's the supplier. Proving that conclusively,
of course, is very important.
Representative Strong. Absolutely. Okay. Do you believe the
existing U.S. safeguards are enough to prevent American
institutions from indirectly endorsing or profiting from these
practices? Or should the U.S. Government explore further
measures, such as increased transparency, reporting, or funding
restrictions?
Mr. Brownback. I think those are absolutely necessary and
totally plausible. And they are things that we should be doing
in the face of this documentation, eyewitnesses, of what's
taking place. I mean, that's what Congress should be doing. And
passing the bills, like the Stopping Forced Organ Harvesting
Act, and including these types of provisions in that type of
bill, broad support. And I think it also is a moral stand for
people in this country to take, through their Members of
Congress, to pass such legislation. We will not participate in
any way, shape, or form in this type of horrific practice. And
here's how we're expressing that.
Representative Strong. Thank you. Mr. Gutmann, in your
estimation what is the scale and scope of illegal sourced
organs in China?
Mr. Gutmann. I'm not there with a clipboard, but--and my
work has concentrated on the Uyghurs--but I do believe that
this is the main source now. Our 2016 report was done with
David Kilgour and David Matas, and a team of Falun Gong
researchers who spent 5 years collecting the data. Now we came
up with the idea that organs were basically--the transplant
hospitals had been rationed to about 150, or now it's more like
200, and that they were doing at least one transplant per day,
based on their capabilities. That quickly leads you to a number
at least of 60,000. Personally, I believe that it's closer to
100,000.
Representative Strong. Thank you, Mr. Gutmann.
Mr. Brownback, can you elaborate on how religious freedom
can play a strategic role in our diplomatic engagement strategy
with the CCP? And how would you recommend that tool be wielded
to strengthen U.S. leadership and diplomacy?
Mr. Brownback. You could just watch and study what Ronald
Reagan did in the faceoff with the Soviet Union. It was the
same godless, atheistic society. He traveled across the
country. He pointed this out. He said--and then he also talked
about the treatment of Jews in the country and evangelicals,
the Jewish refuseniks. He brought the American public into it.
And that's what has to be done. I think we can, as--and I think
this is a critical piece of our theater engagement strategy
with the CCP, which we're now engaged in, how we're going to
fight with this group--is religious freedom. They can't
tolerate it. They can't stand it. The American public strongly
supports it. Western civilization does.
So we need to start talking about that differentiation. And
we need to start thinking about it in those sorts of strategic
engagement ways. We ought to invite Chinese dissidents that
have been persecuted for their faith to the White House to meet
with the President, the Vice President, to meet with the
Secretary of State as a show. They ought to invite the person
that started Falun Gong, Li Hongzhi, see if he would come to
the White House to meet with the President. He's exiled in the
United States in New York. And this is a group that's been
decimated, slaughtered, in the most vile of ways, because they
can't tolerate this indigenous faith that is so natural to
China.
It's a blended kind of faith of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucian
thought, but it's very natural to China. And it was a complete
threat to the Chinese Communist Party. And all that Falun Gong
wants is a return to the old Chinese civilization that existed
before the communists took over. That's really all they want.
So bring them in--and then I also think it would be wise for us
to start talking with Tibetan individuals and Tibet authorities
about the future of Tibet. This is a place that's never been a
part of China. We should be--we should be bringing those
individuals in and talking with them as well. I've got a list
of other specific items in my testimony.
Representative Strong. Thank you. Mr. Brownback, this will
be my final question. How has intimidation against religious
groups outside of China impacted these groups, their worship,
their advocacy, their personal lives?
Mr. Brownback. Oh, horribly. Most Uyghurs I talked to and
work with have had family members back home that have
disappeared, been killed. Falun Gong members that will cite
those. I've had people in this country who have been tracked,
shot at, that have testified to me, that have been open people
that have testified against what's going on in the CCP--
tracked, marked, tires slashed, in this country. This is
transnational oppression--or another person referred to it as
transnational terrorism. I think we've really got to be much
more aggressive at prosecuting these cases when they happen in
this country.
Representative Strong. Thank you. I thank each of our
witnesses for being here today, and also Peter and Bob. It's an
honor to have each of you here.
Mr. Jekielek. Could I answer your earlier question,
Congressman? Just one thing that the U.S. Government--one way
in which we've interacted with Communist China in the past is--
you know, there's all these methods that were set on autopilot.
For example, we're still transferring technology to Communist
China as a matter of policy in different places, like in
embassies. One example of this in this context is these
Federal-wide assurances that HHS grants to different bodies
around the world. And basically, it's sort of--it's been
described to me by someone as kind of a rubber stamp in some
terms. Basically, what it says is, from the perspective of the
U.S. Government, this institution is okay to work with.
We know some number of these transplant hospitals--we
should make sure that none of them have one of these Federal-
wide assurances. I mean, again, there's a whole bunch of
different specific policy recommendations that can help us cut
off all relationships with their transplant system. Obviously,
if we accept that this is real, which I hope we can--we can
finally put it into law sometime soon. Why are we working with
any institutions that are involved with this?
Representative Strong. Thank you. Chairman Smith, I yield
back.
Co-chair Smith. Thank you very much.
I'd now like to yield to the distinguished gentlewoman from
New York. I want to thank her as well for her new book,
``Poisoned Ivies,'' which is a really, really incisive book
about antisemitism and the Ivy League. And, you know, Sam
Brownback, before I yield, made a very good point about Reagan
and what he did vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. He raised human
rights, and did it tenaciously, as did Shultz, his Secretary of
State, and others. He always named names. And that's what
President Trump was trying to do with Jimmy Lai and others. And
both the House and the Senate passed resolutions to that
effect, and named names that hopefully can effectuate or help
them gain their freedom. But China has always gotten a bye.
Years ago, there was a book called ``China Misperceived.'' And
Steven Mosher wrote it and how they always are given a bye when
it comes to human rights. Well, that has to end. It is ending.
Your testimony and your great work, and your books, have made a
difference. And I want to thank my good friend for her new book
and for her leadership.
Representative Stefanik. Thank you so much, Chairman Smith.
And thank you to the Chairman for his extraordinary decades of
leadership on human rights issues and so many other important
issues. Thank you to each of you for testifying today.
Incredibly disturbing testimony, but important to hear this in
Congress and for the American people to hear this.
I want to start with you, Mr. Jekielek. In your testimony
you mentioned American universities partnering with CCP
transplant centers to train transplant surgeons and conduct
joint research. You also mentioned that some of these
partnerships received NIH funding. Do you have a comprehensive
list that you can provide this Commission of instances where
there are U.S. Government-funded American universities that are
funding transplant research supported by the CCP? I know you
mentioned you're putting together that list.
Mr. Jekielek. Correct. I will--I don't know if I can
provide a comprehensive list, because it's a process, but I
will provide the best list I can.
Representative Stefanik. I recently introduced legislation
to ban Federal funding to universities that employ foreign
researchers who were previously employed by the Chinese
Communist government, specifically those that work in sensitive
research areas. Do you agree that U.S. taxpayer dollars should
not go to universities that financially, directly or
indirectly, support the Chinese government facilitating illegal
organ harvesting?
Mr. Jekielek. This is a complete no-brainer. Absolutely. As
a matter of fact, even people that come here--there are people
that come here that want freedom, that are not wanting to work
for the Chinese Communist Party. But their national
intelligence law demands that they do, that they provide--that
they basically spy, and not admit that they're doing so. So
it's a very difficult situation people are put in. But I would
say any sensitive area--forced organ harvesting, absolutely--
but any sensitive area, it doesn't make sense.
Representative Stefanik. One other concern that I have
raised is some American universities, as we know, operate
branch campuses in communist China. And I recently introduced
legislation to stop the flow of taxpayer dollars to these
institutions that, frankly, are profiting off of our
adversaries. Are you concerned that these universities, and
therefore American taxpayers, could be directly or indirectly
implicated in cases of organ harvesting?
Mr. Jekielek. I'm absolutely concerned. I don't know of
specific instances of this, but again, you can sort of imagine,
this is the thesis, I guess, of my book--the true nature of
America's biggest adversary. You have to understand the
Communist Party--this is a group--this is a regime that does
these sorts of horrible things to people. Imagine how they
view, you know, sort of gullible or financially incentivized
Americans who have set up a campus in communist China. It's not
good intent, let's say.
Representative Stefanik. Thank you. Ambassador Brownback,
thank you for your leadership. You mentioned a number of
actions the U.S. should take on the world stage to raise this
issue. And yet we have seen in international organizations like
the U.N. they have been incredibly uncooperative, despite the
fact that American taxpayers are footing the majority of the
bill. Do you think--let me ask it this way--how can the U.S.
strongly lead on these issues of human rights? And--I think I
know the answer to this--do you think the U.N. can be a
reliable partner of the United States when it comes to
addressing this? I certainly do not think it's a reliable
partner.
Mr. Brownback. I think they've proven, no, they're not
interested. But I think more than that, they're so infiltrated
by the Chinese Communist Party, the U.N. is, and so many of the
various branches and entities of it, even if they wanted to I
don't think they could get it--I don't think they could get it
done. But that's why it's incumbent upon us. And we're the only
country in the world that can do this. Nobody else. So at the
G-20, religious freedom should be front and center. And
remember, they fear religious freedom more than they fear our
aircraft carriers or nuclear weapons. This goes right at
control to them. And they've got the fastest growing Christian
population in the world. So they know this. And they're looking
and saying, We've got to hold this down. And these are people
we should be standing with and backing aggressively everywhere
that we can. And we've got a lot of tools so we can do that, as
I mentioned some of those already.
Representative Stefanik. Thank you very much. Again, thank
you, Mr. Chairman, for conducting this very important hearing.
I yield back.
