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ORGAN HARVESTING OF RELIGIOUS AND

POLITICAL DISSIDENTS BY THE CHINESE

COMMUNIST PARTY

JOINT HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND 

INVESTIGATIONS

AND THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON AFRICA, GLOBAL HEALTH, 

AND HUMAN RIGHTS

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED TWELFTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

Serial No. 112–180

Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Affairs

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/ or

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/

(II)

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS 

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida, Chairman 

CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey 

DAN BURTON, Indiana 

ELTON GALLEGLY, California 

DANA ROHRABACHER, California 

DONALD A. MANZULLO, Illinois 

EDWARD R. ROYCE, California 

STEVE CHABOT, Ohio 

RON PAUL, Texas 

MIKE PENCE, Indiana 

JOE WILSON, South Carolina 

CONNIE MACK, Florida 

JEFF FORTENBERRY, Nebraska 

MICHAEL T. MCCAUL, Texas 

TED POE, Texas 

GUS M. BILIRAKIS, Florida 

JEAN SCHMIDT, Ohio 

BILL JOHNSON, Ohio 

DAVID RIVERA, Florida 

MIKE KELLY, Pennsylvania 

TIM GRIFFIN, Arkansas 

TOM MARINO, Pennsylvania 

JEFF DUNCAN, South Carolina 

ANN MARIE BUERKLE, New York 

RENEE ELLMERS, North Carolina 

ROBERT TURNER, New York 

HOWARD L. BERMAN, California 

GARY L. ACKERMAN, New York 

ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American 

Samoa 

BRAD SHERMAN, California 

ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York 

GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York 

RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri 

ALBIO SIRES, New Jersey 

GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia 

THEODORE E. DEUTCH, Florida 

BEN CHANDLER, Kentucky 

BRIAN HIGGINS, New York 

ALLYSON SCHWARTZ, Pennsylvania 

CHRISTOPHER S. MURPHY, Connecticut 

FREDERICA WILSON, Florida 

KAREN BASS, California 

WILLIAM KEATING, Massachusetts 

DAVID CICILLINE, Rhode Island 

YLEEM D.S. POBLETE, Staff Director 

RICHARD J. KESSLER, Democratic Staff Director 

(III)

SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS

DANA ROHRABACHER, California, Chairman 

MIKE KELLY, Pennsylvania 

RON PAUL, Texas 

TED POE, Texas 

DAVID RIVERA, Florida 

RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri 

DAVID CICILLINE, Rhode Island 

KAREN BASS, California

SUBCOMMITTEE ON AFRICA, GLOBAL HEALTH, AND HUMAN RIGHTS

CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey, Chairman 

JEFF FORTENBERRY, Nebraska 

TOM MARINO, Pennsylvania 

ANN MARIE BUERKLE, New York 

ROBERT TURNER, New York 

KAREN BASS, California 

RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri 

THEODORE E. DEUTCH, Florida 

(V)

C O N T E N T S 

Page

WITNESSES 

Mr. Ethan Gutmann, adjunct fellow, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and Author, ‘‘Losing the New China’’ ..................................................... 8

Gabriel Danovitch, M.D., professor of medicine, UCLA Medical School ............. 14

Damon Noto, M.D., spokesman, Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting ..... 27

Charles Lee, M.D., spokesman and public relations director, Global Service 

Center for Quitting the Chinese Communist Party .......................................... 36

LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC., SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING 

The Honorable Christopher H. Smith, a Representative in Congress from 

the State of New Jersey, and chairman, Subcommittee on Africa, Global 

Health, and Human Rights: Prepared statement .............................................. 5

Mr. Ethan Gutmann: Prepared statement ............................................................ 10

Gabriel Danovitch, M.D.: Prepared statement ...................................................... 17

Damon Noto, M.D.: Prepared statement ............................................................... 30

Charles Lee, M.D.: Prepared statement ................................................................ 38

APPENDIX 

Hearing notice .......................................................................................................... 52

Hearing minutes ...................................................................................................... 53

The Honorable Christopher H. Smith: Material submitted for the record ......... 54

(1)

ORGAN HARVESTING OF RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL DISSIDENTS BY THE CHINESE 

COMMUNIST PARTY 

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS, 

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS, 

Washington, DC. 

The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:30 p.m., in room 

2172 Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Dana Rohrabacher 

(chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations) 

and Hon. Chris Smith (chairman of the Subcommittee on Africa, 

Global Health, and Human Rights) presiding. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. We call this hearing to order, and thank my 

colleague, Chairman Chris Smith, for agreeing to hold this hearing 

jointly between the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee 

and his Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights Subcommittee. 

I also want to thank ranking members, Congressman Russ 

Carnahan, Congresswoman Karen Bass. 

The Chinese Communisty Party is a corrupt elite which aggressively claims territory in the South China Sea, pilfers U.S. intellectual property, steals American jobs, and conducts massive espionage against our Government and private enterprises. The CCP 

spends a vast amount of its time, energy and resources maintaining its grip on power by suppressing the rights of the Chinese people, ethnic groups such as the Tibetans, the Uighurs, and yes, religious practitioners and anyone who speaks up against the party’s 

grip on power. 

The CCP and its state security machine uses a wide range of repression techniques including, not only limited to, censorship, beatings, home imprisonment, forced labor camps, those labor camps 

called the Laogai of course. And the most ghoulish manifestation 

of this gangsterism is the forced harvesting of organs of the political prisoners and religious followers that it arrests, particularly of 

the Chinese religious movement known as the Falun Gong. 

Last year, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom found in their annual report that the Communist Party of 

China maintains an extra judicial security apparatus called the 6–

10 office to persecute Falun Gong believers. It is estimated that 

over half of the 300,000 believed in the Laogai prisons are inmates 

who happen to be part of the Falun Gong. 

Since the CCP began its crackdown in 1999, and began to call 

the peaceful practice of the Falun Gong an evil cult, thousands 

2

have been killed and their organs ripped out of their body while 

they were still warm and transplanted into the bodies of rich Chinese and foreign accomplices. Members of the CCP do this in order 

to make themselves and their children rich, and because the Falun 

Gong was and remains a peaceful and indigenous movement which 

attracts tens of millions of followers in China. The CCP cannot 

allow any independent group in China to exist which can motivate 

so many people. Any group the CCP does not control is a threat 

and must be penetrated, subverted and destroyed. The Falun Gong 

has remained peaceful even in the face of unspeakable brutality. 

This unbridled obsession with destroying the Falun Gong unmasks 

the true nature of the CCP. 

I look forward to hearing the comments of our panelists. And 

with us today we have Dr. Damon Noto, who is a spokesman for 

the organization, Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting. He 

graduated from Mt. Sinai Medical School and is currently an attending physician at Hackensack University Medical Center in 

New Jersey. 

Then we have Dr. Gabriel Danovitch—I hope I am pronouncing 

that correctly—is a professor of medicine at the David Geffen 

School of Medicine at UCLA and medical director of the Kidney 

and Pancreas Transplant Program at the Ronald Reagan Medical 

Center, and is an expert on organ transplant tissues. 

Then we have with us Dr. Charles Lee, who serves as the spokesman for the Global Center for Quitting the Chinese Communist 

Party. Sounds good to me. He was born in Communist China and 

lived through the Cultural Revolution. After 1989 he came to the 

United States. He is a Falun Gong practitioner, and when he traveled back to China in 2003 he was arrested at the airport and 

spent the next 3 years in a Chinese prison. This occurred despite 

the fact that he is a U.S. citizen. While in prison he was tortured 

and forced to make products, some of which were later exported for 

profit to this country. 

Dr. Ethan Gutmann is an accomplished author and currently the 

adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He 

has written extensively on China including for the Weekly Standard, National Review and for World Affairs Journal. He is also the 

author of a book, ‘‘Losing the New China: A Story of American 

Commerce, Desire and Betrayal.’’ He earned his bachelor and master degrees in international affairs from Columbia University. 

I believe today’s hearing is exceedingly important as we stand in 

moral witness to the ongoing crimes of the CCP and the possible 

accomplices that they have to these crimes right here in the United 

States. 

We now have Ms. Bass, did you have an opening statement? 

Ms. BASS. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Chairmen Rohrabacher and 

Smith, I want to thank you for holding this hearing, and I look forward to learning more about this horrific practice. I noted there is 

some differences in terms of the extent of this practice on the practitioners of Falun Gong, but to me, the idea that you would have 

the forced harvesting of human organs, regardless, is just really 

deeply troubling. I know that the March 2012 Wall Street Journal 

article notes that China recently indicated that it plans to abolish 

the practice of death row inmate organ harvesting over the next 5 

3

years. I don’t why we would do that over the next 5 years and not 

immediately. 

And I would also like to know, and perhaps it will come out in 

the testimony, since this is a new issue to me, when they are harvesting these organs who are they for and who they go to, are they 

exported around the world? Is this a profit making business? All 

of that kind of information I look forward to learning about from 

our witnesses, and thank you for taking the time out to come. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. We also have with us Chris Smith, and let 

me just note that Chris and I have fought so many battles together 

over the years and I have always been very proud that these type 

of stands which—and let me just note, when you are a Member of 

Congress, no matter what, there is going to be somebody else that 

is trying to get your job in the next election. And a lot of times 

Members of Congress only want to tackle issues that are going to 

increase the number of contributions to their campaign war chest. 

Standing up for human rights does not increase the amount of 

money in your campaign war chest. Chris has been here all of 

these years and has been fighting the good fight, and it is an honor 

to have you here and co-chairing this hearing. 

Mr. SMITH. Well, Mr. Chairman, thank you for inviting our subcommittee, Ms. Bass and I and members of the subcommittee to 

join you for this important hearing on the grave, but little publicized human rights abuse occurring in China today, and that has 

been for many years, organ harvesting. 

