Why Are Falun Gong Practitioners Killed for Their Organs in China?

Why Are Falun Gong Practitioners Killed for Their Organs in China?

by

Last Updated on 4 minutes ago by TodayWhy Editorial

In August 2024, a 58-year-old man named Cheng Pei Ming stood before a press conference in Washington D.C. and pulled back his shirt to reveal a 35-centimeter scar running across his chest. He was, investigators said, the first known survivor of China’s forced organ harvesting program. The reason there are so few survivors, human rights lawyer David Matas explained, is simple: “The bodies are cremated after organ harvesting.”

Cheng’s testimony is one data point in a body of evidence that an independent tribunal chaired by a former Hague prosecutor has described as proving — beyond reasonable doubt — one of the worst crimes against humanity of the 21st century.

What Is Forced Organ Harvesting?

Forced organ harvesting is the removal of organs from a living person without consent, killing them in the process. Unlike conventional organ donation — which relies on voluntary consent and brain-dead donors — forced harvesting treats living human beings as an inventory of spare parts to be accessed on demand.

In the context of China, the allegation is specific and documented: that beginning around the year 2000, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began using the large population of Falun Gong practitioners it had imprisoned as a captive pool of compatible organ donors. Prisoners were blood-typed and physically examined. When a paying recipient required a heart, liver, kidney, or cornea, a compatible prisoner would be identified, taken to surgery while still alive, and killed through the organ removal process. Their body would then be cremated, eliminating physical evidence.

The practice is described by its investigators as operating on an industrial scale and generating an estimated $1 billion to $1.2 billion annually in revenue for China’s transplant industry.

Why Are Falun Gong Practitioners Targeted?

The targeting of Falun Gong practitioners is not incidental. Three factors made them particularly vulnerable to this practice.

Scale of detention

Following the 1999 ban on Falun Gong, Chinese authorities arrested hundreds of thousands — and by some estimates millions — of practitioners. This created a massive, renewable pool of prisoners who were held outside the normal criminal justice system, in labor camps and “re-education” centers with little legal oversight and no independent monitoring.

Health and lifestyle profile

Falun Gong’s spiritual practice emphasizes clean living, moral cultivation, and physical exercise. Practitioners tend to be non-smokers and non-drinkers with good overall health — making their organs particularly valuable for transplant purposes. The China Tribunal noted this factor explicitly in its analysis.

Political expendability

The CCP had officially designated Falun Gong as an “evil cult” to be eliminated. Practitioners who refused to renounce their faith were treated as enemies of the state with no legal protections. Within the internal logic of the persecution, their deaths were not a cost — they were the goal.

📖 Related: Why Is Falun Gong Called a Cult — And Why That Label Is Politically Motivated — our article on how and why the CCP constructed the “evil cult” narrative.

The Evidence: Five Pillars

The case for forced organ harvesting rests on five distinct and mutually reinforcing categories of evidence, assembled over nearly two decades by investigators on multiple continents.

The Five Pillars of Evidence

  • 1. Transplant volume anomalies — China performs 60,000–100,000 transplants/year; official figures report only 5,000–16,000
  • 2. Impossible waiting times — Days or weeks in China vs. months to years in all other countries
  • 3. Undercover phone evidence — Calls to Chinese hospitals confirmed organs from Falun Gong practitioners available on demand
  • 4. Systematic blood testing of prisoners — Documented organ-compatibility screening of Falun Gong detainees and Uyghurs
  • 5. Physical survivor testimony — Cheng Pei Ming’s 2024 testimony, corroborated by medical imaging

1. Transplant Volume Anomalies

China’s official data claims approximately 10,000 to 16,000 organ transplants per year, a figure it attributes to voluntary donation following stated 2015 reforms. Independent researchers — including Matthew Robertson of the Australian National University and Dr. Jacob Lavee, a cardiac transplant surgeon at Tel Aviv University — have published peer-reviewed analysis in the American Journal of Transplantation concluding that China’s voluntary donor database was statistically “falsified” and “manufactured from the central levels of the Chinese medical bureaucracy.” Their best estimate, consistent with the capacity of China’s transplant infrastructure, places annual transplants at 60,000 to 100,000 — a gap of tens of thousands that cannot be explained by voluntary donors.