Co-chair Smith. Thank you very much, Ms. Stefanik. Again,
good luck on your book. I think everyone needs to read it.
Just a couple of thoughts. And again, I want to thank you
all for your brilliant testimony. Just on the point of
universities and colleges, because I held a whole series of
hearings on the soft power of trying to get these colleges to
conform to the CCP's will. I had a hearing with the head of
NYU. I had the top person there, the chancellor, testify. I
invited myself to go, because I'm barred from going, like you,
Sam, and like our--you know, I'm on their hit list. And I
actually got a visa when he said I could come.
But what shocked me about NYU is that they get a campus in
Shanghai, fully paid for by the Chinese Communist Party. I
asked them about if somebody raises Tibet or Falun Gong on the
campus, or they go online and they--because obviously the
internet is completely policed, or if a woman gets pregnant and
she's single, did not get permission by the government--and
this is in 2016 when I had this hearing--is she forcibly
aborted? Because we know that forced abortion is absolutely one
of the most horrendous things. It was a crime against humanity
at Nuremberg against the Nazis. And it's no less by the Chinese
Communist Party.
Scott Flipse and I went on that trip. The students seemed
eager to hear about human rights. Not so much so with some of
the other people, particularly the Chinese top people who were
teaching at that institution. But I was shocked that they were
charging an enormous amount of money to go there. I asked, who
picks who gets in here? You know, what kind of selection
process? I only say this because there has been shameless
complicity on the part of our universities and colleges. Some
may have stood up.
Steven Mosher exposed forced abortion in China in the early
80's. And then I started, I did an amendment on it in 1984, to
stop any funding to the UNFPA or anybody else. Based on his
research--Michael Weisskopf wrote a great piece for the
Washington Post on that very thing, three-part series about how
horrible it was--but Stanford then went to him and said, You're
out. You're not getting your doctorate. Because they wanted
access. So I hope that our universities, if there's any
complicity--and I'm sure there is--with this terrible cruelty
of forced organ harvesting, will absolutely disassociate, call
it out. You know, maybe you're going to be denied some access.
And we see what the business is. Sam, you remember--Mr.
Ambassador--just how conforming American corporations are and
continue to be to what the mantra is being spread by China and
by Beijing, because they don't want to lose access. They don't
want to lose their market. We saw it even during the most
recent Olympics.
So my thought is--again, Scott and I went over there. I
gave a major speech on human rights. And I saw people
grimacing. And it was a one and done. They didn't invite me
back. But I'm just so worried about this complicity. Our bill
will say anybody in that supply chain for forced organ
harvesting, we're going to come after you and we're going to
prosecute you. You know, you can't let these Falun Gong
practitioners continue to be killed, and Uyghurs and others.
Twenty-eight years old, as you said, 29 years old. And maybe
Mr. Gutmann, you could further elaborate on what--and any of
you--what do they go through? You know, when you're strapped
down, given an anesthetic, and you know that they're going to
kill you to take your organs, I don't know if there's a greater
horror. I mean, all torture is horror, but this is a
particularly cruel manifestation of torture. And it's going on
right now.
And as you know, Mr. Gutmann, they're talking about
expanding, for the Uyghurs, the number of facilities available
for this by 2030. They're not going in the direction of, Hey,
we need to stop this. They're expanding it. I think this bill
has to pass. The State Department, I love them, but they're not
doing due diligence on this the way they could. This will
empower State, HHS, the Justice Department, give them brand new
tools to go after this horrific supply chain. And again,
Americans go there. They get their, whatever it is, heart,
liver, whatever it might be, facilitated by brokers. Let's put
them behind bars as well. I just brought up the college
because, again, Elise has done yeoman's work on how our higher
ed has just been shameless when it comes to human rights with
regard to Jews, the antisemitism that is rife there in many of
those places. So if anybody would like to comment on that, I
would appreciate it.
Mr. Gutmann. I would like to mention one thing. I've made
this point before, so I apologize, but I still think it's
valid. You know, when we discovered in the 1960's that the
Soviet Union was torturing dissidents by putting them into
mental hospitals, the world psychiatric association responded
by banning any contact with the Soviet psychiatrists, or any of
their institutions. And that meant everything. It was a
complete ban. There was no work on psychoactive drugs together
or anything like that. Now we're looking at a very different
situation. I mean, someone like Pfizer goes into China and
tests Chinese citizens who've had transplants, and they're
probably carrying around a Falun Gong or a Uyghur organ, or
possibly even a house Christian church organ. This absolutely
should not be defended in any way.
And of course, from the academic perspective, they've
absolutely not responded at all to this. This should be a
blanket ban. That's what we had in the 1960's. I'm not saying
it worked perfectly. I don't think it really changed Soviet
behavior on how many dissidents got thrown into mental
hospitals, but at the end of the day, we made a point. The
world made a point, and today we're just looking at a kind of
chaotic situation, I think, on contact with China.
Mr. Jekielek. Co-chair Smith, we've gotten into this
habit--I
remember I interviewed you some years ago. We talked about how
this linkage of human rights and trade was broken during the
Clinton administration. And basically ever since then human
rights have been off the table. They've been in these off-the-
books or quiet dialogues, which basically both sides, from what
we learned on reporting subsequently, viewed cynically. They
were purely performative, basically. It makes no sense, because
if you're--as a regime, you're treating your people in a
particular way, in this particular egregious way, the Chinese
Communist Party has treated hundreds of thousands of its
people, how do they view Americans?
This is somehow lost on people. We've gotten into this
habit of saying, Okay, the human rights, just keep that off the
table, got to keep it quiet, got to keep it--of course, I
understand that the U.S. Government is raising these things in
the appropriate venue and so forth, but--as Ambassador
Brownback has talked about as well--it's their huge Achilles
heel. They're doing terrible things to their own people, and we
should make our own population here in America as aware as
possible of that, and not play to the platitudes, or their
propaganda--that this is all kind of false and just attacks on
China and so forth. So I think human rights is the key.
Ambassador Brownback. I was just going to say, Mr.
Chairman, I thought you said something earlier that I want to
double back to. For years China has been given a bye on this,
and they really have, for decades. Really until President
Trump. He's the first President since Kennedy to actually take
them on. Now, you know, today saying all these things about Xi
Jinping that I'm kind of questioning about, but maybe that's
part of the negotiating tactic. I hope it is. It seems to me
like that bye is starting to be pulled off. And they're not
getting a bye as much anymore. And we need to get to the point
where they don't get a bye at all. I think a key piece of this
is just really following the money.
As Governor I saw that our universities in our state, the
university heads, their primary concern every morning they got
up, was money. Money coming into the place, make sure the doors
were operating, and I don't begrudge them that. They've got big
institutions to run. They've got to make sure we've got plenty
of money coming in here to run this place. That's what they're
thinking about. And so China comes along and says, Here, we've
got resources that you can use. That's why you've got to break
these two economies apart. That's why the key piece of this
actually--I think two key pieces. One, breaking the economies
apart. And second, us standing up for human rights,
particularly religious freedom because it's such a weakness on
their part.
This is one of those things, it's kryptonite to them, and
they do everything they can to suffocate it and hold it out of
the room. When they bring up Taiwan, we should bring up
religious freedom. When they bring up any of these issues, we
should bring these, because this is just something they cannot
tolerate. It's just such an effective tool. Finally, I think we
ought to also double back and really press about opening up the
great internet firewall that China has. The second-largest
economy in the world and you've got an internet firewall around
your people? Come on. That's not leadership. That's
suffocation. And we really should embarrass them about it.
Co-chair Smith. You know, very interesting point about the
internet. On one of my trips when I still could get a visa--I
went to an internet cafe, I typed in ``torture,'' and I got
everything about what Imperial Japan did vis-a-vis torture, and
George Bush at Gitmo, which was false, in my opinion, but it
was still there. Then I put in ``Manfred Nowak.'' He was
mentioned earlier, because he did a tremendous job at exposing,
on behalf of the United Nations, the torture there. And
nothing. Nothing. I put in ``Tiananmen Square.'' I got nothing
but pretty pictures of people smiling in Tiananmen Square. No
tanks, no Tank Man, no anything. It was really amazing. And so
we really have to find our voice more than ever right now.
I remember meeting Wei Jingsheng after he was allowed out
in 1994. The Chinese Communist Party thought they would get
Olympics 2000 by doing that. They didn't get it. They
rearrested him. But while he was out I was in Beijing. We had
dinner together. And he says, please, will you Americans
understand this? When you kowtow and you weakly approach the
Chinese Communist Party, they beat us more in prison. And he's
the father of the Democracy Wall Movement. He suffered almost
death at the hands of his torturers. And it's like, we've got
to find our voice and stop saying, Oh, by the way, human
rights. It doesn't work that way. We have to be so upfront.
And this issue of killing people--you know, I read a book
before I came to Congress about Unit 731, where Imperial Japan
did horrific torture against people, mostly servicemembers
during World War II, in China. And I look at that, then I look
at what they're doing now, and say, you know, You hated what
happened to you. And I do too. But why are you replicating it
in very large numbers beyond that?
But I would like to ask, Mr. Gutmann, if you don't mind,
walk us through, if you could, or any of you, what a victim
goes through. They've already been typed--you know, for their
blood type and all the other things, so that a match can
immediately be made. You have said before that there's pretty
much an equal male to female--number of women that are being--
average age 28 to 29--being slaughtered, murdered for their
organs, as well as men, young men. And if you could just--what
is this like?
