Opening statement of Co-Chairman Smith at CECC hearingA Market Built on Victims: Stopping Illegal Organ Trafficking in China and Beyond

Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), Co-Chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), delivers his opening statement as his May 14th hearing, "A Market Built on Victims: Stopping Illegal Organ Trafficking in China and Beyond." The following are excerpts of Co-Chairman Chris Smith’s (R-NJ) opening statement at the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC)’s May 14 th hearing , entitled “A Market Built on Victims: Stopping Illegal Organ Trafficking in China and Beyond” : 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 of several hearings 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. What a nightmare. 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 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 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 China. Organ crimes are not just a China problem. It is 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. ###