I wanted to say very clearly for the record how grateful I am for 

your leadership on human rights in China. Again, very often there 

are far too few people willing to speak, not about the human rights 

abuses in China but to do so with such clarity. And I think as most 

of you know, as a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, Dana 

Rohrabacher knows how to phrase and how to cut right to the 

chase and has done so with excellence since I have been here. So 

I want to thank you for that extraordinary leadership. 

What adjectives can be used to describe the Chinese doctors and 

hospitals engaging in large scale harvesting of human organs for 

profit? The ordinary words like concerned, disturbing, appalling or 

shocking are inadequate, yet our ordinary humanity shies away 

from words like barbaric. And in the absence of firm statistics, 

open waiting lists, tranparency, and the giving of consent, and even 

the number of Chinese who have been sentenced to death, or condemned prisoners who are said to have been the large number of 

organ donors, we can’t know for sure. But we need to change that 

and the inquiry has to begin in earnest. All that has been done 

years to date has set a very, very terrible record for the Chinese 

Government’s organ harvesting, but now we need to go and make 

this a premier human rights issue. 

I want to thank Dr. Charles Lee. He has been tenacious in trying 

to get the Congress to focus on this important issue, and so I thank 

him and I look forward to his testimony. 

I would add paranthetically that as far back as 1998, June 4th 

and June 16th, I chaired a hearing on the sale of body parts in the 

People’s Republic of China, and we actually brought in a guard who 

brought in pictures, Harry Wu was the one who arranged it, and 

he authenticated, and we had everything he said and everything he 

4

brought to us really raked over the coals to make sure it was accurate and there was absolutely no guile or mischief in his presentation. He sat right where you gentlemen sat and talked about how 

they would kill prisoners, mostly political and religious prisoners, 

but not execute them, not kill them immediately, but take out the 

desired organs and then finish the job of murdering that individual. And whatever was needed, kidneys—what is it that you 

need? They were able to put in the order, and then the wardens 

at various prisons would fill that order. 

The international transplant community, aware that their life-extending skills might be abused or might set in motion sales of organs by the poor, or favor the rich, have over the years developed 

demanding protocols to assure that their donations conform to 

strict ethical and procedural guidelines. The Chinese Government 

says it is moving toward adherence of these standards. I would say, 

let us not hold our breath. Let us trust but verify, and in the absence of accurate information can these assurances even be a little 

bit believed? 

All this so far describes the ordinary transplant of such organs 

as kidneys, livers, lungs, hearts, and corneas from those recently 

deceased to those who can use them. I am confident we will hear 

more from our witnesses about transplants in China and where 

that nation falls short of international standards and protocols. 

Mr. Chairman, reports from India, Malaysia, and Israel, of their 

citizens who traveled to China for transplants that were botched, 

and the testimony of a few doctors and nurses now outside of 

China, give disturbing evidence that China has become a lawless 

zone where medical skills are for sale for huge sums, where organs 

are said to come from prisoners, and again we began documenting 

this back in 1998, and I am sure it preceded even then when high 

officials or transplant tourists with money need not wait for organs 

to become available, because it is available because they execute a 

prisoner, where profit and power run over the law or medical ethics, where pious pronouncements are made by the government that 

they are not doing this. 

So far I have spoken of ordinary transplants, but there is a graver prospect, that the Chinese military doctors may be engaged in 

organ harvesting from living prisoners in Chinese camps and prisons. The charge is that many victims are ethnic minorities, and as 

Mr. Rohrabacher pointed out, members of the Falun Gong, members of the spiritual movement unjustly held, abused, subjected to 

psychological and physical torture for nothing more than fidelity to 

truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. This possibility pushes, 

and this probability pushes us into the horrific beyond, beyond the 

challenges of our language making ‘‘barbaric’’ too calm of a word. 

If this is true, even the powerful fraught legal term ‘‘crimes against 

humanity’’ seems inadequate, leached of horror. For those who 

doubt that horror could be sanctioned by a modern state, I commend the recent article by one of today’s witnesses, Ethan 

Gutmann, and I ask that it be appended to record of this hearing. 

In the article of the Weekly Standard from last December, he describes Xinjiang’s procedure, removal of organs by teams of surgeons in medical vans immediately after executions. One doctor 

told him that some of the transplants came from still living vicVerDate 0ct 09 2002 14:29 Nov 02, 2012 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00010 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 Y:\WORK\OI\091212\75859 HFA PsN: SHIRL
5

tims, and that comports with what we heard from witnesses back 

in 1998 and since. He said the stories point to systematic elimination of China’s religious and political prisoners, and of course 

they are making huge profits by doing that. 

Without objection, I would, since we were late in starting, ask 

that my full statement be made a part of the record. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Smith follows:]


75859e-1.eps
6


75859e-2.eps

skills are for sale for huge sums. Where organs are said to come from prisoners hoping to atone 

for their crimes. Where high officials or transplant tourists with money need not wait for organs 

to become available. Where profit and power run over the law, or medical ethics, or pious 

pronouncements by the government 

So far I have spoken of ordinary transplants. But there's a graver prospect. It is that 

Chinese military doctors may be engaged in organ hatvesting from living prisoners in Chinese 

prisons and labor camps. The charge is that many victims are ethnic minorities, or members of 

Falun Gong -- members of the spiritual movement unjustly held, abused, subjected to 

psychological and physical torture for nothing more than fidelity to "truthfulness, compassion, 

and forbearance." 

This possibility pushes us into a horrific beyond, a beyond that challenges our language, 

making "barbaric" too calm a word. If this is true, even the powerful, fraught legal tenn "crimes 

against humanity" seems inadequate, leached of horror 

For those who doubt that such horror could be sanctioned by a modern state, I commend 

the recent article by one oftoday's witnesses, Ethan Gutmann, and T ask that it be appended to 

the record of this hearing. Tn an article in an issue of The Weekly Standard last December, he 

described lithe Xinjiang procedure, II removal of organs by teams of surgeons in medical vans 

immediately after executions. One doctor told him that some of the transplants came from stillliving victims. He said the stories point to "systematic elimination of China's religious and 

political prisoners. II 

These horrific reports of more-than-barbaric transplants beg for evidence, yet proofis in 

short supply. What we hear is disturbing. That those transplants are reportedly conducted by 

military doctors, part of a health system that is a "black box." That the victims come from 

China's prisons or from reeducation through labor camps, far from justice and investigation 

That many victims may be Falun Gong practitioners who, when taken into custody, refused to 

reveal their names for fear of reprisal against relatives and co-religionists. And of course the 

victims are unable to escape and testify. Expeditious cremation destroys physical evidence. 

We must acknowledge that much of the evidence is circumstantial. The few times that 

Chinese doctors or health officials have discussed China's transplant system at international 

meetings, the figures don't add up. The confessed failure of the authorities to set up a voluntary 

organ donor system, combined with estimates of the number of transplants, point in the direction 

of abuse. Some Falun Gong practitioners released from labor camps report that the camp doctors 

gave them frequent physical examinations, with special attention to their blood type and the 

health of their kidneys, livers, lungs, hearts, and eyes. Some specialists have concluded that the 

labor camp population is considered a pool of individuals whose organs are available on short 

notice whenever a transplant needs to be scheduled. 

We all hope that these fragmentary reports and the circumstantial evidence do not add up 

to barbarism. Here, tragically, the evidence of other Chinese policies does not give confidence 

This is where local officials steal the property of ordinary citizens under the bruise of eminent 

domain to build hotels, factories, and malls. This is a nation where a mother protesting 
7


75859e-3.eps

inadequate sentences meted out to those who sold her daughter into sexual slavery was herself 

sentenced to reeducation through labor. This is a nation where women are forced to abort their 

children as routine policy, even in the third trimester. This is where the Communist Party stands 

above the law. Even so, we hope, we pray, that the stories have been misconstrued 

This is why the evidence of the experts before us today is so important. Humanity cries 

for us to piece together the truth. I look fOf\vard to hearing your testimony and your 

recommendations for U.S. policy 
8

Mr. SMITH. But again, Mr. Chairman, I thank you for pulling 

this hearing together because this barbaric human rights abuse 

must be stopped, but to stop it we first have to further expose it, 

which is why we have this panel. Thank you. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Ms. Bass, thank you for being here, and 

Chris, thank you for being here. 

This hearing goes to the heart of what America is really all 

about, and if we don’t care about things like this what kind of 

country and what kind of people have we become? So thank you to 

all the witnesses for coming here and helping to expose this horrendous part of what is going on in the world today. 

What we are going to ask is each of the witnesses will have 5 

minutes to summarize their position. If you have a longer statement you can submit it for the record, and then we will follow that 

with the questions from the committee to you after you all have 

finished your opening statements. 

So Mr. Gutmann, you may proceed. 

STATEMENT OF MR. ETHAN GUTMANN, ADJUNCT FELLOW, 

FOUNDATION FOR THE DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES, AND 

AUTHOR, ‘‘LOSING THE NEW CHINA’’

Mr. GUTMANN. Beginning in 2006, I began conducting comprehensive interviews with medical professionals, Chinese law enforcement personnel, and over 50 refugees from the Laogai System, 

in order to piece together the story of how mass harvesting from 

prisoners of conscience evolved in China. Based on my research, 

the practice began in Xinjiang in the 1990s. By 2001, the practice 

expanded nationwide, with Falun Gong providing a much larger, 

and frequently anonymous, pool of potential donors. 

My time today is very short. I too was skeptical when I began 

my investigation. Some of you may be today. So instead of offering 

my conclusions, I invite you to draw your own conclusions from my 

evidence, 12 witnesses, each of whom fills in a critical piece of the 

puzzle. 

Harry Wu’s research shows that harvesting criminals began in 

the 1980s. By the early 1990s it had become systemic, a practice 

involving organ donation consent forms and mobile organ harvesting vans at execution sites. These donors were criminals. 

Whether or not the criminals signed the forms under duress, they 

had been convicted of capital crimes under Chinese law. 