Mr. Gutmann. I would--this is perhaps not the answer people
want to hear, in a way, but it's actually less painful than it
used to be. Partly because of Dr. Ko Wen-je, who pioneered this
technique of using ECMO. That meant--originally what you would
have to do is do very light anesthesia, because you don't want
to put a sluggish organ into another human being. So the
anesthesia had to be very light. And it was actually a very
painful procedure, according to Nijat, who was a Uyghur who
worked with the PSB. Now when he put in this new technique it
basically meant you could put the person under full--pretty
much full anesthesia, and you'd have the oxygenated organ. It
would be kind of running through, so you had constant, kind of
in a loop. You go into slow motion, but not that bad. And
basically that meant that you could take out the organs in a
much more rational way, and you could take them out slower, and
one after the other, and finally the heart's the last to go.
I don't think the person is actually feeling that much. I
think we're--you know, if you want, we've made improvements in
this area. Now, the problem with that is that it also means
that the person who was worth--you could only get an organ or
two out of them and plausibly get it to the destination--this
is something Didi Kirsten Tatlow from the New York Times
worried about a lot--that person is now worth a lot more money
because you can take out maybe up to five organs successfully,
or four organs. Before it was only one or two. Now we're in a
very different situation, because you've got, like, 16 hours,
24 hours to work with, with this perfusion method.
I'm not saying it's ECMO right now. By the way, I went to
Taiwan for six months to try to figure this out and I don't
know which perfusion method they are using. I know it started
with ECMO. And ECMO--this is an off-label use. For any doctors
out there listening, I am not criticizing ECMO. It's a
lifesaving device. It's fantastic. But this is the way it's
been used. And we're looking at a very kind of ``Brave New
World'' situation. I was saying that they don't take organs
around the world. That's now possible. I'm not saying they're
doing it, because I see no actual evidence of that, but it
could happen.
Co-chair Smith. But people go there to get the organs.
Mr. Gutmann. Well, right now people go to China. But
increasingly these techniques have led to a different world,
where it is possible for them to fly organs out, say, to Saudi
or somewhere like that, or Russia, or Berlin. You know, this is
what we're kind of looking at. And it also means new
populations are potentially at risk. I don't want to--we don't
see the evidence for this now. As far as I'm concerned, the
Chinese are a lot like the old Soviet Union. They like to keep
their rocket ships landing right in the country, not in
international waters.
Co-chair Smith. And the average cost? How much do they
make, like, for a liver or some other organ?
Mr. Gutmann. Well, it depends on who's buying it.
Obviously, if it's a foreigner it's going to be about, you
know, $100,000 for a liver these days, or something like that.
And more like $200,000 for a heart or lungs. Or you sometimes
get a package deal. Now if you're Japanese and don't want to
negotiate, you might end up paying a million. So there's a huge
difference between, say, Koreans, Japanese, Germans, Americans,
and so forth. But we are still talking about huge profit
potential on every individual who's healthy and is done
correctly. Thanks.
Mr. Jekielek. Co-chair Smith, I just wanted to comment on
these--the new populations. One of the things I noticed, kind
of anecdotally, I'm very sensitive to this dehumanizing
rhetoric that's used to target the population first, to get the
rest of the population to kind of accept horrible things being
done. It looked to me, anecdotally, that there's this uptick of
that against Christians in China. And I actually talked with
Bob Fu over here on ``American Thought Leaders,'' on my show,
about this. And this sort of thing isn't studied empirically,
but it really does look like, as there's this increased
incarceration of Christians with the Zion Church, these
restrictions on Catholic clergy and so forth, that there's this
increase in dehumanizing rhetoric as well. I would love it if
someone would study that empirically. But that's a big concern,
because it's always this dehumanization that is a prequel to
inclusion as a group for forced organ harvesting.
Co-chair Smith. Thank you.
Mr. Walkinshaw.
Mr. Walkinshaw. Thank you, Co-chair Smith. First, I just
want to thank you for your many years of principled commitment
to human rights issues and to this Commission. I'm new here but
look forward to working with you. And thank you all for being
here. As we sit here today, the PRC human rights atrocities
such as forced organ harvesting--the President is participating
in the U.S.-China summit. I think it's unfortunate that human
rights issues don't seem to be high on the list of agenda
topics in that summit, because for years folks here before us,
researchers, ethics experts, survivors, and human rights
advocates have raised alarming evidence--presented, I should
say--alarming evidence that the PRC has systematically targeted
Uyghurs, Falun Gong practitioners, and other religious and
ethnic minorities for forced organ harvesting.
As we've heard today, detainees have been subject to
unexplained blood testing and medical screening while in
detention camps and prisons, and many later disappeared.
Researchers estimate that tens of thousands of individuals,
perhaps more, have been killed to supply China's transplant
industry. This is a profound moral crisis. And I thank all of
our witnesses for your commitment to addressing it. This
Commission, thanks to Co-chair Smith's leadership, has
documented evidence showing that Uyghurs and other Turkic
minorities detained may now be a primary source of organs
within China's transplant system. The targeting of Falun Gong
practitioners and Uyghurs reflects, as we've heard today, a
broader campaign of religious persecution that includes
Christians in China, ethnic repression, and dehumanization
carried out by the PRC. And this Commission has to continue
examining these allegations and working to ensure that the
abuses are documented, and pushing for them to come to an end.
Ms. Sidik--she can hear? Okay. Ms. Sidik, here in America
folks might hear terms like ``detention camp'' or ``forced
labor,'' but they might not understand what daily life is like
in those camps and under this system. Can you just describe for
us the atmosphere--the atmosphere of fear inside and outside
the camps that we've heard about today?
Ms. Sidik [through translator]. When I was sent to the
men's camp for six months, I saw horrific atrocities in those
camps. One example is just in a little cell, 30 to 40 men are
locked up. They sleep on very thin blankets. The detainees had
to crawl in and crawl out. And the interrogation room is right
next to the classroom. So usually they take detainees out for
half an hour, an hour-ish. We hear these extreme screams from
these detainees. And these detainees are all chained and
shackled. They are given little, tiny chairs to sit down. You
could see from their faces how scared, desperate they are. And
that they are also--you could see crying, tears streaming from
their eyes, but there is nothing I can do. I have to be very
careful, because it's all cameras. And so I have to watch every
word and my action in the class.
And in the women's prison, you can see all these women are
like robots. You know, no hope, no life in their faces. The
toilet is just a bucket in the cell. You know, they only dumped
it once every 24 hours--their life is really, really horrible--
the cell and the corridors stink because of that. All these
women's hair is shaved. And they all have vests with numbers,
so they are called not by name but by the vest number. And I
could see when I was teaching them--they were sitting down--
getting up is extremely difficult. You could see clear torture
marks. And at times, you know, I hear they were abused and
raped. And every Monday those women were given unidentified
medications, so mothers who are nursing, their milk stops, and
women's menstruation stops.
At one class I taught about the motherland, meaning China.
Then one lady stood up and thanked the Chinese Communist Party
and the government for giving her the opportunity to study the
Chinese language there in the camp. And at the same time, she
talked about that she just had a baby and in the camp her milk
stopped. Another young woman also said, you know, I was
supposed to get married a week later before I was taken, all
the wedding invitations were sent out. But I'm grateful for the
Chinese Communist Party for bringing me here for education,
even though I don't know where my fiance is. And some others,
who came straight from studying overseas, despite their parents
telling them not to come back, they returned out of love for
their parents, their homeland. But they were taken from the
airport, sent straight to the camps. And there they also had no
choice but to thank the Chinese Communist Party for their
treatment.
Representative Walkinshaw. Thank you, Ms. Sidik, for
sharing, and for your courage in speaking out. That's all I
have, Mr. Co-chair. Thank you.
Co-chair Smith. Thank you, my good friend and colleague.
I'll just conclude--and anything you would like to add,
please do--but first I want to thank Scott Flipse for his
incredible leadership on this Commission, on human rights in
general. Scott and I, and Frank Wolf, back in 1986 went to Perm
Camp 35 in the Ural Mountains, where Sharansky--and pushed for
the release of prisoners there. Took us two years to get into
it. We lobbied like crazy when Gorbachev was saying, you know,
glasnost and perestroika, all these buzzwords, that they were
opening. And what seemed absolutely impossible, we went to the
Ural Mountains, to this horrible place where all these
prisoners were. Scott was indispensable to that effort, as he
has been in Romania when we fought against Nicolae Ceausescu,
and we had many trips there as well.
Even the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which I
introduced and got passed in the House and passed in the Senate
under Marco Rubio. It is the law. It was his idea. He never
wants to take any credit. But I just want to say how grateful I
am for all these years of not only never-ending pushing--you
know, Sam, how important it is to have a staffer like Scott--
but also to be so creative. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention
Act--a bill that is law right now and that has made a
difference. This is the guy that did it. So I just want to
thank him. [Applause.] He'll get mad at me later and say I
shouldn't have done that, but I am so grateful for his
leadership. And on this issue, it's just been incredible as
well. So Scott, thank you for all your work on helping to put
this very important hearing together.
I just want to say, when our bill passed on March 27th,
2023--the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act--it went nowhere in
the Senate, and then passed a year ago, May 7th of 2025, when
it passed, the Chinese embassy went into overdrive to say what
a liar I was, that I'm making it all up--overdrive. And then
almost at the same time, their foreign ministry said, anybody
who wants to go to Xinjiang, nothing to hide, come on. So we
did a letter that night when they said that and I said: I want
to lead a congressional delegation there. I want to go to the
camps. I want to--you know, we've done it, and we've done it
many times. I even met with Xanana Gusmao when he was in an
Indonesian jail, you know, way back. You can do it. And I re-
offer that hope again, that the Chinese will let Members of
Congress travel to China to go to places.
You know, if you go over there and talk trade and say,
Let's make a deal, you know, the doors are wide open. But when
you go over there and say, Human rights matter--religious
freedom, as Sam Brownback says, is at the very top of our
concerns, the door is slammed shut. So I reiterate that request
to the Chinese embassy, to allow me and others to travel to
Xinjiang and to China. But also, we need to pass this bill. We
need to pass it yesterday, for all those victims. And this
atrocity must end. If anyone would like to add anything before
we close? Again, your testimony really shows us the way. I
thank you for that.
