China's Death Camps - Center for Human Rights

By Peter James, Second Place winner of the 2024 Human Rights Essay Contest

Gunshots. “The last one is yours,” shouts a man. “Hurry up, extract the liver and two kidneys.” says another. It is a hot, summer day, and you are pressured to get to work— an officer and a surgeon just gave you orders. You see “yours”, he is a civilian in his 30s. There is a bullet wound in his chest. He is still alive. “Hurry up”, you grab the scalpel, but before you cut in, you ask for anesthetic. The request is denied, and you are again told to hurry up. You cut in. Feeling like an eternity, the whole operation lasted about half an hour. The crew of surgeons pack the organs in a strange container, and you head back to the hospital with them. You are told that nothing happened. That was the experience of Dr. Enver Tohti Bugdha.¹

Dr. Tohti’s experience was not an isolated incident. For at least the past thirty years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been systematically engaging in forced organ harvesting.² This egregious atrocity of harvesting organs from innocent and very-much alive people has gone unnoticed and unchecked.

But what exactly is forced organ harvesting and why is China conducting these operations?

Forced organ harvesting is exactly as it sounds, removing a person’s organ(s) without their consent. Not only is China conducting this, but China adds to the sinistery by killing these organ “donors”. According to Dr. Huige Li, “organs of prisoners were harvested using four methods: 1) organ harvesting from prisoners incompletely executed by shooting, 2) organ harvesting from prisoners after lethal injection, 3) execution by organ ex-plantation (live organ harvesting), and 4) organ harvesting under the pretext of brain death.”³ Whatever the method, innocent people—forced against their will— are killed in order for their organs to be removed and transplanted.⁴ The most common organs removed by the CCP are “hearts, kidneys, livers, corneas and, less commonly, parts of livers.”⁵As for the reason, China is conducting these operations out of Machiavellian self-interest. China gets dual benefits from this; people who are not ideologically primed with the CCP— people who do not view the CCP as the highest good— are A) done away with and B) their organs are sold for profit. Simply put, China has a process where people’s intrinsic value is reduced to the monetary value of their insides.

To better understand the atrocity, it is important to note its history. The CCP began the endeavor in the 1990s by harvesting organs from Uyghur (a mostly-Muslim, ethnic minority) political prisoners, like in the case with Dr. Tohti.⁶ In 1999, the CCP began arresting and targeting the Falun Gong— followers of a “set of meditation exercises and texts that preach the virtues of truth, benevolence and forbearance.”⁷ For steadfast Falun Gong practitioners, they were arrested, tortured, and sent into “the Chinese gulag – China’s network of labour camps, detention centres, psychiatric hospitals, prisons, and black jails.”⁸ The Chinese gulag provided these prisoners to surgeons for the sole purpose of harvesting their organs. Not coincidentally, as the crackdown on Falun Gong increased so too did organ transplants, exponentially increasing by “thirty-fold … between 1999 and 2005 alone.”⁹

One might argue that these claims are Western propaganda or even that these atrocities are a thing of the past. Those arguments are flawed. Just three years ago, United Nations human rights experts raised this issue of forced organ harvesting in China.¹⁰ If one wants to discount the UN as a Western mouthpiece, then one will have to ignore the fact that many of these independent experts reporting on this are from various non-Western countries.¹¹ Even excluding the UN, the preponderance of evidence eviscerates any reasonable doubt of forced organ trafficking in China. Prisoners of conscience, including Falun Gong, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Christians, are still being exploited for their organs despite CCP claims.¹² Each year, “25,000 to 50,000 Xinjiang prison-camp detainees” are harvested for their organs before being cremated.¹³

Nazi death camps were liberated by a coalition of morally convicted countries— countries who chose to stand up for humanity. China’s atrocities need to be combated with a similar approach. But how are they addressed now?

Although the UN reported on the issue and the issue violates the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN has no real enforcement capabilities and has not pushed the matter.¹⁴ So this problem is ultimately left up to individual countries, organizations, and human rights groups. Yet, progress has been made.