My first witness, Nijat Abdureyimu, special officer, 1st 

Regiment, Urumqi Public Security Bureau, doesn’t dispute that 

but he does note that by 1994, the doctors doing the harvesting had 

become increasingly uninhibited. A fellow officer, puzzled over the 

screams, ‘‘like from hell’’ that he heard coming from a harvesting 

van. Two years later the prison’s medical director confessed to 

Nijiati that organ harvesting from living human beings—they 

would expire during the surgery of course—was now routine. 

My second witness is Dr. Enver Tohti, general surgeon. Based in 

an Urumqi hospital, under his supervisor’s firm direction, Enver 

performed a live surgical extraction of a man’s liver and kidneys 

on an execution ground. This execution ground was commonly used 

for political prisoners. The man had long hair, rather than a convict’s shaved head. But there are no fully credible allegations of 

9

doctors harvesting political or religious prisoners until 1997, the 

year of the ‘‘Ghulja Incident.’’

My third witness, a nurse who worked in a Ghulja hospital in 

1997, describes the hospital being turned upside down. Arrest of 

any doctor who dared to treat a Uighur protestor. The segregation 

of medical staff. Chinese doctors administering slow-acting lethal 

injections to any Uyghur baby who had the misfortune of being 

born a second child. Finally, she describes, 6 months after the 

Ghulja incident, the case of a 21-year-old Uighur protestor harvested for his kidneys by a Chinese military hospital. 

This timing jibes with my fourth witness, a young doctor ordered 

to blood-test prisoners in the political wing of an Urumqi prison on 

behalf of six highly placed Party officials in search of healthy organs. 

The next eight witnesses, and I am going to skip their names for 

the brevity, come from different backgrounds, were held as prisoners in strikingly different facilities, yet they all had two things 

in common. They were all practitioners of Falun Gong, and they 

were all given strikingly similar medical exams. The doctor would 

draw a large volume of blood, then a chest x-ray, then a urine sample, probing of the abdomen, and in most cases, a close examination 

of the corneas. Did the doctor ask any of them to trace the movement of his light? Did he wiggle his fingers to check their peripheral vision? No. Only the corneas. Nothing involving brain function. 

The doctors were checking the retail organs and nothing else. 

Now I defy the Chinese authorities to furnish a plausible explanation for such tests, or why these tests were given to thousands 

of Falun Gong men and women, particularly women, often matched 

with an individual guard to prevent any disruption. Why were 

there special buses arranged to take Falun Gong practitioners 

away after extensive blood testing? Or why, as time progressed, 

‘‘Eastern Lightning’’ Christians, or Tibetan activists were given the 

same exams? Now I can’t supply a death count for those groups. 

But I estimate that 65,000 Falun Gong were murdered for their organs from 2000 to 2008. 

Given my time limitations here, I request that you include my 

recent chapter in State Organs, which explicitly explains the methodology behind that number, along with two articles, ‘‘China’s 

Gruesome Organ Harvest,’’ and ‘‘The Xinjiang Procedure,’’ in the 

record of today’s hearings. Anyone who reads this material will 

quickly grasp the obvious, the demand for the harvesting of political prisoners came not from triads, but aging Party cadres. China 

is a surveillance state. It is aimed at observing Party members and 

the military. Wang Lijun himself was given an award for medical 

innovation in organ harvesting, so ‘‘Party Central’’ knew about this. 

This was state-run, and any reader will quickly grasp why the 

Quit-the-Party movement cannot be a Reform-the-Party movement. 

Ultimately, my writing and my testimony cannot do justice to 

these 12 witnesses, but I can report one thing with certainty. Every 

one of these witnesses that I mentioned has consented to testify 

openly before this committee. Now the fact is, these witnesses have 

begun to realize there is strength in the collective narrative and in 

transparency, particularly in the West, and particular if the U.S. 

Government facilitates this transparency. Sadly, little support has 

10

come forward in the 6 years since these first allegations have surfaced. Much more evidence has accumulated since that time but 

our Government has done little. 

So I believe a tragedy is being played out, even in this hearing 

today, for in the final analysis these witnesses are the men and 

women who should be sitting in this chair today, not me. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Gutmann follows:]


75859d-1.eps
11


75859d-2.eps

Ethan Gutmann September 12,2012 

Thank you for inviting me to participate in this profoundly important hearing. 

Beginning in 2006, I began conducting comprehensive interviews with medical 

professionals, Chinese law enforcement personnel, and over 50 refugees from the Laogai 

System, in order to together the story of how mass harvesting from of 

conscience China. Based on my research, the practice began 

the late 19905. 2001 the practice expanded nationwide, with Falun Gong a 

much larger, anonymous, pool of potential 'donors.' 

Yet my time today is short. I too was skeptical when I began my investigation, as some of 

you may be today. So instead of offering my conclusions, I invite you to draw your own 

conclusions from my evidence-twelve witnesses, each of whom fills in a critical piece 

of the organ harvesting puzzle--before I speculate, briefly, on the implications and the 

full human cost. I'll also touch upon the potential function of the quit-the-CCP movement 

I think most people in this room are familiar with Harry Wu's research. Ha.rv(:stinl2 

criminals began in the 1 980s. By the early 19905 it had become systemic, a 

involving "organ donation" consent forms and mobile harvesting vans at execution sites. 

The donors were criminals. And whether or not the criminals signed the forms under 

duress, they had been convicted of capita! crimes under Chinese law. 

My first witness, Nijat Abdureyimu, special officer, 1st Regiment, Urumqi Publie 

Security Bureau, doesn't dispute any of that. But he does note that by 1994, the doctors 

doing the harvesting became increasingly uninhibited. That's when his fellow officer 

puzzled over the screams-"like from hell"-that he heard coming from a harvesting 

van. Two years later the prison's medical director confessed to Nijiati that 

harvesting from living human beings-they would expire during the surgery 

was now routine. 

My second witness, Dr. Enver Tohti, general surgeon, based in an Urumqi hospital, 

recalls an execution ground outside the city in 1995: a prisoner shot in the chest, not to 

kill, but to send the body into deep shock, minimizing the squirming and contractions that 

could make harvesting problematic. Under his supervisor's firm direction, Enver 

performed a live surgical extraction of the man's liver and kidneys. 

The execution ground was commonly used for political prisoners, and the man had long 

hair, rather than a convict's shaved head. But Enver wi!! not speculate, nor will I: there 

are no fully credible allegations of doctors harvesting political or religious prisonerswho only rarely can plausibly be sentenced to death under Chinese law-until 1997, 

the "Ghulja Incident." 

My third witness, a nurse who worked in a Ghulja hospital, describes a hospital turned 

upside down: arrest of any doctor who dared to treat a Uyghur protestor, forced 

segregation of Uyghur medical staff, and Chinese doctors administering slow-acting 

lethal injections to any Uyghur baby who had the misfortune of being a second child. 

Finally, she describes, six months after the Ghulja incident, the case of a 21-year-old 

Uyghur protestor, harvested for his kidneys by a Chinese military hospital. 

Foundation for Defense of Democracies www.defenddemocracy.org 
12


75859d-3.eps

Ethan Gutmann September 12, 2012 

That timing jibes with my fourth witness, a young doctor ordered to blood-test prisoners 

in the political wing of an Urumqi prison on behalf of six highly placed Pmty officials in 

search of healthy organs. As these political prisoners were not on death row, they 

panicked and had to be restrained. Against every fiber of conscience in his being, the 

young doctor played his part. "It's just for your health," he said, as he drew blood. Six 

months later there were six new Party cadres, and the cycle repeated. 

The next eight witnesses-Qu 

Ying, Fang Siyi, Yu Xinhui, and from 

held as prisoners in strikingly different facilities throughout the Chinese System. 

Yet all have two in common: they are all practitioners of Falun Gong, and they 

were all given similar medical exams. The doctor, usually military, drew a 

large volume a chest Then a urine sample, probing ofthe abdomen 

and, in most cases, a close examination corneas. Did the doctor ask any of them to 

trace the movement of his light? Did he wiggle his fingers to check the peripheral vision? 

No. Only the corneas. Nothing involving brain function, no hammer on the knee, no 

lymph nodes, no examination of ears or mouth or genitals-the doctors checked the retail 

organs and nothing else. 

I defy the Chinese authorities to furnish a plausible medical explanation for such tests. Or 

why these tests were given to thousands of Falun Gong men and women-particularly 

women, often matched with an individual guard to prevent any disruption. Or why there 

were special buses arranged to take away Falun Gong practitioners after extensive blood 

testing. Or why, as time progressed, "Eastern Lightning" Christians, or Tibetan activists, 

were given the same exams. 

I can't supply a death-count for House Christians, Uyghurs and Tibetans. But I estimate 

that 65,000 Falun Gong were murdered for their organs from 2000 to 2008. And given 

my time limitations here, I request that you include my recent in State Organs 

(which explicitly explains the methodology behind that number) with two articles, 

"China's Gruesome Organ Harvest," and "the Xinjiang Procedure," in the record of 

loday's hearings. Anyone who reads this material will quickly grasp the obvious: The 

demand for the harvesting of political prisoners came not from triads, but aging party 

cadres. China is a surveillance state, aimed at observing party members and the military. 

Wang Lijun himself was given an award for medical innovation in organ harvesting. So 

"Party Central" knew about this. This was state-nm. And any reader will quickly grasp 

why the quit-the-party movement cannot be a refonn-the-Party movement. 

But ultimately, my writing and my testimony cannot do justice to these twelve witnesses, 

I cannot replicate the sensation ofa guard's tears falling on ann as she says that she 

"can't bear to see ... a living person about to be wiped out in of my eyes." But there 

is one more thing that draws all twelve witnesses together: even if I have protected some 

of their identities today, I can report-with certainty-that every one of these witnesses 

has consented to testify openly before this committee. And if they do, a Taiwanese 

Foundation for Defense of Democracies www.defenddernocracy.org 

2 
13


75859d-4.eps

Ethan Gutmann September 12,2012 

surgeon who can indisputably verify that Falun Gong organs were being used for his 

aging patients is likely to step forward as well. 