All members have five legislative days to revise and extend
and to add extraneous matter if they would like. If there are
any additional questions from the commissioners, we will give
them to you. And please get back to us as quickly as you can.
The hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:48 a.m., the hearing ended.]
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A P P E N D I X
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Prepared Statements
------
Prepared Statement of Ethan Gutmann
In the Chinese transplant industry humans are the only element that
can't be fully controlled. That's why I swear by field research. Over
time, I have learned that all testimony--even that which doesn't
support my ongoing thesis--is valuable.
Yet I've also been observing the often-skeptical Western world.
Camp refugees who observed the organ harvesting selection process, or
were nearly harvested themselves, matter. But the testimony of a
medical practitioner who was directly involved in the transplant
process clearly matters more. I'll briefly focus on these super
witnesses, recap current harvesting rates, touch on Uyghur deportation
from Central Asia, and close with a few personal thoughts on policy.
From ``The Slaughter'':
Fifteen years ago, in a Westminster hearing, Enver Tohti, a former
Urumqi hospital surgeon, confessed that he used his ``own hands,'' to
extract the kidneys and liver of a wounded, but salvageable, human
being on a Xinjiang execution ground.
In 2013, Dr. Ko Wen-je of National Taiwan University Hospital
agreed that I could publish the story of his quest for organs on behalf
of his Taiwanese patients in a mainland hospital (probably Wuxi
People's Hospital). When Ko expressed doubts about the quality of
executed prisoner organs, his Mainland counterparts assured him that
``all the organs will come from Falun Gong.''
``The Xinjiang Procedure'' adds to this collection.
In 2007, an accidental witness: ``Cat,'' (Mr. Sugawara), was
assisting his Yakuza chieftain prepare for a liver transplant in a
Beijing Police hospital. Wandering into the wrong room, Cat found a
bound, sedated young man--wrist and ankle tendons severed. A Chinese
surgeon soothingly explained the young ``liver donor'' was Falun Gong.
In 2017, Sayragul Sauytbay, a teacher in a Kazakh and Uyghur camp,
gained exclusive access to organize the camp's medical files. A red
checkmark next to blood results signaled the individual had been pre-
selected for harvesting. Several camp refugees recalled guards imposing
color-coding--from pink vests to wristbands, a few nights before the
actual disappearances.
In 2018, ``Samal,'' an ethnic Kazakh woman, was recruited by a
Uyghur veterinarian to extract human intestines in preparation for the
systematic extraction of organs. Why intestines? Because their
workspace was in a secret medical compound, four floors under a Uyghur
and Kazakh concentration camp with sub-standard ventilation.
And an update: While Dr. Ko knew that Falun Gong were being
harvested, according to his Chinese colleagues, Ko became the ``teacher
of ECMO to Mainland China''--directly instructing Chinese surgeons to
exploit an off-label procedure for live organ harvesting. As mayor of
Taipei and a Presidential candidate for the Taiwan presidency, Ko could
have been the ultimate super witness. Instead, Ko was recently
sentenced to 17 years in Taiwanese prison on corruption charges.
Along with a hunger for medical witnesses, there is a hunger for
scale. The full publication of witness evidence in Chapter 5 concludes:
2.5 to 5 percent forced disappearance rate in the
camps. (Average age 28-29. Specifications: taken at night,
final blood/DNA test to establish health and identity).
Assuming one million in the Xinjiang camps, forced
labor factories, and other carceral environments, that's 25,000
to 50,000 Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic groups harvested
per year.
Two to three organs extracted per individual to reach
the minimum requirement for China's transplant industry volume:
60,000 successful transplants per year.
Minimum cumulative death total in Xinjiang: over
200,000 minimum and counting.
Some analysts recently speculated that camps are closing (it may be
inside baseball, but I would welcome a question on this). Either way,
forced labor organs are the same as concentration camp organs, and the
per capita medical attention that Xinjiang receives is extraordinary.
Beijing recently pledged ``six more human organ transplantation medical
institutions in the region by 2030.''
The round-up of Uyghurs from China's neighbors is also
extraordinary. My interviews establish that 88 percent of Tajikistan's
Uyghurs and 87 percent of Kyrgyzstan's Uyghurs have been deported back
to Xinjiang. I also documented a new Chinese military base, just north
of Tajikistan's Qolma Pass--about 30 miles from a Tajik mine speculated
to contain 50 percent of the world's uranium.
The energy and mineral reserves of the Pamir and the Kyrgyz
mountain ranges are the ``South China Sea'' of China's western
frontier. With Russia at war, without a U.S. presence, a new nine-dash
line is theoretically possible.
Regarding policy: I like all the bills. But I support passing the
Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act first because it follows the surgical
lead; the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation put
the Chinese transplant industry (and implicitly, The Transplantation
Society) on notice with an academic boycott of China in 2022.
Withdrawal of legitimacy should now be immediate and comprehensive.
Nothing changes without embarrassment and trauma; 1 day after my
press conference on Ko, Taiwanese medical authorities withdrew
immunosuppressive drug coverage for Taiwanese patients who receive
Chinese organs. We could do that here. And instead of attempting to
police the entire import/export medical industry, we could immediately
investigate Thermo Fisher for providing the DNA tests used on an
estimated 10 million Uyghurs and Kazakhs.
A word on limitations. The Party responds to embarrassment by
hiding, adapting, altering the production process, and adding new
layers of complexity. Beijing loves games. So we might need to consider
changing the stakes of the game.
I don't have a 20-point plan, just a parting thought. Falun Gong is
a majority Han Chinese spiritual movement. They have no choice; their
sacred mission is to change China. And they deserve our support.
Yet small nations rise--often it's a delayed response--when mass
murder and wanton neglect have placed their future survival as a people
in question. Ireland, the potato famine. Ukraine, Stalin's mass
starvation. Israel, the gas chambers. East Turkestan, organ harvesting.
Re-entering history is a bloody affair, yet these nations came back
from the dead. Even if it begins as a cynical negotiation tactic, a
tacit threat, a Uyghur state, even a democratic Uyghur state, is
possible. The liberation of Central Asia is possible. For the Party,
that's the nightmare scenario.
And the most improbable scenario of all is the systematic reform of
the Chinese transplant system. But if our first objective is to stanch
the bleeding, apply immediate and consistent pressure. Pass this bill.
______
Prepared Statement of Ambassador Brownback
We are in a clash of civilizations between the democratic West and
its allies versus the Chinese Communist Party with its evil alliance of
communist, authoritarian, and totalitarian regimes. The winner will
establish how societies are conducted now and in the future.
Western civilization is built on the Judeo-Christian ethic that
every person has an eternal soul with immeasurable worth and dignity.
It believes that all are endowed with inalienable natural rights that
come from God, not government.
Communism, on the other hand, boils man down to an economic being
and denies the existence of these divine rights. In the Communist
framework, all power is derived from and controlled by the government.
It cannot and will not tolerate a power above itself.
In pursuit of this absolute power, the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) today is ruthlessly crushing every religion. Their methods are
unfathomable to most in the West, including the mass deployment of
crimes such as forced organ harvesting.
Disfavored religious communities are particularly targeted by the
perpetrators of the forced organ harvesting scheme, with Falun Gong
practitioners systematically catalogued based on biometric markers and
then murdered for their organs. The organs of Uyghur Muslims are
marketed to wealthy Middle Easterners as ``halal,'' in an unimaginably
cynical perversion of their Muslim faith.
Decades of careful research has shown that this issue is not merely
contained within China--it's a moral blight that involves ``medical
tourists'' from dozens of countries around the world, including the
U.S. and its allies in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Chinese
transplant institutions openly market organs to customers around the
world in a global scheme that relies on the financial infrastructure
operated by the West.
The CCP is conducting three religious genocides as we speak--
against Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghur Muslims, and Falun Gong
practitioners.
In addition, the CCP is training and resourcing other authoritarian
regimes around the world with the latest in surveillance technology,
enabling them to be better dictators by crushing non-compliant people
of faith in their countries.
As the leading Western civilization nation in the world, on our
250th anniversary and founded on the principle of religious freedom for
all, the United States must courageously stand in opposition to this
fundamental assault on liberty. This is why I wrote the book, ``China's
War on Faith.''
The U.S. must embrace a policy stance that reflects the importance
of religious freedom and China's hostility toward it:
1. We must act on the reality that the CCP is at war with us.
2. We should stand on our core principles, including defending
religious freedom for everyone.
3. Religious freedom should be viewed as not only a human right,
but as a strategic weapon we use in our theater engagement strategy
with the CCP, just as President Reagan did with the USSR.
4. The President, Vice President, and Secretary of State should
host public meetings with Chinese exiles of all religions who have been
persecuted for their faith.
5. The White House or Congress should host a global summit of
religious, democratic, and political leaders calling for religious
freedom for everyone, everywhere, all the time--including in China.
6. The United States should lead a global coalition of
governments, academics, and medical and financial institutions to
openly condemn forced organ harvesting and take concrete steps to end
international complicity in the practice.
7. We ask the President to seek from Xi Jinping the release of
Pastor Ezra Jin, Jimmy Lai, and the nine Catholic bishops currently
detained in China.
8. We ask Pope Leo to criticize China for its three ongoing
genocides and to publicly seek the release of the nine detained
Catholic bishops, Pastor Ezra Jin, and Jimmy Lai.
9. We should send the Vice President or Secretary of State to
Dharamshala, India to meet with the Dalai Lama to discuss the future of
Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism.
10. We should make religious freedom a major policy focus at the
G20 Summit we host this year.
11. The President should include, in his speeches commemorating
the 250th anniversary of our Nation's founding, the central role
religious freedom played in it and call for religious freedom around
the world.
