This blog is part of a summer blog series written by the McCain Institute’s Summer Junior Fellows. Jillian Proshan is a junior fellow for the Human Rights & Freedom program.
Let’s begin with a math problem.
As of 2015, China declared that all organ donations would be “sourced from voluntary donors,” repealing an earlier policy that allowed the government to source organs from death row prisoners. Accordingly, in 2017, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reported that the voluntary organ donor list of approximately 375,000 people “yielded 5,146 ‘eligible’ organ donors,” resulting in over 16,000 organ transplants.
Yet scholars and experts, such as those who form the China Tribunal, an international organization tasked with investigating transplant practices in China, find a different reality. They estimate from data, including hospital bed counts and medical personnel, that China conducts between 60,000 to upwards of 100,000 organ transplants annually.
Given the overwhelming gap in these statistics, from where did China source tens of thousands of organs?
The answer lies in the illegal operation of forced organ harvesting. Recent congressional testimonies estimate that 25,000 to 50,000 prisoners in China undergo forced organ transplants annually. Imprisoned and detained religious and ethnic groups, including the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities, account for the majority of victims.
Accusations of organ harvesting in China came to Congress in 2006, when human rights advocates and government officials reported that “there has been and continues today to be a large-scale organ seizure from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners.” Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that began in the 1990s, has amassed millions of followers since then. While estimates are varied and “difficult to verify,” the approximate number of current members ranges from 7 million to 40 million. However, since the late 1990s, the group has been targeted by the Chinese government. After a peaceful rally of 10,000 Falun Gong followers in April 1999, the government banned the movement, declaring the group to be an “evil cult.” Thousands of Falun Gong practitioners were, and continue to be, imprisoned and sentenced to labor camps. Many of these individuals face torture and die in custody, while others are “murdered by medical professionals for their vital organs.” This same practice continues today, targeting Falun Gong followers, the Uyghur community, and other oppressed minority groups in China.
While the issue of forced organ harvesting in China is not new, it is also not well documented. The 2006 report declared that the number of Falun Gong practitioners harvested for their organs is “large” but unknown, and due to the CCP’s efforts to conceal these operations, researchers still can only estimate the number of individuals exploited by the government.
The United States government has taken some preliminary measures to address the active yet largely obscured organ harvesting industry taking place primarily in the Xinjiang region of China. For instance, in May 2025, the House of Representatives passed the “Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act” with an overwhelming majority of 406–1. A bipartisan initiative, the bill seeks to sanction those involved in the organ trafficking industry, requiring comprehensive research and reporting on “forced organ harvesting and trafficking in persons for purposes of the removal of organs in foreign countries.”
Representative Christopher Smith first proposed the “Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act” in the House in 2023, where it passed 413-2. The bill was introduced in the Senate and then referred to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, where it died before any votes took place. Smith reintroduced the bill in 2025, hoping that it will pass through the Senate. He argued in his floor statement, “State-sponsored forced organ harvesting is big business for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party and shows absolutely no signs of abating, which is why we and the rest of the world need to step up, particularly the democracies of this world.”
While legislation proposals may not conclude in policy changes, these steps bring additional and much-needed attention to the ongoing persecution of Uyghurs and other minority groups in China. When asked in the 2017 documentary Hard to Believe why this issue lacks attention in the media, interviewees discussed the efforts of the Chinese government to conceal operations, the subsequent dearth of concrete evidence, and the difficulty believing that such inhumane acts are occurring without consequence. Falun Gong practitioner Jeff Nenarella explains, “This [illegal organ harvesting] is a new form of evil. When there’s a new form of evil, people don’t want to accept it.” Enver Tohti, a former surgeon who extracted organs from an executed prisoner in China, added, “People don’t want to touch this evil because when you touch this evil… at the end of the day, you will not be able to tackle the consequences.”