2. Impossible Waiting Times

In the United States, patients wait an average of six to nine months for a heart transplant and often years for kidneys. In 2018, more than 156 million Americans had registered as organ donors — roughly half the population. China, by contrast, has a small fraction of registered donors owing to deep cultural beliefs about keeping the body intact after death. Yet Chinese hospitals have routinely advertised — and delivered — transplants within days or weeks. China’s own Liver Transplant Registry indicated in 2005 and 2006 that more than 25% of cases were emergency transplants, with organs found within hours. The Hudson Institute concluded: “No satisfactory explanation exists” for these waiting times under a voluntary system.

The China Tribunal’s review of this evidence included undercover phone calls to Chinese hospitals in which surgeons and officials acknowledged that Falun Gong practitioners’ organs were available for selection. One such call, cited in the U.S. Congressional Record of May 2025, also provided evidence that former Chinese President Jiang Zemin personally issued the order to harvest organs from Falun Gong practitioners.

3. Systematic Prisoner Blood Testing

Multiple accounts from former prisoners describe being subjected to blood tests, ultrasounds, and physical examinations with no medical explanation given. These procedures are consistent with organ-compatibility screening. The United Nations Special Rapporteurs who investigated the matter in 2021 noted that Uyghur detainees in Xinjiang were subjected to mandatory health screenings — including organ ultrasounds — not administered to other prisoners. The same pattern was documented among Falun Gong practitioners a decade earlier.

The China Tribunal: A Legal Verdict

In 2018, a group of lawyers, human rights investigators, and medical experts established the Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China — commonly known as the China Tribunal — in London. It was chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who had previously served as the lead prosecutor of Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Over the course of twelve months, the Tribunal examined written evidence from dozens of sources and heard testimony from more than 50 witnesses. It released an interim report in June 2019 and a final judgment of 160 pages in March 2020.

China Tribunal Final Verdict — June 2019 / March 2020

“Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale… Falun Gong practitioners have been one — and probably the primary — source of organ supply… The Tribunal has had no evidence that the significant infrastructure associated with China’s transplantation industry has been dismantled… Commission of Crimes Against Humanity against the Falun Gong has been proved beyond reasonable doubt.”

On the question of genocide, the Tribunal found that the required elements — killing members of the group and causing serious bodily or mental harm — were clearly established. It stopped short of a genocide finding only because it could not be certain, on the available legal advice, that the specific intent required for genocide had been proved beyond reasonable doubt. The Tribunal described forced organ harvesting as “of unmatched wickedness even compared — on a death-for-death basis — with the killings by mass crimes committed in the last century.”

Following the verdict, Sir Geoffrey Nice and the Tribunal’s counsel Hamid Sabi presented the findings to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, urging an independent UN investigation. They called on all governments, medical institutions, and transplant professionals to take immediate action.

The First Known Survivor: Cheng Pei Ming

⚠️ Survivor Testimony — Washington D.C., August 9, 2024

Cheng Pei Ming, 58, a Falun Gong practitioner from Shandong Province, China — the first publicly known survivor of state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting — testified at a press conference in Washington D.C. on August 9, 2024. His case was subsequently reported by The Diplomat, the Daily Mail, and The Telegraph.

Cheng was repeatedly detained and tortured between 1999 and 2004 for practicing Falun Gong. During his detentions, he was subjected to forced blood tests three times — later recognized as organ-compatibility screenings. In 2002, he was sentenced to eight years in prison at Harbin Prison in northeastern China.

In July 2004, while in a state of good health, prison guards dragged him to a hospital and attempted to make him sign a consent form for surgery. When he refused, guards knocked him unconscious and administered anesthesia without his consent. When he awoke three days later, Cheng found himself handcuffed to a hospital bed. There was a drainage tube in his chest and a 35-centimeter incision on his left side. He was told nothing about what had been done to him.