12. Our media, Hollywood, academia, and big business must start
shining a light on these horrific practices being conducted by the
Chinese government and no longer look the other way.
President Trump can be the first president since President Kennedy
to effectively confront the Chinese government. This must be a
sustained U.S. policy, similar to our long-term policy of confronting
the USSR, conducted by both political parties over four decades.
We must tell the world how ruthless and barbaric the CCP is and how
far they are willing to go to control their own people. Our most
effective weapon to confront totalitarians is a free religious people.
It is a weapon that the CCP fears more than our aircraft carriers or
even our nuclear weapons.
______
Prepared Statement of Jan Jekielek
Chairman, Co-Chairman, and distinguished members of the Commission,
thank you for the opportunity to testify today.
If there's one thing we can all agree on in America, it is this:
the United States should not fund, enable, or participate in any system
that rips organs from unwilling donors and treats human lives as
disposable commodities.
What I am about to describe is not the black-market organ trade run
by cartels we most typically hear about. This is something far more
systematic, and far more industrialized. It is state-sponsored killing
of innocents, on demand, to supply a multi-billion-dollar transplant
industry. I'll start with a telling example detailed in my book, Killed
to Order: China's Organ Harvesting Industry & the True Nature of
America's Biggest Adversary:
``An affluent German woman from Monchengladbach, with the rare
AB blood type, struggled with alcoholism for years, and faced
liver failure. In systems like Germany's, finding a match might
take years, or not happen at all. Yet she obtained three livers
in China around 2015-2019, each in just months, for
approximately $400,000, involving a visit to China for each
procedure. Her continued drinking, combined with anti-rejection
medications, led to quick rejections of each liver--one about
every 2 years.''
How did this happen? It appears to have been indirectly facilitated
by a major transplant center in the Eurotransplant zone which had
listed partnerships with China on liver donor research and anti-
rejection work as recently as 2025.
This demand extends to Americans as well. In one well-documented
case, a man traveled to China for a kidney transplant. He received a
perfectly matched organ in 2 weeks, then he returned home. He was aware
someone was killed for this
purpose. We know this because his cousin documented the trip in the
2009 book
Larry's Kidney.
Now compare that to the United States, where the average wait time
for a new kidney is three to five years.
To understand how this is possible, we must begin with two
essential tools the Chinese Communist Party has perfected over decades.
First, the creation of what the regime itself calls a ``black
class,'' a designated enemy group that the rest of the population is
taught to hate, fear, and see as subhuman through relentless, state-
controlled propaganda. In the early years after 1949, the landowners
became one of the first black classes. They were portrayed as parasites
who had stolen from the people. The regime flooded the country with
this message until ordinary citizens accepted, and in many cases
participated in, the confiscation of their property and often their
lives. During the Cultural Revolution, the educated and keepers of
traditional culture were targeted for vilification. This is the
pattern: designate a group as subhuman, flood the information space
with propaganda, and the population becomes psychologically prepared
for atrocities against the target group. The persecution of each black
class also serves as a stark reminder to the entire population of the
raw power of the Communist state, and what can happen to anyone who
dares to challenge it.
The second key tool is the infrastructure to incarcerate massive
numbers of people at will.
Prisons, black jails, re-education camps, and forced labor camps
are just part of an incarceration system with capacity for millions.
It was the Chinese communist regime's designation of Falun Gong
practitioners as a black class in 1999, and a directive to
``eradicate'' them, that set the stage for ``killed to order'' forced
organ harvesting. Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is an ancient
qigong, or slow motion exercise practice that resembles Tai Chi, rooted
in the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance.
(Another way to translate this is being True, Good and Enduring). Falun
Gong features extensive teachings written by its founder, Master Li
Hongzhi. It's also characterized by an unusual lack of organizational
structure: no collection of funds, no roster (you don't ``join''
anything, you're a practitioner if you decide to live by its
principles), no hierarchy, and no worship of a deity. It spread by word
of mouth in the 1990's in China, growing, by government estimate, to an
estimated 70 million-100 million people practicing. This included
people of all walks of life, from high-level CCP officials to migrant
field workers, and everyone in between.
There are different theories about why the Chinese paramount leader
at the time, Jiang Zemin, ordered the persecution of Falun Gong
practitioners. Perhaps it was because the number of practitioners had
grown greater than communist party members; perhaps it was because they
were from a broad cross section of society; perhaps because he was
jealous of Li Hongzhi, which ample evidence shows he was. Or perhaps it
was because the Chinese Communist Party, with its decades of
totalitarian rule, simply couldn't abide how much individual agency
practicing Falun Gong fostered in people. If one were to design a
system that could withstand totalitarian control and overreach, it
might look something like Falun Gong.
Unlike previous black classes, large numbers of Falun Gong
practitioners refused to be re-educated. They resisted at a scale the
regime had never before encountered. As a result, the CCP incarcerated
a massive number of them, and enacted an unwritten rule: all Falun Gong
deaths in China's massive incarceration system would be considered
suicides. In 2005, the U.S. State Department estimated that roughly
half of all people in China's Reeducation Through Labor (RTL) system
were Falun Gong practitioners. In 2006, the United Nations Special
Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, reported that Falun Gong
practitioners accounted for 66 percent of the torture cases he
documented during his visit to China.
This created the perfect supply for an organ industry that was
ready to grow but needed a reliable, on-demand source.
In any ethical transplant system such as that of the United States,
vital organs typically come from catastrophic accidents. To reduce the
chance of rejection, blood type and histology are also matched. Thus
the supply of organs is always much less than the demand. Patients must
wait months or years. The system is conditioned on tragedy. This
creates a pool of people willing to go to great lengths for a second
chance at life.
The Chinese Communist Party saw this as an opportunity. As I
recount in Chapter 5 of Killed to Order, bringing together the evidence
gathered by different researchers and groups over the last 20 years,
the regime took the massive population of healthy, dehumanized and
incarcerated Falun Gong practitioners, and started blood-typing,
tissue-typing, and organ-scanning them, and creating a data base. So
when a patient, whether Chinese super-elite or foreign transplant
tourist, needs a heart, liver, or kidney, a match could be quickly
found and the prisoner killed to order. One of the earliest
whistleblowers exposing this was a transplant surgeon, Dr. Jacob Lavee,
whose patient in 2005 had a heart transplant scheduled and then enacted
within 2 weeks' time.
The years 2000-2005 saw a massive surge in growth of transplant
hospitals in China. Ethan Gutmann, who is also testifying today,
estimated in congressional testimony in 2016 that there were 60
thousand to 100 thousand transplants being done in China annually.
Tragically, after years of little to no meaningful international
action on forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong, it was around this
time that the Chinese Communist Party also expanded this atrocity to
another group. They dehumanized the Uyghur Muslim population in the
Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, incarcerated a massive number of
them, and proceeded to use them in ``killed to order'' fashion. In
Xinjiang, which now operates as a high-tech police state, authorities
have gone door-to-door collecting blood and tissue samples from
ordinary citizens in their own homes, expanding the pool of potential
organ donors. As noted in a 2022 European Parliament resolution, a
Beijing hospital actually advertised `` `halal organs' from Uyghurs and
Muslim minorities.''
The overall number of transplant hospitals has only grown,
substantially, since then.
It is important to note that China did not even have a nationwide
public donor registry until 2014 and even today, it only claims about 7
million registered donors--less than 5 percent of the United States'
more than 170 million.
This is why I titled my book Killed to Order. Because that is
exactly what it is: organs delivered on a schedule, matched in advance,
extracted from living human beings who are then discarded. It is
industrialized forced organ harvesting made possible by the CCP's
unique combination of totalitarian control, mass dehumanization, and
the willingness to turn human beings into spare parts for profit, power
and elite longevity.
Unfortunately, the United States is not innocent in this atrocity.
American universities and hospitals have partnered with Chinese
transplant centers, trained hundreds of Chinese transplant surgeons,
and conducted joint research. The NIH has funded projects involving
Chinese transplant institutions. American companies supply critical
immunosuppressive drugs and medical technologies used in these
procedures. American patients have traveled to China for transplants.
Just last year, the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition
Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party sent a letter
to Harvard University raising serious concerns about its collaboration
with Chinese entities implicated in forced organ harvesting.
It is critical to understand that the systematic forced organ
harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners, and members of other persecuted
groups such as the Uyghurs, is not an isolated crime, but part of a far
more comprehensive pattern of abuses that are inflicted on believers as
the final stage of a violent suppression campaign.
The official position of the U.S. Government is that the Chinese
Communist Party is enacting a genocide against its Uyghur Muslim
population. A number of international legal experts, including Caylan
Ford, have concluded that these atrocities against Falun Gong also
demonstrate genocidal intent. Communist Party documents explicitly call
for the ``complete eradication'' of Falun Gong. The Party's 610 Office
has directed a nationwide apparatus of persecution involving mass
imprisonment without due process, forced ideological conversion,
dehumanization through state media, social and economic isolation,
torture, and extrajudicial killing.
These actions precisely fulfill the legal definition of genocide
under the Genocide Convention: the deliberate infliction of serious
bodily and mental harm, conditions calculated to bring about physical
destruction, and the targeted killing of members of the group. The
systematic harvesting of organs from living prisoners represents one of
the clearest manifestations of this intent to destroy Falun Gong in a
biological and physical sense.
As Ms. Ford so aptly concludes, China's persecutory campaign that
includes, indeed features, forced organ harvesting, constitutes
genocide.
So what can be done?