Testimony by such witnesses takes courage. It carries intense risks for their families. 

Shortly after Nijat first consented to an interview with a Swiss paper, his sister, back in 

Xinjiang, was arrested for three months. And yet, these witnesses have begun to realize 

that there is strength in the collective narrative and in transparency-particularly ifthe 

West, and in particular, the US government, facilitates this transparency. Sadly, no such 

support has come forward in the six years since the first allegations surfaced. Much more 

evidence has accumulated since that time, but our government has done little. A tragedy 

is being played out, even in this hearing today, for in the final analysis, these witnesses 

are the men and women who should be sitting in this chair today, not me. 

Foundation for Defense of Democracies .. WIW .defenddemocracy .org 

3 
14

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you very much for that testimony. 

Dr. Lee, you may proceed. 

Dr. LEE. Can I testify after these two doctors on my left, please? 

Because I think that make more sense. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. That will be just fine. Thank you. 

Dr. LEE. Thank you. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Doctor, would you like to proceed? 

STATEMENT OF GABRIEL DANOVITCH, M.D., PROFESSOR OF 

MEDICINE, UCLA MEDICAL SCHOOL 

Dr. DANOVITCH. Good afternoon, Honorable Chairman Rohrabacher, Mr. Smith, Ms. Bass, Members of Congress, congressional 

staff and guests. I am Gabriel Danovitch. I am a professor of medicine at UCLA. I am also the secretary of the international Transplantation Society (TTS), which is the NGO for the WHO for matters of transplantation. 

TTS and the International Society of Nephrology (ISN) are cosponsors of the Declaration of Istanbul on organ trafficking and 

transplant tourism, a declaration that has been endorsed by over 

100 governments and professional organizations around the world, 

and which works to support an end to the exploitation of vulnerable organ donors around the world and to put a stop to the use 

of organs of executed prisoners in China. 

Let me say categorically that the recovery of organs for transplantation from executed prisoners is regarded internationally as 

an unacceptable abrogation of human rights. The Chinese Ministry 

of Health has also said repeatedly that it is not consistent with 

international standards, yet it continues. 

There may be doubts about the number, but there can be no 

doubts about the Chinese own numbers that you can look up on the 

Chinese Ministry of Health own Web site, CLTR, the China Liver 

Transplant Registry, which as of August 2012, that is last month, 

gives over 21,000 executed prisoners for liver transplant. The numbers may be considerably more than that but they are unlikely to 

be less than the Chinese Government’s own statistics. There was 

some dropoff in these numbers at the time of the Olympic Games 

in China in 2008, under the influence of Congress, but since that 

time those numbers seem to be increasing. 

The ease in which these organs can be obtained and the manner 

that they may be allocated to wealthy foreigners has engendered 

a culture of corruption which also affects living donation where 

vending is rampant. Despite Chinese laws, there are Chinese laws 

to this effect which are often flouted, and statements by the Ministry of Health admit that their own laws are flouted. These Chinese organ recovery practices have wide implications beyond 

China. China has become a hub for wealthy foreigners seeking 

quick access to organs, and in doing so this has undermined the development of organ recovery in other countries. I include Americans who travel to China and other countries to purchase organs 

in numbers that we do not know, and I will come back to that in 

a moment why that is an important job for this group. 

The medical outcome for recipients of these organs is often poor, 

both from executed prisoners and from vended donors. U.S. citizens 

returning from China and from other countries that have been inVerDate 0ct 09 2002 14:29 Nov 02, 2012 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00020 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 Y:\WORK\OI\091212\75859 HFA PsN: SHIRL
15

volved in organ vending often do so with life-threatening medical 

complications requiring prolonged hospital care, high mortality rate 

and significant public health risk. I have observed this personally 

in my own practice at the UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center 

and have published in this matter. 

On the positive side, attempts are being made by the Chinese 

Ministry of Health to develop alternative organ recovery practices 

that are consistent with international standards. The Transplantation Society, and the Declaration of Instanbul Custodian Group 

(DICS) is actively engaged in trying to support the activities. With 

respect to the United States, this country has recently improved its 

public transparency and accountability regarding non-residents 

coming to the United States for transplants. However, there is no 

transparency or reliable information on U.S. citizens that travel to 

China and elsewhere, despite the medical risk and public health 

implication and tremendous cost involved in that. We just do not 

know. There is no information on that. 

Organ vending does not only occur in China. The WHO has identified several hot spots in developing countries around the world. 

Organ vending in this country remains illegal according to NOTA, 

the National Organ Transplantation Act, yet it is not illegal for 

United States citizens to engage in vending abroad. The U.S. 

should take the lead in this regard in stopping its citizens from 

going abroad to break the laws in other countries. Other countries 

have passed such laws. 

The Transplantation Society, and the DICG has made and will 

continue to make efforts to deny academic recognition to those 

whose practice is contrary to its ethical standards. We also are attempting to influence the behavior of pharmaceutical companies. 

It is hard for us to control what goes on in China, but we do have 

some control about what goes on in this country and how we affect 

the behavior of Americans. It is not enough for us to express 

abhorence to this practice, Congress can tell Americans not to go 

to China or elsewhere to purchase organs from the living or the 

dead. We can do that. The U.S. should prohibit citizens from contravening organ transplant laws in other countries and should 

work to achieve international consensus. The National Organ 

Transplantation Act, NOTA, of which we are rightly proud in this 

country, should be given extra territorial jurisdiction. 

All U.S. residents returning to this country after receiving an 

organ transplant performed legally or illegally in another country 

should be required to declare this fact on their return. Such a policy would permit transparency and protect public health. U.S. visa 

DS–160 now is a small step in that direction. When you fill in your 

customs form when you come into the United States you say 

whether or not you have been on a farm or you are bringing in 

nuts, but you don’t have to say whether or not you purchased an 

organ in another country. 

U.S. companies should be prohibited from undertaking organ 

transplant related clinical activities or benefiting from the sale of 

equipment or pharmaceuticals if the source of organs is executed 

prisoners or commercial organ donation. And we have tried to 

make some progress with pharmaceutical companies in that regard. 

16

Human trafficking for organ removal, which occurs not only in 

China but in other countries in the world, should be added to the 

Trafficking Victim Protections Act, TVPA. The U.S. Organ and Procurement and Transplantation Network, which is a branch of the 

DHHS around the corner from here, has accepted the definitions of 

the Declaration of Istanbul, and UNOS has accepted, which is the 

organization which governs transplantation in the United States, 

has accepted the principles of this declaration. Several governments now include the declaration in their transplant regulations. 

The U.S. Government and the State Department should promote 

the principles of the Declaration of Istanbul and the World Health 

Assembly whose Guiding Principles now cover these principles. 

Through its good offices in China and elsewhere, the U.S. Government and State Department should make it clear that the use 

of organs from executed prisoners and the buying and selling of organs from the living and the dead around the world is an unacceptable abrogation of human rights, and the U.S. should be prepared 

to offer the Chinese authorities assistance in the development of alternative, ethically acceptable organ retrieval practices. The U.S. 

professional transplant community is at the ready to help in that 

regard. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Danovitch follows:]

17


75859b-1.eps

The 

Transplantation Society 

Testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight 

and Investigations. Washington DC September 122102 

Gabriel Danovitch MD 

Distinguished Professor of Medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine at 

UCLA 

Medical Director, Kidney and Pancreas Transplant Program, 

Ronald Reagan Medical Center at UCLA 

How should the US Government and medical community respond to the 

continued use of executed prisoners as a source of organs for transplantation 

in China and the abuse of vulnerable living organ donors elsewhere? 

It is my privilege to address this committee. T do so in my personal capacity as a 

Professor of Medicine at UCLA with a long career engaged in clinical organ 

transplantation, as a representative of The Transplantation Society (TTS) for which 

society I am Secretary, and as a representative of the Custodian Group of the Declaration 

of Istanbul (DlCG) whose Patient Affairs Committee I co-chair. TTS (wwwtts.org) is an 

international organization founded in 1966 of more than 5000 members with activities in 

more than 100 countries with organ transplantation services around the world. TTS 
18


75859b-2.eps

together with the International Society of Nephrology (ISN) cosponsored a most 

important international forum on transplantation ethics in 2008 leading to the Declaration 

of Istanbul on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism 

(~ww.decll!!illionofistanbuLm:g) which has been endorsed by over a hundred 

professional organizations and governmental agencies around the world. 

The Declaration of Istanbul called for a prohibition of organ trafficking and organ trade 

and transplant tourism. It rej ected the use of organs from executed prisoners. 

During the late 1980's and 1990' s technical expertise in organ transplantation spread 

across the world from the originating centers of excellence here in the United States, 

from Europe and from a limited number of developed Western economies such as 

Australia, to less developed healthcare environments across Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin 

America and the Indian Sub-continent. The phenomena of transplant commercialism and 

human organ trafficking metamorphosed during this spread of expertise from a small, 

hidden and limited activity such that by the tum of the century it had become a prominent 

and pervasive influence on organ transplantation throughout the world. The prevailing 

view amongst transplant physicians and surgeons in developed countries during the 

1980's and 1990's was that paid organ "donation" was mostly limited to surgery 

undertaken by some individual "bad apples' in India, Pakistan, China and perhaps some 

other smaller emerging economies. It became, in the early years of the 21st Century, 

evident that this limited perspective was incompatible with the enormous growth in organ 

transplantation as a commercial "for-profit activity" especially with the rise of 

transplantation from executed prisoners in China for profit from wealthy foreigners from 

rich counties with poor transplantation healthcare infrastructure such as in the Middle 

East or where transplantation was curtailed for cultural reasons such as in Japan .. 