CT scans conducted years later — after Cheng had escaped China — confirmed that portions of his liver’s left lobe and part of his left lung had been removed.

The guards, he testified, later told him he would need to undergo a second surgery — one they said carried an 80% mortality rate. Cheng survived only because he was transferred before the second procedure could be carried out.

“Nobody knows what we meant by a survivor of forced organ harvesting because 99.9 percent die after being organ harvested. This is the first case we have found of a survivor.” — Dr. Nieh, physician who reviewed Cheng’s medical records, Washington D.C. press conference, August 2024

Human rights lawyer David Matas, co-founder of the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China, called Cheng’s case “incontestable.” The Falun Dafa Information Center noted that Cheng subsequently faced reprisals after going public — consistent with the pattern of CCP transnational repression documented in 2024.

How Large Is the Industry?

Estimating the true scale of China’s organ harvesting is difficult by design — the secrecy is a feature, not a bug. But investigators have assembled several cross-referenced lines of evidence.

  • 60,000–100,000: Estimated annual organ transplants in China (independent researchers)
  • 5,000–16,000: China’s official annual transplant figure
  • $1–1.2B: Estimated annual revenue of China’s transplant industry (USD)
  • Days–Weeks: Advertised organ waiting times in China (vs. months to years globally)

In 2006, Canadian human rights investigators David Kilgour and David Matas published the first major report, documenting 41,500 organ transplants between 2000 and 2005 that had no identifiable donor source. Journalist Ethan Gutmann subsequently estimated in his 2014 book The Slaughter that approximately 65,000 Falun Gong practitioners were killed for their organs between 2000 and 2008, based on interviews with former detainees, doctors, and defectors.

More recent estimates published by the McCain Institute and the Santa Clara University Center for Applied Ethics place the annual forced extraction figure at between 25,000 and 50,000 prisoners. Jan Jekielek’s 2026 book Killed to Order estimates 60,000 to 90,000 people killed for organs each year across the 200 hospitals estimated to be engaged in the transplant business.

The transplant infrastructure itself is a form of evidence. In 2007, when China’s judicial reforms significantly reduced the number of death-penalty executions, a large new transplant center — described as the largest in Asia — was completed in Tianjin. At a moment when the officially claimed organ source (executed prisoners) was shrinking, capacity was expanding. The Chinese government has never provided a credible explanation for this discrepancy.

International Response and Legislation

The international response to forced organ harvesting has been building for two decades, but accelerated significantly in 2024 and 2025.

U.S. Congress: 406–1

On May 7, 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act (H.R. 1503) by a vote of 406–1 — one of the most bipartisan votes of the 119th Congress on any China-related issue. The sole dissenting vote was Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY). The bill was sponsored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and Rep. William Keating (D-Mass.).

The Act would:

  • Impose sanctions on any individual — including CCP members — engaged in organ transplant abuse
  • Revoke visas and immigration benefits of those convicted of organ trafficking
  • Impose civil fines of up to $250,000 per violation
  • Impose criminal penalties of up to $1 million and 20 years in prison for willful violations
  • Make it official U.S. policy to promote voluntary organ donation systems in bilateral talks and international health forums

One week earlier, on May 5, 2025, the House had already passed the Falun Gong Protection Act by voice vote — a bill aimed specifically at compelling the CCP to end its persecution of Falun Gong and the forced harvesting of organs from detained practitioners.

European Parliament

In January 2024, the European Parliament passed a resolution on the ongoing persecution of Falun Gong in China, including explicit reference to reports of organ harvesting. The resolution cited the case of detained practitioner Ding Yuande and called on China to allow independent monitoring of its transplant system.

Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission (U.S. Congress), March 2024

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) held a hearing titled “Stopping the Crime of Organ Harvesting: What More Must Be Done?” on March 20, 2024. Rep. Chris Smith, chair of the CECC, described forced organ harvesting as “one of the most persistent, horrific human rights abuses of our time.”