First, end all American participation in and cooperation with
China's organ transplant system. Congress should direct the Department
of Health and Human Services (HHS), in coordination with the State
Department and NIH, to conduct a full audit of any U.S. ties, including
funding, research collaborations, physician training programs, data
sharing, or procurement partnerships, with China's organ transplant
system. Further, HHS should immediately cease issuing or recognizing
Federalwide Assurances (FWAs) for any Chinese institutions connected to
organ transplantation. The FWA is the formal process by which HHS
certifies that a foreign institution meets U.S. ethical standards for
human subjects research. Once granted, this certification allows the
institution to receive Federal funding and collaborate with American
universities, hospitals, and researchers. Revoking FWAs for transplant-
related Chinese entities would be a direct and effective way to cut off
U.S. support.
The International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation has
formally declared that they will not accept submissions related to
organ or tissue transplantation from human donors in China.
Second, sanction those involved. There are two bipartisan pieces of
legislation that address this specifically--S. 4009 (Falun Gong and
Victims of Forced Organ Harvesting Protection Act, a Senate-modified
version of H.R. 1540) and H.R. 1503 (Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act).
Both have passed the U.S. House near-unanimously and now await Senate
confirmation.
Third, expand state laws banning insurance reimbursements or public
funding for organ transplants linked to forced harvesting in China. Six
states have already done so--Texas, Arizona, Idaho, Tennessee, Utah,
and Arkansas--which leaves forty-four left to go.
Federally, the Block Organ Transplant Purchases from China Act of
2025 (H.R. 2114, ``BLOCK Act''), still in committee, would bar Federal
funds (Medicare, Medicaid) from covering transplants sourced in China,
shutting down any American complicity through transplant tourism.
Eight countries have enacted binding national laws addressing
China-related organ trafficking and transplant tourism.
Fourth, at the grassroots level, I hope Americans can spread the
word, like through the End Forced Organ Harvesting satellite Rotary
Club, so their fellow Americans and beyond know not to go to China for
any more organ transplants.
On the eve of the 250th anniversary of America's founding, it's
appropriate to remember that this country was built on a foundational
belief in the God-given rights of every individual and the inherent
dignity of every human being. That forged
the ethical principles that still define America: the sacred right to
bodily autonomy,
and the moral imperative to oppose any regime that treats people as
harvestable resources.
It is why America has already taken concrete steps to investigate
at least two transplant systems that have allegedly repeatedly violated
the dead donor rule. Yet we still cooperate with one on the other side
of the globe that commits atrocities on an industrial scale. Let's take
immediate action to stop that.
Thank you. I look forward to your questions.
______
Prepared Statement of Kalbinur Sidik
Honorable Chair, distinguished members, and respected committee
members:
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to testify. My name is
Kalbinur Sidik. I am from our homeland, Uyghuristan (East Turkestan),
from the city of Urumqi. I am a witness to the detention camps, and I
am ethnically Uzbek.
For 28 years, I worked as a Chinese language teacher and held
important administrative positions at Urumqi City No. 24 Elementary
School. Never did I imagine that one day I would be forced to teach
inside a detention camp, or that I would become a witness to the crimes
committed by the Chinese Communist Party against Uyghurs and other
minority peoples.
Today, I stand before you to speak about atrocities, including the
possibility of forced organ harvesting. I will tell you only the
truth--only what I personally witnessed and experienced.
In March 2017, I was sent under a 6-month contract to teach in a
men's camp located on a mountain in Sangfanggou Village No. 5, Urumqi
City. The authorities told us we would be teaching ``students'' in a
literacy training course. But they were not students. They were
prisoners.
They were fathers, young men, businessmen, religious figures,
intellectuals, people from all walks of life, and ordinary citizens.
There were also elderly men among them. They had been taken from their
homes and imprisoned behind barbed wire, triple iron gates,
surveillance cameras, armed guards, and locked cells.
Every Monday, no classes were held for the detainees. Instead,
blood was drawn from them. They were given unidentified injections.
Afterwards, they were given small white pills. Chinese nurses told me,
``These are vitamins or calcium supplements. Since the detainees never
see sunlight, the government ordered us to take care of them this
way.''
But I did not believe them.
How could a government that imprisoned, starved, tortured, and
humiliated these people suddenly care about their vitamins? No, that
was impossible. At that time, and even now, I believe there was another
purpose behind it.
I also witnessed healthy men disappearing. I clearly remember one
man named Osman. He was active in class and eager to learn. He was a
wealthy businessman and appeared very strong and healthy at first.
Among hundreds of people, I could easily recognize his face. Then one
day, he disappeared. When I asked what had happened to him, I was told
he suffered from high blood pressure and diabetes and had died on the
way to the hospital.
There was another man who sat at the far end of the first row in
the classroom. He too was hardworking, and I still remember his face
vividly. Later, he also disappeared. I was told he died from ``kidney
poisoning.''
I did not believe these explanations.
Every day in the classroom, detainees were constantly replaced.
Older and stronger prisoners were taken away, while new ones arrived.
Familiar faces disappeared, and we were expected to accept whatever
explanation the guards gave us.
Later, when I testified before parliaments in various countries, I
was asked about the disappearance of detainees and organ harvesting. I
told them what I had heard while working in the camps.
The special police driver who transported me, and the police
officer assigned to accompany me, often talked among themselves. They
said: ``Right now in our country, the `halal organ trade' is booming.
The detoxification center in Michuan, Urumqi, has now become an organ
transplant center.''
I did not witness the surgeries. I did not personally see organs
being removed. But I heard these conversations.
Later, after hearing my testimony, a close relative and friend of
mine living in Europe--married to a foreigner--spoke to me on the
condition of anonymity. She personally told me that the Michuan
``detoxification center'' had indeed been transformed into an organ
extraction hospital.
In 2018, she and her foreign husband were sent there for medical
examinations before leaving for Europe. During that process, she saw
many young detainees wearing prison uniforms lined up under heavy
Chinese police supervision, entering designated rooms. She also
observed that the number of doctors had increased greatly and that
doctors were carrying unusual containers in their hands as they exited
the rooms. She told me this with her own mouth and begged me to speak
about it in my testimony.
So for the second time, I heard directly from someone I personally
knew--someone who claimed to have seen with her own eyes that this
place had become an organ harvesting hospital.
In the camps, I witnessed blood collection from detainees,
injections, forced medication, disappearances, and the secrecy
surrounding everything.
Therefore, if you ask me today whether I believe the Chinese
Communist Party turned Uyghurs in the camps into a source of profit
through a so-called ``halal organ trade,'' my answer is: ``Yes. Yes. A
hundred times yes.''
While I was in these camps, I witnessed horrors beyond words.
Chinese police humiliated detainees to a level no human being should
endure. They stripped them of their humanity. They did not call them by
their names, but by numbers. They tried to break their minds, destroy
their faith, and erase their dignity.
Let me tell you more about what I witnessed, so that the world will
never forget the genocide taking place in East Turkestan.
When I first entered the men's camp, I walked into a building
surrounded by barbed wire, electric doors, armed police, soldiers, and
locked gates. The detainees were brought out from their cells. Chains
and shackles were on their hands and feet. Many still had unshaven
beards because they had only recently arrived. Their eyes looked at me
with desperation--as if I had come to save them.
But I could not save them. I could not even help them. Guards
surrounded me everywhere. The cells were dark. The windows were sealed
shut. The detainees slept on bare concrete floors with only a thin
blanket. For all three meals, they received only a small Chinese bun
and watery rice soup. They were allowed to use the toilet only for very
short periods of time. During the entire 6 months I was there, they
were never once allowed to bathe.
Their bodies weakened. Their faces changed. Healthy people became
thin, pale, and exhausted.
I taught 4 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the afternoon--
sometimes even 4 additional hours during inspection periods. But
gradually I realized the purpose there was not education. The purpose
was control.
Later, detainees were forced to memorize ``red songs,'' patriotic
songs praising the Chinese Communist Party and Xi Jinping, and
political slogans. The detainees were forced to praise the same
Communist Party that had imprisoned them. They were forced to express
gratitude toward the very system destroying them.
During lessons, police would call detainees out not by name, but by
number, and take them for interrogation. The interrogation room was
next to the classroom. Shortly after they were taken away,
heartbreaking screams could be heard. They were tortured with devices
such as electric batons, electric ``tiger chairs,'' electric gloves,
and electric helmets.
After my 6-month assignment in the men's camp ended, I was sent to
a women's camp located in Tugong, Saybagh District, Urumqi. There I saw
many women and girls. Most were highly educated. Their hair had been
cut short. They wore gray prison uniforms with blue numbered vests over
them. Their faces were pale and lifeless.
About 90 percent of these detainees were between 18 and 40 years
old. The remaining 10 percent were older women, some even in their
seventies and eighties. These women and girls were also given
medication and unidentified injections. As a result, many of them
completely stopped menstruating.
Some had studied abroad. During lessons, they were forced first to
thank the Chinese Communist Party and government before telling their
stories.
One woman said she had recently given birth and still had a nursing
baby, but her breast milk had stopped.
Another young woman said she had been preparing for marriage when
she was suddenly taken to the camp, and that she no longer even knew
where her fiance was. Yet she was forced to thank the government for
providing such a ``good opportunity'' to learn the ``national
language.'' Others said they had been taken directly to the camp
immediately after returning from studies abroad.
From the way these women painfully sat and stood, I could sense the
severe abuse they had suffered. Tears constantly streamed from their
eyes.
In this camp, I heard about rape and sexual violence committed by
Chinese police. I heard that guards used electric batons and other
weapons to abuse detainees. I personally witnessed the body of a young
girl, around 18 to 20 years old, being carried away before my eyes. I
later heard that she had bled to death.
Outside the camps, the control continued. The Chinese government
placed so-called ``Chinese paired relatives''--Han Chinese men--inside
the homes of Uyghur women, especially in homes where husbands had been
taken to camps. Even in their own homes, these women faced various
forms of abuse and humiliation. People were afraid to speak. Phones
were monitored. Relatives abroad became a source of danger.