The governments of Colombia and Spain called attention to the problem in 2003 and 

asked that the World Health Organization (WHO) to enquire into the issue and determine 

if a revision of the 1991 Guiding Principles for organ donation and transplantation was 

required (1). TTS, which is a non-government organization (NGO) in official relation 

with the WHO was part of the consultation from the start, and built a mirror-image 
19


75859b-3.eps

professional strategy to the governmental WHO processes. TTS, in concert with the 

International Society of Nephrology (ISN), also examined the data and asked questions of 

the field to understand the truths in global organ commercialism and human organ 

trafficking. The answers were not reassuring and confirmed - as did the WHO - that 

malpractices were rampant, transplant commercialism and human organ tratlicking were 

indeed taking place in China, Colombia, Egypt, Pakistan, The Philippines, India and in 

Eastern Europe amongst other places. It was clear to TTS and ISN that a professional 

code of practice was required irrespective of any decisions by governments. The 

Declaration ofIstanbul was thus borne from this determination in 2008. In 2010, the 

World Health Assembly (WHA) endorsed a revised version of the WHO Guiding 

Principles on Cell, Tissue and Organ Transplantation (2). These guiding principles 

uphold those of the Declaration 

With respect to China specifically, the practice of obtaining organs for transplantation 

from executed prisoners has been widely regarded as an unacceptable abrogation of 

human rights for decades. It was not until 2007 that expression of abhorrence of the 

practice and a series of practical steps to respond were published in a respected academic 

journal on behalf of professional transplant society- The Transplantation Society which 

included specific reference to these steps in it membership ethics statement (3). Prior to 

the Olympic Games in China in 2008 members of the Congress communicated with 

Chinese government to clarify the role of the Falun Gong as forced donors. Yet despite 

international condemnation, including recognition by highly placed government otlicials 

of the People's Republic of China that the practice is unacceptable and does not conform 

to international standards, it continues (4). In addition, according to Chinese law, it is 

illegal for foreigners to undergo transplantation in China from a deceased donor. This law 

is being flouted and Americans and others exploit the laxity in the fultillment of these 

regulations and the culture of corruption that accompanies them that are recognized 

publically by Chinese authorities. 

Americans who travel to China and elsewhere to purchase organs also do so at great risk. 

It has been well-documented that the medical outcomes of such transplants are poor; 
20


75859b-4.eps

mortality and morbidity rates are unacceptable high, and on their return to the US many 

such transplant recipients require long and complex hospital admissions and medical care 

as a result oflife-threatening surgical and infectious complications. My own personal 

experience in this regard has been published (5) 

The last decade has seen a welcomed sea-change in the nature of interaction between 

China and the rest of the world on many levels, such that it is hard to recall the near 

isolation of that great country a mere generation ago. Medical research from China 

commonly reaches the English-speaking world, medical exchange and training is 

common, and phannaceutical companies do business on a massive level and conduct 

drug-development and clinical research. These normati ve and welcome interactions are 

now accompanied for the first time by submission of reports of organ transplant-related 

clinical experience and clinical research where the "donor" source has been executed 

prisoners. Overtly benign statements of the source of transplanted organs obscure the fact 

that deceased donor organ recovery in China involves death by execution and that those 

euphemistically described as 'donating' their organs were prisoners, whose 'severe brain 

injury' was most likely a result of execution by a gun-shot to the head. It is difficult to 

know for sure how many such "donation by execution" take place in China but it is safe 

to say that the numbers provided by the official China Liver Transplant Registry 

(www.cltr.org.en), which reported over 21,000 cases in the period between January 1993 

and August 20 12, are likely to represent a low estimate: there may be many more. 

What can the US medical community do? 

The American Journal a/Transplantation (AJT) is the official journal of the American 

Society of Transplantation (AST) and The American Society of Transplant Surgeons 

(ASTS). In an editorial commentary (6) in AJT on the publication of data obtained from 

transplants where executed prisoners were the donor source a series of options for action 

by the professional transplant community was proposed: these included 

• International and national professional medical societies and journals should not 

accept abstracts, publications or presentations from Chinese transplant centers 
21


75859b-5.eps

unless the authors clearly indicate that the data presented is in concordance with 

the most recent Chinese government reh'lliations regarding transplant tourism and 

that executed prisoners were not the source of organs . 

• Membership of international professional societies by Chinese transplant 

professionals must be conditioned by acceptance of ethics policies that 

specifically express the unacceptability of executed prisoners as a source of 

organs . 

• Pharmaceutical companies must ensure that no executed prisoners are the source 

of organs used in their studies and that Chinese government regulations regarding 

transplant tourism are adhered to rigorously . 

• Training of Chinese transplant professionals by the international community 

must be conditioned on commitments that trainees will not engage, directly or 

indirectly, in the use of organs from executed prisoners. 

Since May 2011, the American Journal (~f Tramplantation routinely includes in the 

instructions to authors submitting manuscripts for publication the following statement: 

"The American JOllrnal of Transplantation (AJT) will not accept manuscripts 

whose data derives from transplants involving organs obtained from executed 

prisoners. Manuscripts writing about this practice (e.g. an editorial or a report 

recounting the secondary consequences of this practice) may be considered at the 

discretion of the Editorial Board, but require a written appeal to the Board prior to 

submission of the manuscript." 

The prestigious US Biomedical Research publication the Journal (if Clinical 

Investigation published a specific editorial position statement regarding publication of 

articles on human organ transplantation opening with the following statement (7): 

"The practice of transplanting organs from executed prisoners in China appears to 

be widespread. We vigorously condemn this practice and, effective immediately, 

will not consider manuscripts on human organ transplantation for publication 

unless appropriate non-coerced consent of the donor is provided and 

substantiated" . 
22


75859b-6.eps

Other steps have been taken. The website of the Declaration ofTstanbul on organ 

Trafficking and Transplant Tourism (wvvw.declaratiol1ofistanbuLorg) includes a 

document on Policy for Meeting Content which includes the following statement 

"All abstract submission forms should include a statement to the effect that 'The 

authors attest that (a) all data (clinical finding, description of clinical material, etc) were 

derived from research and clinical activities carried out in accordance with the Principles 

of the Declaration of Istanbul and (b) executed pri soners were not the source or organs 

and tissues in any of the activities reported'." 

This policy was included in the instructions for abstract submission at the International 

Society for Organ Donation and Procurement (ISODP) meeting in Buenos Aires in 

November 2011 and at the World Transplant Congress in Berlin in July 2012. 

What can the US Government do? 

The new DS-160 US visa application form: "Security And Background' Part 3" includes 

the following new questions for all visa types: "Have you ever been directly involved in 

the coercive transplantation of human organs or bodily tissue?" Inclusion of this question 

represent otllcial US Government recognition of the abrogation Human Rights that is 

intrinsic to commercial organ donation form both the Ii ving and the dead and that the use 

of organs and tissues from executed prisoners is intrinsically coercive. US law through 

the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA (1984 Pub.L. 98-507) criminalizes 

commercial organ donation and the first prosecution under this Act has recently been 

successfully completed (8). Regulations of the United Network for Organ Donation 

(UNOS, available at www.unos.org)relatingtothetransplantation of non-US residents 

have been updated as of September 2012 and serve to increase the public transparency 

and accountability of this practice. Yet much remains to be done . 

• NOTA criminalizes the buying and selling of organs in the US but says 

nothing of such practice outside of the US. Chinese Ministry of Health regulations 

officially prohibit the selling of both living and deceased donor organs to foreigners, yet 
23


75859b-7.eps

the practice continues. The US should prohibit US citizens from contravening the organ 

transplant laws of other countries and should work to achieve international consensus and 

agreement to that effect. NOTA should be given extraterritorial jurisdiction. 

• All US residents returning to this country after receiving an organ transplant, 

performed, legally or illegally, in another country, should be required to declare this fact 

on their return. Such a policy would permit transparency and protect public health 

• Through its good offices in China and elsewhere the US Government should 

make it clear that the use of organs form executed prisoners and the buying and selling of 

organs from the living and the dead, is an unacceptable abrogation of Human Rights. 

• The US should be prepared to offer the Chinese authorities assistance in the 

developments of alternative, ethically acceptable, organ retrieval practice . 

• The US Organ Procurement and Transplant Network (OPTN a branch of the 

Department of Health and Human Services) has accepted the Definitions of the 

Declaration of Istanbul and UNOS has accepted the Principles of the Declaration. Several 

governments now include reference to the Declaration in their transplant regulations. The 

US government should promote the Principles of the Declaration oflstanbul and the 

World Health Assembly both at home and abroad. 

• Human trafficking for organ removal (HTOR) should be added to the Trafficking 

Victims Protection Act (TVP A) 

• US companies should be prohibited from undertaking organ transplant-related 

clinical research activity or benefitting from the sale of equipment or pharmaceuticals if 

the source of the organs is from executed prisoners or commercial organ donation. 
24


75859b-8.eps

Concluding comments 

Since the promulgation of the Declaration of Istanbul and under its influence positive 

changes have taken place in the organ transplant endeavors of several countries that were 

previously designated as "hotspots" of transplant tourism by the WHO; including India, 

Pakistan, Columbia, and the Philippines. Positive changes have also taken place in 

countries that had historically "exported" its citizens to receive organ transplant overseas; 

these include Israel, Gulf countries, and Japan (9). With respect to China, it should be 

emphasized that it is the intent of the suggestions listed in this document to provide 

succor to those in China and elsewhere who wish to see positive change. In this respect, 

to their credit, some Chinese Ministry of Health officials have indicated their intention to 

end the practice and pilot projects with the use of brain dead donors and are underway 

(10). TTS and DlCG maintain active contact with colleagues in China who are working 

to develop ethically acceptable alternatives to the use of executed prisoner organs and 

commercial living donation. Yet the use of executed prisoner organs continues. 

