<span class ="kicker">The Epoch Times article on Smith's CECC hearing on forced organ harvesting</span>'"Perverted" Forced Organ Harvesting Gets Spotlight in Congress'

This press release from Representative Christopher H. Smith (R-NJ) was published on 2026-05-14 and titled "<span class ="kicker">The Epoch Times article on Smith's CECC hearing on forced organ harvesting</span>'"Per".

<span class ="kicker">The Epoch Times article on Smith's CECC hearing on forced organ harvesting</span>'"Perverted" Forced Organ Harvesting Gets Spotlight in Congress'

By Eva Fu Published May 14, 2026 WASHINGTON—As U.S. and China delegations convene in Beijing, a bipartisan panel of lawmakers is casting a spotlight on the regime’s forced organ harvesting, saying it’s past time to put the abuse to an end. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, opened a May 14 congressional hearing by recalling a hot mic incident on Tiananmen Square last September. A conversation was captured between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin as they walked together, musing about living to 150 through continued organ transplants. “That was not macabre small talk among aging dictators,“ Smith said at the hearing. ”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.” (2nd L-R) Congressional-Executive Commission on China chairman Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), co-chair Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Rep. Dale Strong (R-Ala.), listen to testimonies during a hearing titled, “A Market Built on Victims: Stopping Illegal Organ Trafficking in China and Beyond,” on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 14, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times Smith called what the leaders discussed “murder masquerading as medicine.” Thirty years after Smith’s first hearing on the topic of organ harvesting, the evidence has become “more disturbing, more detailed, and more compelling,” he said, as religious and ethnic groups—including Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Christians—face greater risk. Though Beijing now insists that its transplant system conforms to international standards, he said, “extraordinary” eyewitness accounts reviewed by his commission say otherwise. ‘Enough Is Enough’ One testimony came from Seyed Alireza Motevalian, an Iranian-born refugee and businessman in China. As recently as 2021, he saw unconscious, restrained Chinese prisoners brought in on stretchers and sent to surgery rooms in prison hospitals, never to return—a repeated pattern he linked to organ harvesting. Kalbinur Sidik, who worked as a Chinese-language teacher in Uyghur detention camps in Xinjiang, testified that she saw blood drawn from detainees every week. The detainees were then given injections of unidentified substances and small white pills that the Chinese nurses described as nutrition supplements, she said. Healthy men disappeared. Sidik said the special police officer and driver who escorted her said the authorities had converted a local detoxification center into an organ extraction hospital. Kalbinur Sidik, survivor of China’s genocide and eyewitness to forced labor camps and author of forthcoming book “Heart Full of Light: Love, Loss, and Survival Inside China's Gulags,” testifies online from the Netherlands, before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 14, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times “They said, ‘Right now in our country, the halal organ trade is booming,’” she said via a translator. “Halal organs” are reportedly taken from Muslim ethnic minorities and marketed to wealthy Muslims. “These are Nazi-like atrocities that are being committed in 2026—it’s getting worse,” Smith told The Epoch Times. “The American public, we all need to mobilize and say, ‘Enough is enough. This has got to stop.’” Concerns of forced organ harvesting targeting prisoners of conscience first emerged in 2006. Whistleblowers told The Epoch Times they'd witnessed the killing of Falun Gong practitioners for their organs in underground facilities. Under international pressure, the Chinese regime announced it would transition to having a voluntary organ donation system. But a 2019 study published in the scientific journal BMC Medical Ethics, having analyzed the country’s organ donation data, found it “too neat to be true.” “These figures don’t appear to be real data from real donations. They’re numbers generated using an equation,” said study author Matthew Robertson, a doctoral student at the Australian National University. The researchers also compared the figures with data from 50 other countries in a database managed by the World Health Organization and found that none of the other countries’ datasets fit any formula. In 2019, the independent China Tribunal in London released findings after a year of investigation into the issue. It concluded that the Chinese regime had forcibly harvested organs from prisoners of conscience “on a significant scale,” and that Falun Gong practitioners were the primary victims. Ethan Gutmann, investigative journalist and author of the “Xinjiang Procedure,” was one of three hearing witnesses who have written books on the issue. Ethan Gutmann, a China studies research fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and author of “The Xinjiang Procedure,” testifies before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 14, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/