My daughter was in the Netherlands, and we lived constantly in fear
and anxiety. Under pressure from neighborhood committees and assigned
police officers, we were also forced to undergo sterilization
procedures at Changleyuan Hospital in Tianshan District. Even though I
did not want this, I had no choice. My safety and the safety of my
family depended on obeying government demands. That is why I say: we no
longer had ownership over our own bodies.
Because of time limitations, I will end my testimony here.
I am one of the fortunate few who managed to escape after enduring
tremendous suffering. The people inside the camps cannot speak to you.
They have no way to make their voices heard. I am standing here today,
at enormous personal cost, to tell you this truth--because the men who
disappeared, the women who were abused, the mothers separated from
their babies, and the families destroyed by this genocide need
witnesses.
Honorable Chair, distinguished leaders, and committee members: I
ask you not to turn your eyes away from this tragedy.
The horrific violence taking place in East Turkestan is not merely
a crime. It is part of a system that sees Uyghurs--the original
inhabitants of that land--as less than human. This is genocide. The
world once said, ``Never again.'' Yet in East Turkestan, it is
happening again. I ask the U.S. Congress never to forget the Uyghur
genocide. I urge you to continue investigations and hold the Chinese
Communist Party accountable.
Thank you.
______
Prepared Statement of Hon. Chris Smith
Last September, the world heard something chilling.
As Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un walked together in
Beijing, a hot mic picked up an unguarded conversation about organ
transplants and the possibility of living to 150 years old.
That was not macabre small talk among aging dictators. It was a
glimpse behind the curtain--a glimpse into a world where human beings
can be treated as interchangeable parts to prolong the lives of
autocrats. But forced organ harvesting is not healing. It is murder
masquerading as medicine.
Today, this Commission examines one of the most barbaric human
rights atrocities of our time: the forced harvesting of organs from
prisoners of conscience, death row inmates, and other vulnerable
people--especially in Communist China.
Let me be clear: ethical organ transplantation is noble and
lifesaving. But what we are examining today is the opposite. It is the
conversion of the imprisoned and persecuted into inventory. Hearts.
Livers. Kidneys. Lungs. Corneas. Taken from the living. Sold to the
desperate. Hidden behind hospital walls. Protected by secrecy,
corruption, fear, and state power.
I chaired my first hearing on forced organ harvesting thirty years
ago, on June 18, 1996. Since then, the evidence has become more
disturbing, more detailed, and more compelling.
The most persistent allegations in China centered first on Falun
Gong practitioners--peaceful men and women targeted by the Chinese
Communist Party for eradication. Later came mounting evidence
concerning Uyghurs, already victims of genocide in the Uyghur region;
Tibetans; Christians; death row inmates; and others treated as property
of the state.
Experts, like Ethan Gutmann, have documented how this atrocity
expanded from death row prisoners to prisoners of conscience and
religious detainees. The China Tribunal concluded that forced organ
harvesting has been committed in China for years, on a significant
scale. Witnesses at previous hearings have warned us about military
hospitals, impossibly short wait times, organs available on demand, and
a transplant system that cannot withstand scrutiny.
And yet Beijing now asks the world to believe the problem has been
solved. It says its transplant system now meets international
standards. And once again, the disappointing and corrupt WHO takes
Beijing's claims at face value--just as it did in the early days of
COVID.
But today, this Commission has received rare and extraordinary
eyewitness accounts from inside the Chinese gulag itself: Ali
Motevalian's written submission details his incarceration in a PLA-
linked prison hospital near Shanghai, and Kalbinur Sidik's testimony
from the detention camps of the Uyghur region. Together, their accounts
shatter Beijing's fiction that its transplant system is voluntary,
transparent, and compliant with international standards.
Ali Motevalian spent years inside China's prison system. His
submission describes coerced thumbprints on so-called consent forms,
bondage, tranquilizers, ``last rooms of terminal patients,'' prisoners
taken to surgery and not returned, mobile freezer carts, and bodies
moved toward incineration. His account strikes at the heart of
Beijing's favorite defense. The Chinese Communist Party told the world
it had ended the use of executed prisoners' organs. Ali says otherwise.
Inside the prison hospital system, in 2020 and 2021--years after
Beijing told the world it had stopped taking organs from prisoners--Ali
says he saw unconscious, shackled men, known as ``sleepers,'' brought
by armed personnel directly into surgery rooms. They never returned.
That is not voluntary donation. That is execution by organ extraction.
Kalbinur Sidik brings us inside another part of the Chinese gulag:
the camps of the Uyghur region. I will not summarize her testimony in
detail, because in just a few minutes she will speak for herself. But
her account shows a system where human beings are reduced to numbers,
where the state controls the body as well as the mind, and where
coercion and fear are used to destroy dignity.
The prison hospitals and gulag described in these testimonies are
not places of care, rehabilitation, or education. They are crime
scenes--part of a system of coercion, medical abuse, and genocide in
China.
Organ crimes are not just a China problem. It is a global one that
flourishes wherever coercion, poverty, corruption, secrecy, and demand
intersect.
That is why Congress must act.
The House has twice passed my legislation with overwhelming
bipartisan support. H.R. 1503, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of
2025, passed the House 406 to 1.
It would criminalize forced organ trafficking, impose serious
sanctions, require reporting, deny visas, and create penalties of up to
20 years in prison and up to a $1 million fine for knowing complicity.
This bill is not a press release. It is enforceable policy. It says
to brokers, traffickers, corrupt officials, complicit doctors,
hospitals, researchers, insurers, and middlemen: if you profit from
coerced transplants, directly or indirectly, you should risk your
money, your visa, your access to the United States, and your freedom.
The Senate has not acted on the bill, but they must. Delay is
denial.
Every day without consequences is another day perpetrators operate
in the shadows, witnesses are intimidated, evidence disappears, and
families never learn what happened to their loved ones.
Forced organ harvesting is barbaric. It is systematic. It is state-
enabled. And it is big business.
And, speaking frankly, no one wants Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin to
live forever. I suspect on this point there would be broad bipartisan
agreement. But behind that dark irony is a deadly serious point: no
dictator, no party boss, no wealthy patient, and no broker should be
able to purchase longevity with the organs of the poor and persecuted.
That is all the more reason to pass the Stop Forced Organ
Harvesting Act and make unmistakably clear that the United States will
not stand by in the face of such cruelty. Not with our expertise. Not
with our money. Not with a dollar of American complicity.
Thank you.
Submissions for the Record
------
Statement of Seyed Alireza Motevalian
Chinese Prisons and Organ Harvesting
My name is Seyed Alireza Motevalian, commonly known as Ali. I am an
Iranian-born refugee and a victim of wrongful imprisonment in the
People's Republic of China. I lived in China as a businessman from 2009
until 2023. I was arrested in Shanghai with my Chinese wife, Jessica
Liu Zhiyu, on May 2, 2013. We were formally arrested on June 8, 2013,
tried in 2014, and convicted under Article 225 of the Chinese Criminal
Code for alleged illegal business operations outside the scope of our
business license.
My sentence was 10 years. My wife was sentenced to 8 years. Several
of our staff received shorter sentences. I maintained my innocence
throughout my imprisonment and served my full sentence. My wife was
released earlier but was not allowed to leave China after her release.
I am submitting this statement because during my incarceration I
spent extended periods inside Shanghai Prison's General Hospital,
located within the Nanhui Prison campus in Shanghai's Pudong District.
There, I observed a repeated institutional pattern that I understood to
be non-consensual organ procurement from prisoners. My observations
were not based on one incident. They came from repeated hospital stays,
repeated transfers through the building, views from hospital-room
windows, encounters in corridors and controlled areas, and
conversations with convict orderlies, doctors, and other prisoners.
My imprisonment and transfer to the prison hospital
After our conviction and the rejection of our appeal in 2015, I was
transferred to Shanghai's Qingpu Prison in 2016. My wife was
transferred to Shanghai Women's Prison.
After exhausting legal remedies, I began a hunger strike in Qingpu
Prison in March 2018. By May 2018, my health had deteriorated badly,
and I was sent to Shanghai Prison's General Hospital at Nanhui Prison.
From 2018 to 2021, because of my hunger strikes and related medical
problems, I was moved repeatedly between Qingpu Prison and Nanhui. I
describe this as 13 round trips, or 26 transfer legs. I spent much of
that period inside the prison hospital and became familiar with its
layout, personnel, routines, and movement patterns.
During this period, I suffered kidney failure and immune-system
failure. I required dialysis, IV fluids, antibiotics, tube feeding, and
other treatment. I believe the prison authorities kept me alive in part
because consular officials visited me. Chinese prisoners did not have
that protection.
Coerced consent and restraints
As soon as a prisoner was admitted into the hospital, he was
required to thumbprint a consent form. When I refused, I was placed in
bondage, injected with a tranquilizer, and my thumbprint was taken
while I was immobilized.
This was not an isolated method used only against me. In the
hospital, prisoners who did not respond to commands could be put in
bondage. This included the deaf, the mentally ill, prisoners who had
lost cognitive function, prisoners who refused food, Uyghur prisoners,
and prisoners facing death sentences.
Bondage meant being strapped by all four limbs to a bed, with
another strap across the chest. Prisoners were tube-fed, attached to IV
lines, placed in diapers, and sometimes catheterized so that they could
remain strapped down for long periods. After extended bondage, the body
became stiff and wasted. When my straps were opened to send me back to
Qingpu, I could not move and had to be taken by wheelchair.
I saw many immobilized prisoners. In the second room next to what
prisoners called the ``last room,'' all nine patients were strapped
down. In the last room itself, at any given time, I usually saw at
least two or three of the nine patients strapped down. Bondage was a
regular part of the hospital's control system.
