U.S. legislation that’s focused on combating the Chinese regime’s state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting was approved at the committee level and is headed to the House floor.
The bill would bar entry by perpetrators to the United States and block financial transactions on U.S. soil. It also would require the U.S. secretary of state to report to Congress on organ transplant abuses committed in foreign countries.
“People are finally waking up to the brutality of the CCP,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), the bill’s lead sponsor, said in a statement on Feb. 28, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. “We in the United States—in the medical field in particular—must examine our moral complicity in this most heinous of crimes.”
Forced organ harvesting is a lucrative trade in China, systematically carried out under state order. Doctors remove key organs from victims who are primarily prisoners of conscience, killing them in the process.
At the committee hearing, Smith cited investigations by the London-based China Tribunal, which in 2019 found that the state-sponsored abuse “has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale,” with detained Falun Gong practitioners being the main source of organs.
The spiritual discipline, which espouses the values of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance and involves a set of slow-moving exercises, had an estimated following of as many as 100 million people when the Beijing regime began an expansive suppression campaign in 1999 to eradicate the faith.
Smith recalled presiding over a congressional hearing about 25 years ago at which a Chinese security official testified that he and other security agents were shooting prisoners, with doctors standing ready to harvest their organs.
“That was the beginning stages,” he told NTD, a sister media outlet of The Epoch Times. “Then it went into an all-out assault, because the Chinese Communist Party realized they could make billions of dollars doing this, and they also then would have a repair kit for themselves.”
“If Xi Jinping gets sick tomorrow and needs a new lung, he will get that lung from a 28-year-old Falun Gong practitioner or perhaps an Uyghur man or woman,” Smith said, referring to the Chinese leader. Such an act, he said, is reminiscent of the medical experiments by Nazi physician Josef Mengele at Auschwitz, which are “remembered as war crimes.”
The trafficking of organs as a global criminal enterprise generates anywhere from $840 million to $1.7 billion annually, Global Financial Integrity (GFI) estimates; however, such a number could still represent the tip of the iceberg, experts say.
Smith says the bill is a first step to “stop this barbaric practice—starting first and foremost with the People’s Republic of China, but secondly its global enablers.”
‘Can’t Think of Anything More Horrific’
In China’s opaque organ transplant industry, there’s no telling how many people are killed each year. An investigative report in 2016, which analyzed data such as bed counts, revenue, and transplant capacity across 169 Chinese hospitals, said that those facilities together could have conducted 60,000 to 100,000 transplants annually.“Anyone who does get a transplantation should be very aware of its source to ensure the dead person voluntarily offered their organ—be it a heart, liver or whatever it might be—[and] that they were indeed dead at the time of the organ transplant,” Smith told NTD.
“But in China, everything is reversed. They go and pick and ‘cull’—as they call it—these very healthy people, and the Falun Gong practitioners are extraordinarily healthy because of their religious practices, because of their lifestyle, so they become victimized by the Chinese Communist Party.”
“They target the very people that they oppress with impunity—Falun Gong practitioners or the Uyghurs or Tibetan Buddhists, but mostly Falun Gong practitioners,” Smith added, noting that the adherents are “a threat to no one.”
“They [the Chinese authorities] hate them so much, but they want their organs. I mean, this is outrageous.”
Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), a co-sponsor on the bill, expressed appreciation to Smith for bringing this “long overdue bill” to the attention of the American public, “who may not understand what type of nation we are dealing with and how complete the disregard for human life and human rights the [CCP] has.”
“I can’t think of anything more horrific or more barbaric than this practice that the Chinese Communist Party engages in,” he said at the hearing.
“To hold people down against their will, and sometimes anesthetize them, sometimes not, and take out their very vital organs and then sell them for hundreds of thousands of dollars—it is absolutely disgusting.”
The bipartisan bill also is co-sponsored by Reps. Bill Keating (D-Mass.), Kathy Manning (D-N.C.), and French Hill (R-Ark.).
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who led the Senate companion bill in the last Congress, told The Epoch Times he plans to reintroduce the legislation next week.
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