In 2020, the China Tribunal— an independent body established by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China— looked into the issue and released its judgment after having hearings for two years prior.¹⁵ The China Tribunal confirmed the CCP’s systematic operations of forced organ harvesting and noted that “no evidence exists of forced harvesting where the ‘donor’ survives.”¹⁶ This is clear evidence that China is sending political “undesirables” to death camps to be harvested and killed.

Based on that information, the US began to legislate. On March 27th of 2023, the House passed H.R. 1154 – Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023. The bill “mandates annual reporting by the State Department on forced organ harvesting globally, and authorizes sanctions for individuals and entities that facilitate organ harvesting.”¹⁷ The bill passed with an overwhelming vote of 412-2, and awaits the Senate.

Besides the US Congress, many states have taken up the issue within their own legislatures. In June of 2023, Texas signed into law Senate Bill 1040 which “prohibits health benefit plan issuers from covering human organ transplants that are performed in China.”¹⁸ Many other states (AZ, UT, MO, ID, IL) are currently working on bills that are modeled after the Texas law.

Having learned of the current initiatives, what can Americans do to help the victims? Surprisingly, Americans can do a lot about the issue. Americans can help by urging their representatives to pass the bills mentioned and craft similar bills. Americans can also spread awareness: sharing on social media about this little-known issue, speaking with others, writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper, inviting related-speakers to campus, and countless other ways. These actions can have profound effects. By spreading awareness, the media will further report on the issue, representatives will further legislate, and other countries will follow suit. China would have to stop its conduct if it faced obstacles from an international coalition because China needs others for its survival just as these victims need us for their survival.

Lastly, pray that this atrocity ends. And remember that your actions have power. Robert F. Kennedy Sr. once said, “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and … those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”¹⁹

1 https://humanrightscommission.house.gov/events/hearings/forced-organ-harvesting-china-examining-evid ence

² https://www.chinaorganharvest.org/timeline/

³ Do No Harm: Mitigating Human Rights Risks when Interacting with International Medical Institutions & Professionals in Transplantation Medicine, Global Rights Compliance, Legal Advisory Report, April 2022, (page 15)

https://globalrightscompliance.com/project/do-no-harm-policy-guidance-and-legal-advisory-report

⁴ https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ChinaTribunal_JUDGMENT_1stMarch_2020.pdf

5 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/06/china-un-human-rights-experts-alarmed-organ-harvestin g-allegations?LangID=E&NewsID=27167

⁶ https://www.chinaorganharvest.org/timeline/

⁷ https://www.chinaorganharvest.org/timeline/;

https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/09/05/what-is-falun-gong

8 https://endtransplantabuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Bloody_Harvest-The_Slaughter-2016-Update

-V3-and-Addendum-20170430.pdf (page 6)

⁹ https://youtu.be/u2bUusvh3c0 (2:40 time stamp); https://www.chinaorganharvest.org/overview/#inline-ref-2 (within booklet)

10 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/06/china-un-human-rights-experts-alarmed-organ-harvestin g-allegations

¹¹ Look at the previous note for the UN press release where the experts are listed. Many of the experts are from non-Western countries— even the Chair-Rapporteur is from Malaysia.

12 https://worldwithoutgenocide.org/genocides-and-conflicts/genocide-of-the-uyghurs-in-western-china/force d-organ-harvesting#:~:text=In%20June%202021%2C%20UN%20human,Tibetans%2C%20Muslims%2C

%20and%20Christians.

https://endtransplantabuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Bloody_Harvest-The_Slaughter-2016-Update

-V3-and-Addendum-20170430.pdf (Page 408)

https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/analysis-killing-prisoners-for-transplants-forced-organ-harvestin g-in-china/

13 https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/tens-of-thousands-of-xinjiang-detainees-killed-by-organ-harvesting

-expert-says/ quoting Matthew Robertson’s article in the American Journal of Transplantation.

¹⁴ Organ trafficking violates Articles 5 and 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

¹⁵ https://chinatribunal.com/

¹⁶ https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/791/Analyses/h0791c.JDC.PDF

17 https://www.cecc.gov/sites/chinacommission.house.gov/files/documents/Opening%20Statement–Forced

%20Organ%20Harvesting%20Opening%20Statement.pdf