The daily care and control of these prisoners was carried out
largely by convict laborers, known as laodong. They were selected from
younger, stronger prisoners and worked as orderlies. They wore white
overalls, carried notepads, had watches, moved around the building, and
were trained by nurses. They also enforced discipline. They had
privileges ordinary prisoners did not have, including better food, more
movement, and contact with doctors and nurses. Patients, by contrast,
often could not move, speak, write, read, or contact the outside world.
The hospital did not function like a normal hospital
The facility did not operate like an ordinary hospital with
meaningful specialist care. Dr. Liu, who was head of the doctors, told
me there were no specialists when I asked to see one. I saw no
specialist wards such as cancer, cardiovascular, kidney, ophthalmology,
or other ordinary treatment departments.
The building had approximately five patient wings, each with around
100 beds, or roughly 500 beds total. Yet I understood there were only
about eight doctors, and from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. only one doctor was on
duty for the whole facility. There was no proper ventilation and no
shower. There was a dentist, but the only dental procedure available
was extraction. There was no eye doctor. No new spectacles entered the
prison or hospital for years; even a foreign consulate might have to
press for a year to obtain new glasses for a prisoner.
Several doctors, including Dr. Liu and others, told me they were
military-trained or assigned through the military or prison medical
system. I observed medical personnel wearing white coats over uniforms.
What made the hospital especially strange was the contrast between
the lack of normal specialist care and the size and activity of the
surgery area. The facility did not function like a hospital designed to
cure prisoners. It functioned like a prison holding-and-surgery
facility.
The fourth-floor surgery area
I have drawn a sketch of the fourth-floor layout from memory. The
fourth-floor surgery area occupied a large, controlled section of the
building near the elevator and away from ordinary visitor access.
Visitors were generally kept on the first floor and did not go
upstairs.
Based on the symmetry of the east and west wings, and my experience
moving through both wings on the third floor, I estimated that the
surgery area could contain at least seven rooms. The exact number is
less important than the fact that the surgery area was large, active,
controlled, and hidden from ordinary visitors.
The ``last room''
As my condition deteriorated, I was moved to what prisoners called
the ``last room.'' This room was for prisoners who could no longer be
cured enough to return to manual labor. Many were elderly, terminally
ill, or severely disabled. Others were younger prisoners whose
illnesses had been left untreated until they could no longer work.
The turnover in the last room was constant. Patients were taken out
and replaced by others. Every morning, I could hear which bed numbers
were scheduled for surgery. At first, I thought the surgery was a final
attempt to save their lives. When I asked whether the surgery had
succeeded, I was told yes. When I asked why the patient did not return
to the room, I was told the patient was ``back there,'' with staff or
laodong pointing to the rear of the building.
Laodong orderlies identified the rear area as an incineration or
cremation area. I saw smoke coming from the chimney in the area they
identified.
The surgery pattern and freezer cart
The pattern I observed was repeated. A prisoner would be selected
for surgery. Doctors would meet about the subject patient. In the early
morning, the prisoner would receive a tranquilizing injection. Laodong
orderlies would press the prisoner's thumb onto a red ink pad and
thumbprint a consent form. The prisoner would then be rushed to the
surgery area.
By around noon, a mobile freezer cart would emerge from the surgery
area and be transferred by elevator to a van waiting in the yard. The
cart was moved quickly and under guard. The body or coffin was handled
separately and later moved toward the rear incineration area by laodong
workers.
This separation was important. The freezer cart was not treated
like an ordinary body. It was rushed, guarded, and moved to a waiting
vehicle. The body or coffin followed a different route and was handled
with far less urgency. From the repeated sequence--surgery, non-return
of the patient, guarded freezer-cart transfer, and separate body
disposal--I understood the freezer cart to be carrying organs or other
valuable biological material.
This same process applied to female prisoners as well. I saw women
taken from the fifth floor to the surgery area, and they did not
return. There were four ``last rooms'' that I knew of: two on the third
floor, one on the fourth floor closest to the surgery area, and one for
female prisoners on the fifth floor.
The ``sleepers'' brought from outside
In addition to the moribund prisoners already inside the hospital,
I saw unconscious or deeply sedated prisoners brought from outside on
rolling stretchers. Their limbs were restrained to the stretcher rails.
They were accompanied by armed People's Armed Police personnel. The
prisoners were taken quickly through the elevator and toward the
surgery area.
I witnessed this in several ways. I was repeatedly transferred
through the hospital and more than once crossed paths with these
unconscious, restrained prisoners. My room also had windows on both
sides. From one side, there was a view toward the gate; from the other,
I could glimpse internal traffic toward the surgery area.
I recognized the role of the People's Armed Police because I had
previously worked in Qingpu Prison's death-row cell block, Block Number
Nine. In Qingpu, I had seen PAP personnel come to take death-row
prisoners away in vehicles. I later saw similar PAP personnel in the
prison hospital bringing unconscious, restrained prisoners toward
surgery. Their uniforms, weapons, behavior, and the reaction of other
prisoners and staff made clear that these were not ordinary hospital
patients.
Based on what I saw in Qingpu's death-row block and later inside
Nanhui, I understood these ``sleepers'' to be death-row or execution-
related prisoners being brought into the surgery process.
Known deaths of prisoners
I also personally knew foreign prisoners who died in custody. Two
of my former Qingpu cellmates, Steven Lien from Canada and Francisco
Rondon from Colombia, died after becoming seriously ill. I had shared a
prison room with them and was present when they died.
Their deaths shaped my understanding that seriously ill foreign
prisoners were not meaningfully protected by medical parole or by the
fact that foreign consulates knew about their cases. I believed medical
parole should have been available to such prisoners. In practice, I did
not see it operate meaningfully for foreign prisoners.
Broader prison conditions
In Qingpu Prison, I saw many elderly, disabled, and seriously ill
prisoners. All prisoners were required to work if they were physically
able, and even severely weakened prisoners were expected to report to
the labor area rather than remain in bed during work hours. At various
times, I remember making greeting cards for the UK store Tesco and
packaging for Quaker Oats. Some prisoners had to push other prisoners
in wheelchairs to the labor area because prisoners were generally not
allowed simply to remain in bed during work hours. A prisoner had to be
almost unable to work before being sent to Nanhui.
I also saw prisoners at Nanhui who appeared to have been brought
from outside Shanghai, including from Fujian Province. From this, I
believed Nanhui served more than one prison or locality. I cannot say
how many provinces used it, but it appeared to function as a central
prison hospital facility for seriously ill or selected prisoners.
My release and continuing hardship
After I was released and deported at the end of my sentence, I had
nowhere to go. I served my sentence in full because I never accepted
the verdict and insisted on my innocence.
Although my wife had already been released from prison, she was not
allowed to leave China and was not allowed to have a passport. This was
like continued punishment after serving the sentence. I went first to
Sri Lanka and then to Vietnam to wait for her to somehow flee China. I
was robbed several times by people in Vietnam and Cambodia who claimed
they could help bring my wife out but failed to do so.
Conclusion
I understand that what I describe is grave. I am giving this
statement because I lived inside this system and saw its routines over
time.
The organ-harvesting pattern I observed was repeated and
institutional. Prisoners were restrained or incapacitated,
thumbprinted, taken to surgery, and did not return. A freezer cart then
moved quickly from the surgery area to a waiting van, while the body or
coffin was handled separately toward the rear incineration area.
Unconscious restrained prisoners were also brought from outside under
armed PAP escort and taken directly toward surgery.
Based on the repetition, the layout, the behavior of guards and
laodong workers, the separate handling of the freezer cart and body,
the lack of ordinary specialist medical care, and the large, controlled
surgery area, I understood this as non-
consensual organ procurement inside the prison hospital.
I hope my statement helps the Congressional-Executive Commission on
China understand what occurs inside Chinese prison hospitals and why
these facilities require urgent investigation.
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Witness Biographies
Ethan Gutmann, senior research fellow in China Studies at the
Victims of Communism Memorial Fountation
Ethan Gutmann is a senior research fellow in China Studies at the
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and co-founder of the
International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China. He is the
author of ``The Slaughter,'' co-author
of the influential 2016 investigative report ``Bloody Harvest/The
Slaughter: An
Update,'' and author of the newly published ``The Xinjiang Procedure,''
based on interviews with Uyghur and Kazakh refugees throughout Central
Asia.
Ambassador Sam Brownback, U.S. Ambassador at Large for
International Religious Freedom, 2018-2021
Ambassador Sam Brownback is a former United States Ambassador-at-
Large for International Religious Freedom, a former United States
Senator, and the 46th Governor of Kansas. He has spent decades
advancing human dignity and religious freedom around the world. He
currently serves as co-chair of the International Religious Freedom
Summit and chairman of the National Committee for Religious Freedom. He
is also the author of ``China's War on Faith,'' which examines the
Chinese Communist Party's campaign against people of faith.
Jan Jekielek, senior editor, The Epoch Times and host, ``American
Thought Leaders''
Jan Jekielek is senior editor at The Epoch Times and host of
``American Thought Leaders.'' He is a journalist, documentary
filmmaker, and author of ``Killed to Order: China's Organ Harvesting
Industry & the True Nature of America's Biggest Adversary.''
Kalbinur Sidik, eyewitness to the forced labor and internment camp
system in the Uyghur region, and author of the forthcoming book ``Heart
Full of Light: Love, Loss, and Survival Inside China's Gulags''
Kalbinur Sidik is a survivor of China's genocide and an eyewitness
to the forced labor and internment camp system in the Uyghur region. Of
Uzbek ethnicity, she served for many years as an elementary school
teacher before being forced to work as a Chinese-language instructor in
internment camps. She has testified before Western parliaments and the
Uyghur Tribunal in London and is the author of the forthcoming book
``Heart Full of Light: Love, Loss, and Survival Inside China's
Gulags.''
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