United Nations Special Rapporteurs

In 2021, United Nations Special Rapporteurs issued a formal inquiry to China, describing themselves as “extremely alarmed” by reports of forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghurs. They requested that China provide explanations for waiting times, transplant volumes, and the mandatory health screenings of detained minorities. China did not provide a satisfactory response.

📖 Related: Why Is Falun Gong Banned in China? — The Full History of the Persecution

China’s Denials and the 2015 “Reforms”

China has consistently denied all allegations of forced organ harvesting, calling them “lies” fabricated by Falun Gong and hostile foreign governments.

In 2015, Chinese health authorities announced what they described as a fundamental reform of the country’s transplant system: a ban on the use of organs from executed prisoners and a transition to voluntary civilian donation exclusively. The government pointed to a new digital donation registry as evidence of the change.

The China Tribunal directly addressed this claim in its final judgment. It found:

  • No evidence that the significant transplant infrastructure built during the 2000s had been dismantled
  • Statistical analysis by Robertson and Lavee indicating that China’s voluntary donor registry data showed “implausible, nearly perfect quadratic equations” — consistent with data being centrally manufactured rather than reflecting real donations
  • Ongoing organ waiting times in China that remained incompatible with voluntary donation even after 2015

The Tribunal concluded that forced organ harvesting “continues till today” — a finding it arrived at in 2019 and reiterated in its full 2020 report.

A note on sourcing The primary investigators of forced organ harvesting — David Kilgour, David Matas, Ethan Gutmann — and organizations such as the Falun Dafa Information Center are advocates as well as researchers. Their findings should be read alongside the independent corroboration provided by the China Tribunal (a non-activist legal body), peer-reviewed publications in the American Journal of Transplantation, U.S. Congressional testimony, and statements from UN Special Rapporteurs. The convergence of these distinct sources across different institutional frameworks is itself significant evidence.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners?

Forced organ harvesting refers to the removal of organs from living prisoners of conscience — primarily Falun Gong practitioners — without their consent, killing them in the process. The practice is alleged to have begun around 2000 in China, when the CCP’s crackdown on Falun Gong generated a massive pool of detained practitioners who were then screened for organ compatibility and killed on demand to supply China’s booming transplant industry.

What did the China Tribunal conclude about Falun Gong organ harvesting?

The China Tribunal — chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, former lead prosecutor of Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague — concluded in 2019 unanimously and beyond reasonable doubt that forced organ harvesting had been practiced in China for years on a substantial scale, that Falun Gong practitioners were the primary source of organs, and that these acts constituted crimes against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute.

Is there a known survivor of China’s forced organ harvesting?

Yes. Cheng Pei Ming, a Falun Gong practitioner from Shandong Province, became in August 2024 the first publicly known survivor. He testified at a Washington D.C. press conference that in 2004, while imprisoned at Harbin Prison, he was anesthetized without consent and woke with a 35-centimeter chest incision. CT scans later confirmed portions of his liver and left lung had been removed. Human rights lawyer David Matas described his case as “incontestable.”

Why does China have such short organ transplant waiting times?

In Western countries, patients wait months to years for organs through voluntary donation. In China, hospitals advertised waits of days or weeks — a statistical impossibility under voluntary donation. The China Tribunal and independent researchers concluded this points to a system where living prisoners are held as a standing organ bank, matched to recipients on demand and killed when a match is found.

What legislation has the U.S. passed on forced organ harvesting?

On May 7, 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act (H.R. 1503) by 406–1. The bipartisan bill imposes sanctions on those engaged in organ trafficking — including CCP members — with civil fines of up to $250,000 and criminal penalties of up to $1 million and 20 years in prison.

Does China deny forced organ harvesting?

Yes, consistently. In 2015, China announced reforms to transition to voluntary donation and claimed it had ended the use of prisoner organs. However, the China Tribunal found no evidence the transplant infrastructure was dismantled, and statistical analysis of China’s donor registry indicates the data was centrally manipulated. The Tribunal concluded forced organ harvesting continues today.

Sources & Further Reading

Leave a Comment