Expressions of good intentions are not enough. For the professional transplant 

community and government authorities it is not adequate to merely give lip service to our 

repugnance. We cannot control events in China, but: 

• Professional organizations that control the content of their meetings and journals 

must continue to categorically insist that Chinese professionals apply 

internationally accepted ethical standards and work towards the day when Chinese 

organ transplantation will take its place as an honored and respected member of 

the international organ transplant community. 

• Congress and can legislatively influence the behavior of US citizens. 

• The State Department can call for a transparency of practice as it pertains to the 

products of human origin to make certain that the rights of individuals are not 

exploited through organ trade. 
25


75859b-9.eps

The US Congress leads the world in effecting acceptable organ transplant 

practice. The US needs to provide an example in its own practice and 

demonstrate lack of acceptance of anyone within US jurisdiction profiteering 

from the desperation of patients in need of transplantation, or the poor and 

vulnerable of the world for money, or from prisoners whose body parts are 

worth large sums of money when they are executed. The Transplantation 

Society and the Declaration of Istanbul Custodian Group seek the help of 

Congress and the State Department to set the example for the rest of the 

world so that individuals not be victimized for their organs. 
26


75859b-10.eps

References 

lWorld Health Assembly. Fifty-seventh World Health Assembly 

WHA57.18: human organ and tissue transplantation. WHO [online], 

http://www. who.intltransplantation/enl A57 _ RI8-en.pdf (2004). 

2. World Health Assembly. Sixty-Third World Health Assembly WHA63.22 human 

organ and tissue transplantation. WHO [online], 

http://apps.who.intlgb/ebwhalpdf_filesIWHA63/A63_ R22-en.pdf (201 0). 

3. Membership Statement. Ethics Committee of The Transplantation 

Society. Available at: www.!ts.org. Accessed September 2012 

4.Alcorn T. China's organ transplant system in transition. Lancet 2011;377:1905 

5. Gill J, Bhaskara R, Madhira, Gjertson D, Lipshutz G, Cecka M, 

Pham T, Wilkinson A, Bunnapradist S, and Danovitch GM. 

Transplant Tourism in the United States: A Single-Center Experience. 

Clin J Am Soc Nephrology 2008 

6. The Use of Executed Prisoners as a Source of Organs Transplants in China 

Must Stop. Danovitch G, Shapiro M, Lavee J. Am J Transplant 2011,11 :426-428 

7. Caplan A, Rockman H, Turka, L. Editorial position on publishing articles on 

human organ transplantation. J Clin Invest. 2012;122:2 

8. http://v,'\v'0i.justicc. nov/usao/nj/Presslfiles/Roscnhaum, %20Levy'!io20 Scntcncing%2 

Ol\cws%20Release. 

9. Danovitch GM, AI Mousawi M. The Declaration ofTstanbul-early impact and 

future potential. Nat Rev Nephrol. 8;358-61 :2012 

10.Huang J, Millis J, Miliis M, et alA pilot programme of organ donation after 

cardiac death in China. Lancet 2012;379:862-865html 
27

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you very much. 

Dr. Noto? 

STATEMENT OF DAMON NOTO, M.D., SPOKESMAN, DOCTORS 

AGAINST FORCED ORGAN HARVESTING 

Dr. NOTO. Thank you for allowing me to come to speak today on 

such an important topic. I am a spokesperson for an organization 

called, ‘‘Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting,’’ and my purpose here today is to try and convey to you the information we 

have learned over the past decade. 

Since the 1990s evidence has continued to mount which concern 

the medical community that Chinese transplant practices were just 

completely unethical. And this goes back to what he mentioned before, in 1998 when a prisoner guard testified here, and then in 

2001, a Chinese medical doctor named Wang Guoqi fled to the 

United States, testified in front of Congress that China was organs 

from executed prisoners. This is something the Chinese Communist 

Party at the time completely denied. 

Many doctors then started becoming very alarmed at the rapid 

exponential increase in transplantations that were taking place in 

China since 1999, and then the number of transplant centers just 

took off. Chinese tranplant centers went from 150 in 1999 to over 

600 by early 2000. And according to the Chinese Vice Minister of 

Health, the number of transplants performed each year went from 

several hundred in 1999 to well over 10,000 a year by 2008. And 

the China Daily Newspaper reported that the actual number in 

2006 was 20,000. And now it is widely recognized that China performs the second most amount of transplantations only second to 

the United States. 

Even more troublesome was evidence that China seemed to have 

an overabundance of organs and that their medical tourism business was booming. They had hospitals advertising all over the 

internet that they could guarantee patients organs within the time 

frame of weeks, and they could even schedule them in advance. To 

put that in perspective, the United States waiting time for a kidney 

is over 3 years. 

It became apparent that China’s organ harvesting was an extremely profitable business, with the Chinese medical centers often 

saying that their number one source of revenue was their transplant unit, and that on their Web sites they were saying they were 

charging $30,000 for a cornea, $60,000 for a kidney, $150,000 for 

a heart. Imagine what one person was worth, in the hundreds of 

thousands. 

Some people may think, ah, it makes sense. China is such a 

large country, so many people. But you really need to take a few 

factors into consideration. One, China does not have a formal public organ donation program, and two, they have no organized national distribution system. And even, even though they tried many 

times, the Beijing Red Cross themselves stated in 2011 that over 

the past 20 years only 37 people nationwide had registered to become an organ donor. Take that in comparison to the United Kingdom who has 18 million people as registered donors. Many people 

believe this is because the Chinese people believe, have a very 

28

strong spiritual belief that they need to be buried with their organs 

intact. 

So the question becomes, how does China become the number 

two transplant country in the world, and where are these organs 

coming from? Well, in 2005 the Vice Minister of Health of China 

admitted that over 95 percent of the organs transplanted come 

from executed prisoner. And then 2010, he stated again that between 1997 and 2008 China had performed more than 100,000 

transplantations, and over 90 percent of the organs came from executed prisoners. This is China saying that themselves. 

Although the Chinese Government admits the major source of organs is from executed prisoners, they don’t actually give official 

numbers for either the amount of people they execute every year 

or the amount of people they transplant every year. If you look at 

many experts that try to estimate it, it is anywhere from about 

2,000 to 8,000 executions a year takes place in China, which is 

more than all the world combined. But that still falls short of the 

10,000 organs that they are saying they are transplanting every 

year. So the numbers that they are saying they are transplanting 

every year. So the numbers don’t add up. Even if they executed 

10,000 a year and transplanted 10,000 a year, there would still be 

a very large discrepancy. Why is that? It is simply impossible that 

those 10,000 people executed would match perfectly the 10,000 people that needed the organs. 

You really have so many factors that go into play when you are 

transplanting somebody, and many times we will use the ratio of 

10:1. It takes ten people to find a suitable donor for one person. So 

if we go by those numbers, they couldn’t be just executing 10,000 

people. Doing it the way they say they are doing, they would have 

to be executing around at least 100,000 people. 

Then there is the factor of time, which needs to be really understood. Once you harvest someone’s organs it is not that you can 

keep these organs around forever. There is a very short window of 

time. Take for example, a heart, which only has about 8 hours once 

removed from the body. And you have the fact that China’s own 

state laws says that prisoners once sentenced to execution have to 

be executed within 7 days. And this almost happens automatically. 

So we don’t have the situation in China where we have all these 

people on death row. It is just not like that. 

So saying this, this means that the prisoners sentenced to death 

cannot fully account for all the transplantations that are taking 

place in China, especially when we talk about medical tourism patients. So how are they able to have this ‘‘on-demand’’ transplant 

system that is capable of extremely short times? The only way they 

can be doing this is if they have another source of living donors 

that are available on demand. And I say living donors. And this is 

where, in some cases, the actual transplant operation itself becomes the method of execution. 

It has been through many different investigations that we now 

come to believe that it is prisoners of conscience, including Falun 

Gong practitioners, Tibetans, Uighurs, house Christians, who are 

being killed for their organs. And many of us now believe that the 

practioners of Falun Gong may be one of the worst victims because 

29

they comprise by many, or are believed by many to be the largest 

population of prisoners of conscience in China today. 

Also if you look at the timeline of the onset of China’s boom in 

transplantations and the onset of the persecution of Falun Gong, 

it almost runs in complete parallel with both of them starting in 

1999. Plus you have the fact that Falun Gong practitioners become 

particularly vulnerable because they often don’t give their true 

identities while in prison to protect their family and loved ones. We 

also know that they are subjected to tests, like blood and urine 

tests, physical exams, ultrasound evaluations, multiple times while 

they are incarcerated. 

How can all this be possible? Well, China has a very unique situation where the military controls the prison systems, the forced 

labor camps and the majority of the hospitals performing these 

transplantations. Therefore they are able to do all the coordinating 

to make it possible and they have the ability to do it secretively. 

So where does this put us? Well, we have American doctors, we 

have American hospitals, we have American universities facing an 

extremely important dilemma, and we have a place where American doctors need to know what is going on. Currently, we have 

physicians, like Dr. Danovitch just said, have their patients going 

to China for organs. We have our own hospitals training these 

transplant surgeons from China. We have our universities participating in funding research in China on transplantation. We have 

our certain well-known pharmaceutical companies selling the 

transplant medications needed to do the transplants and even 

funding clinical trials in China to develop new ones. 

If we look at the numbers, every day there is a few dozen people 

being killed for their organs, and if we wait another 5 years as the 

Chinese Medical Association has said it is going to take to stop 

this, there is a possibility of another 50,000 innocent lives that will 

be taken. 

I stand before you today hoping that the U.S. Government will 

perform an official investigation into this matter and release all 

evidence it has about China’s transplant practices. How can we expect our doctors and hospitals to make good decisions without all 

the information? In fact, our medical community have become accomplices to this horrible, terrific tragedy. I recommend also, Congress pass a resolution condemning China’s forced organ harvesting 

from prisoners and prisoners of conscience. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Noto follows:]

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Joint Hearing 

Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee 

Africa, Global Health and Human Rights Subcommittee 

House Committee on Foreign Affairs 

September 12,2012 

Organ Harvesting of Religious and Political Dissidents by the 

Chinese Communist Party 

Good afternoon, 

Honorable Chairman Rohrabacher, Honorable Chairman Smith, members of the 

Subcommittee for Oversight and for Human Rights, members of Congress, and 

distinguished panelists. 

Thank you for your invitation to this hearing today. 

It is my honor and privilege to testify here before you in Congress. 

My name is Damon Noto and T am a spokesperson for the organization Doctors 

Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH). The organization consists of Medical 

Professionals from around the world, who investigate the practice of illegal or unethical 

harvesting or transplantation of organs in countries allover the world. Since the start of 

our NGO the focus of our attention has been on China and this is for good reason. My 

purpose today is to convey to you the infonnation the medical community has come to 

learn over the past decade. 

Since the 1990's and early 2000's evidence has continued to mount, which 

concerns the medical community, and in particular, the transplant medical community 

that China's transplant practices were completely unethical. As early as 2001, the first 

solid evidence surfaced when a Chinese Medical Doctor named Wang Guoqi fled to the 

United States and testified in a U.S. Congressional hearing that China was transplanting 

organs from executed prisoners, which at the time the Chinese Communist Party 

vehemently denied. 

Medical Doctors became further alanned with the rapid exponential increase in 

transplantations that was occurring in China from 2000 onward. This plus the 

tremendous increase in the number of transplant centers in China was very concerning 

since no other country has ever grown so fast in this regard. China's transplant centers 

went from 150 in 1999 to over 600 by early 2007 showing the confidence that the 

transplant industry would continue to be viable for many years to come; not to mention 

the construction of the largest transplant center in all of Asia, the 16 Floor, 300 bed 
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Organ Transplant Center in Tianjin, which stated that they have perfonned transplants on 

tens of thousands of patients from abroad. According to China's Vice Minister of Health, 

the total number of transplantations performed each year went from several hundred 

transplantations in 1999 to well over 10,000 transplantations per year in 2008. The 

China Daily newspaper reported that the actual transplant number was 20,000 in 2006. It 

is now recognized by the international transplant community that China now performs 

the second most amount of transplantations a year second only to the United States. 

Even more troublesome was evidence that China began to have an 

overabundance of organs accessible for organ transplantation, and that their Medical 

Tourism for organ transplants was booming. Chinese Hospitals were all over the internet 

advertising that they could guarantee patients organs within the timeframe of weeks and 

they could even be scheduled in advance! Some Hospital websites were even bold 

enough to state that their transplant results were superior because they were able to test 

the living donor's kidney function prior to the harvesting. Furthermore, various types of 

transplants were possible including heart and liver transplants. In 2005 Doctor Jacob 

Lavee, Director of the Heart Transplant Unit at Sheba Medical Center ofIsreal was told 

by his patient, who had been waiting for a heart transplant for over one year, that he was 

told by a hospital in China that he was scheduled for a heart transplant in two weeks time 

and he was scheduled for a specific date. That patient indeed went to China and 

underwent the operation on the exact date as promised ahead of time. To say the Doctor 

was shocked would be an understatement. How could someone be told that a heart could 

be available for him in two weeks time and pre-schedule the date for surgery? 

It became apparent that organ harvesting became an extremely profitable business 

in China with some hospitals stating that their organ transplantation programs were their 

#1 source of revenue. The China International Transplantation Network Assistance Centre 

Website (http://en.zoukiishoku.com!) (Shenyang City) in 2006 displayed the following price 

list: Kidney: $62,000, Liver: $98,000-130,000, Liver-kidney: $160,000-180,000, Kidneypancreas: $150,000, Lung: $150,000-170,000, Heart: $130,000-160,000, Cornea: $30,000 All 

of this was good timing for a health care system that had been failing severely since the 

1980s when the Chinese government moved towards a more market-based system in which 

hospitaJs were left under funded by the government and forced to invent new ways to make 

sufficient revenue. 

Some people might think it makes sense that China does so many transplantations 

every year, since China is such a large country with a huge population, but there are 

many factors that need to be considered. First, there is no formal public organ donation 

program in China and there is no organized national distribution system. This means 

hospitals are left to fend for themselves and have their own waiting times and organ 

supply. Although, several attempts to implement public organ donation programs have 

occurred they have all failed. This is including the Chinese Red Cross pilot program in 

2011. The Beijing Red Cross stated in 2011 that only 3 people in Beijing had come 

forward to donate organs in the past 20 years and only 37 people nationwide had 

registered to become organ donors. This is in stark contrast to other countries such as the 

UK. who has 18 million people as registered donors. Most experts attribute the failure to 
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cultural reasons, including the Chinese people's belief that one must have the body 

intact after death, making public organ donation programs very difficult to establish. 

So the question is how has China become, in such a short period of time, second 

only to the United States in terms of the amount of organs transplanted each year, and 

where do all these organs being transplanted come from? In 2005 Dr. Huang Jiefu, 

China's Vice Minister of Health, admitted that over 95% of the organs transplanted in 

China came from executed prisoners. Then in 2006 the World Medical Association made 

a resolution demanding that China stop using prisoners as organ donors, and in 2007 the 

Chinese Medical Association agreed to stop. In 2010 at a transplant conference in 

Madrid, Dr. Iiefu stated that between 1997 and 2008 China had performed more than 

100,000 transplantations with over 90% of the organs being from executed prisoners. 

Then in February of this year (2012) he again stated that the practice of organ harvesting 

from prisoners continues in China today, and they intend to abolish this practice within 

the next five years. 

According to the ethical standards of the major medical associations, prisoners 

deprived of their freedom are not in the position to provide free consent to donate their 

organs. The World Health Organization's guiding principles on transplantation dictates 

all organs must be traceable back to their donor, and that both the donation and 

transplantation of the organ must be transparent and open to scrutiny Hence, the over 20-

year-long practice in China of harvesting organs from executed prisoners is already a 

breach from standards set by the international medical community. 

Although the Chinese government admits that the major source of organs is from 

executed prisoners they still do not give official numbers for the amount of people 

executed each year or the amount of people given transplantation each year. China has 52 

offenses that are punishable by death including petty crimes and prisoners being held for 

political and religious reasons. China also does not comply with international standards 

for fair trials. Although China executes more prisoners each year than all other countries 

in the world combined, the exact number of the executions is a closely guarded state 

secret. Most experts, however, put the number of executions each year anywhere from 2-

8,000 per year, which falls fall short of the numbers given by different sources in China 

including Dr. Jiefu of around 10,000 organ transplants each year. Furthennore, even if 

the numbers added up -- the number of people executed each year equaling the number of 

people receiving transplantations - there's still a large discrepancy. It is simply 

impossible with all of the variables that go into transplantation that the 10,000 people 

executed would match perfectly the 10,000 people needing transplantation. You need to 

have the correct blood type and tissue match. You also need the donor to be relatively 

healthy, free of contagious diseases and approximately the same size as the recipient. 

Although the numbers vary according to the type of organ transplanted and the patient's 

blood type, in general, there is at least a 10:1 ratio needed to find a suitable donor. 

Meaning the actual number of executions would need to be exponentially greater then 

10,000 to find suitable donors for the 10,000 transplantations taking place each year. 
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Another factor that needs to be taken into consideration is the timing needs to be 

near perfect, since once the organs are harvested they have a very short time before they 

are no longer useable for transplantation; with a heart lasting only 8 hours, livers lasting 

only 12 hours and kidneys lasting up to 48 hours. Meaning you cannot stock pile organs 

after execution to be used for future use. China's own laws state that prisoners once 

sentenced to execution must be executed within seven days. To illustrate this even further 

when the Special Rapporteur on Torture to the United Nations, Manfred Nowak, 

visited China to evaluate their prisons, he asked to see and speak to prisoners on Death 

Rowand was told there are none since they are executed almost immediately after their 

sentencing All of this suggests that prisoners sentenced to death cannot fully account for 

the transplantations taking place in China especially the type of scheduled 

transplantations that occur so frequently with medical tourism patients. 

So how is China able to have an on-demand transplant system capable of 

extremely short wait times compared to every country around the world, including the 

United Sates where average wait times for a kidney is over three years? The only possible 

way China can transplant the number of organs they have been over the past 12 years, in 

the manner in which they do, is to have another source of living donors that is available 

on-demand. Several investigators have pointed to Prisoners of Conscience as the main 

source of organs being used with the practitioners of the spiritual movement Falun Gong 

being the most severely persecuted. Many experts believe Falun Gong practitioners are 

the largest population of prisoners of conscience in China today, and are commonly 

subj ected to inhumane torture while incarcerated. To illustrate this I am reminded of an 

interview given by Rebiya Kadeer, a Uyghur human rights activist from the Xinjiang 

region who was jailed in China for over four years. I was quite surprised by her 

interview, because instead of talking about the inhumane treatment of her own people 

while injail, she talked about how sorry she felt for the Falun Gong practitioners because 

of the severe torture she had witnessed them endure. 

If you follow the timeline of China's transplant boom both the start of the 

persecution of Falun Gong in China in 1999 and the peak of their persecution, 

corresponds very well to the start of the tremendous rise seen in the transplantations 

performed in china and its continued growth. In addition, after the persecution of Falun 

Gong began in late 1999 the transplant numbers rose dramatically but the number of 

executions over the years has gone down according to China's government. The 

persecution against Falun Gong practitioners is official state policy in China, and not a 

single person since the start of the persecution has ever faced criminal charges for the 

torture or murder of practitioners. The lack oflegal repercussion for the mistreatment or 

murder of Falun Gong practitioners enhances their vulnerability. 

An investigation done in 2007 by David Kilgour and David Matas compiled 52 

verifiable forms of proof that Falun Gong practitioners were being killed for their organs. 

There have also been other investigators who have come to the same conclusion 

including European Parliament Member Edward McMillan-Scott. Falun Gong 

practitioners are a particularly vulnerable population since they are often unwilling to 

give their true identities in order to protect their families from persecution. Furthermore, 
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a systematic propaganda campaign against the group has demonized and dehumanized 

them in order to incite hatred against them by the general public, and thus, furthering 

their vulnerability. 

Medical doctors outside China have contlrmed that their patients have gone to 

China and received organs from Falun Gong practitioners. At the same time, Falun Gong 

practitioners who have escaped China have testified that they often underwent blood and 

urine testing, had physically examinations and ultrasound evaluations multiple times 

while in prison while their fellow inmates did not. It is hard to believe that the expensive 

tests were being performed for the benefit of the health of the prisoner when so many of 

them also subj ected to various forms of torture. 

There has been interviews of surgeons and others stating they witnessed Falun 

Gong practitioners having their organs harvested. There have been several high level 

Chinese omcials admitting over the phone that they are aware that Falun Gong 

practitioners are used as a source for organ donation. One reason this may all be possible 

is that in China they have the unique situation where the military controls the prison 

system, the forced labor camps and majority of hospitals performing the transplantations. 

Therefore, the coordination of all these factors is achievable and the ability to keep this 

information a secret is possible. Patients who went to China for transplantation often state 

their surgeries were performed very secretively by military doctors in military hospitals, 

and often in the middle of the night. Furthermore, military hospitals and military 

physicians are not under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Health or the Chinese Medical 

Association. Although, non-military hospitals do perform transplants they are often 

amliated with military hospitals or have their transplant departments headed by military 

doctors. 

Perhaps some people may find this dim cult to believe, as did Belgian Senator 

Patrik Vankrunkelsven who decided to do his own investigation. He pretended to be a 

patient in need of an kidney transplant and called two different hospitals in China 

inquiring about availability. Both hospitals offered him kidneys on the spot for 50,000 

Euros, which, again, is only possible with a large supply of on-demand "donors" in the 

waiting. There was also Dr. Francis Navarro head of the Transplant Department of 

France's Montpellier University Hospital, who became compelled to conduct his own 

investigation after he stumbled upon disturbing information while in China training 

Chinese surgeons in organ transplantation techniques. His suspicions grew deeper when 

he heard the coordinator of the military hospital transplantation center say, "Hurry up, we 

have to proceed with all executions before the Chinese New Year" While still in China 

he decided to pretend to be a patient looking for an organ transplant. He too came to the 

conclusion that prisoners of conscience were being used as a source of organs for 

transplantation. 

Currently, American doctors, American hospitals, American universities and 

American medical corporations are now facing an extremely important dilemma. How do 

we treat and handle China's transplant situation? Currently our physicians are seeing 

patients travel to China for organs, our hospitals are training China's medical doctors 
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on how to perform transplantations, our universities are participating and funding 

research, taking place in China regarding transplantations and our medical journals are 

accepting them. Many well-known pharmaceutical companies are selling medications 

needed for the transplantations and performing/funding clinical trials in China to develop 

new drugs to be used for transplantation. Regrettably, many U.S. transplant surgeons 

serve as advisors for Chinese transplant institutions and many of the leading Chinese 

transplant surgeons received their training in the United States. 

Recently Wang Lijun - the right hand man to the recently-disgraced, high-ranking 

Chinese otlicial Bo Xilai -- made international headlines after visiting aU S. Embassy in 

China in February of2012 attempting to defect to the U.S. but was denied asylum. This is 

a man who by his own admission witnessed and participated in experiments involving 

the harvesting of thousands of organs taken from "prisoners" and was even given an 

award for his services in 2006 by the Guanghua Science and Technology 

Foundation. Shortly after Wang left the US. Consulate, China's Vice Minister of 

Health declared China intended to end the practice of harvesting organs from prisoners 

within 3-5 years. 

lfwe go by the numbers we can estimate that every day a few dozen people are executed 

and killed for their organs in China and if we wait another 5 years, there's the possibility 

that another 50,000 innocent lives may be taken. In light of this, 1 stand before you asking 

the American government to help us perform a further investigation and to release any 

evidence discovered about China's organ harvesting practices. Without all the 

information on hand, how can we expect our doctors, our hospitals, and our universities 

to make good decisions? Indeed, without this information we run the risk of making our 

medical community accomplices to one of the greatest tragedies of our time! 

In light of all the infoTInation we have gathered, we offer the following 

recommendations: 

1. Initiate a Congressional resolution to condemn China's forced organ harvesting 

from prisoners and prisoners of conscience. 

2. Initiate a travel advisory for people traveling to China educating our citizens of 

China's forced organ harvesting practices. 

3. Urge the United States government to start an official investigation into China's 

organ transplant system. 

4. Urge the United States government to publicly release all evidence it has in 

regards to China's use of prisoners as a source of organ donation. 

I would like to thank both Honorable Chairman Dana Rohrabacher and Honorable 

Chairman Chris Smith for the opportunity to address Congress today. 

Damon Noto, M.D. 

Spokesperson Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting 
36

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you, Doctor. 

Dr. Lee? 

STATEMENT OF CHARLES LEE, M.D., SPOKESMAN AND PUBLIC 

RELATIONS DIRECTOR, GLOBAL SERVICE CENTER FOR 

QUITTING THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY 

Dr. LEE. Thank you, Chairman and distinguished members of 

the committees for giving me the opportunity to testify today, and 

I also want to thank the gentlemen who were just speaking about 

the organ harvesting. 

I myself was in prison in China for 3 years, and I forcibly had 

blood samples taken without being told the reasons. If it were not 

for my U.S. citizenship and the international support of people like 

those in this room, I could have been the victim of the organ harvesting as well. 

But I want to touch some points regarding the Chinese Communist Party which may help us to understand better about this 

organ harvesting. The first thing is that the history of the killing 

by the CCP actually starting, the Communist Movement actually 

has caused 150 million people worldwide died, including 80 million 

people in China. There was one thing worth mentioning is that 

there was a big famine, manmade famine, during the year of 1959 

to 1961, 40 million people starved to death in China. And what is 

more bizarre is that those starved people were not allowed to go 

out to beg. The armed forces locked them inside their villages. 

So most recently they started the persecuting of Falun Gong 

practitioners in 1999. We have 3,599 deaths were documented with 

names and addresses and how they were tortured. But as these 

gentlemen said, as many as 65,000 people were killed for the organs. 

Now such inconceivable deeds go beyond the routine suppression 

common to dictatorships, because the CCP is not a just average authoritarian regime. If you look at the history of the origin and their 

philosophy, and then we can find out that is very evident that the 

CCP is particularly malicious, inhumane and nefarious. In other 

words, it is evil. It has been like this since its very origin. Even 

though very few people in China right now believe in Communism, 

but their fundamental attributes like atheism and struggle continue to underpin the CCP’s actions. And having destroyed traditional Chinese values like compassion, integrity and the respect for 

the divine that stabilized China for thousands of years, the CCP 

and its officials lack a moral baseline. Because of this absence of 

moral baseline, the Chinese officials, Communist officials, judges, 

and even doctors, they can participate or condone the heinous 

crimes like organ harvesting. 

Then the second point I want to mention is that there is a movement called, ‘‘Quitting the Communist Party,’’ also called a 

‘‘Tuidang’’ in Chinese. There was a book called, ‘‘Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party,‘‘ was published at the end of 

2004. This books describes the true nature of the Communist 

Party, and it has called the Chinese Communist Party, the evil 

specter. And also Karl Marx, actually, he himself referred to the 

communism as a specter in his Communist Manifesto. The book actually spread wide in China like wildfire, and it started, arguably, 

37

the world’s largest grassroot human rights movement of, they 

started. 

The first Tuidang statement actually was received by the Epoch 

Times in December 2004, and the months next the paper published 

a Solemn Declaration urging whoever had joined the CCP or its affiliated organizations to quit immediately and erase the stains on 

the conscience left by the CCP specter, in order to definitely break 

from the Party and avoid suffering from future retributions upon 

the CCP’s demise. And then there was a Web site put out just for 

that. 

With the help of Falun Gong practitioners inside China and 

abroad, this Tuidang movement has grown stronger and faster. 

Right now we have over 123 million people renounced the association with the Communist Party and affiliated organizations. Every 

day there are over 70,000 people doing this. 

The Falun Gong activists involved in Tuidang movement are 

seeking to promote the movement not to catalyze the regime 

change, but to offer Chinese citizens a chance to understand the 

CCP’s history of violence, and take a principled stand by choosing 

to no longer associate with it. And in the actual spiritual movement, meaning is fundamental. When we review these freedom 

movement statements, it is very quickly evident that people overwhelmingly frame their decision to withdraw from the Party in 

moral and spiritual terms. 

The Tuidang movement is actually helping China to prepare for 

the post-CCP future. Right now, inside China they are like 180,000 

mass incidents every year. This is like saying like 500 daily protests against the CCP’s operation. And actually one paper published by the Minxin Pei, your Foreign Policy, he asked questions, 

are we obsessing about China’s rise when we should be worried 

about its fall? So the Tuidang movement, it does not prescribe the 

specific institutional reforms for a post-CCP China, but it does provide a way out of the moral crisis. It offers hope for China as tens 

of millions of people not only reject the Party’s culture of violence, 

lies and the struggles, but also embrace truth and integrity and 

free their conscience. 

So what should the U.S. Government do then? The simple answer is to stand together with the people of China rather than with 

the CCP regime. 

So I would like to stop here and just take more questions. Because there are a lot of things to cover if I had more time. Thank 

you very much again for giving me this opportunity. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Lee follows:]

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JOINT SUBCOMMITTEE HEARING 

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS 

US. HOUSH OF RHPRHSHNTATJVHS 

WASHINGTON, D.c. 20515-0128 

Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations 

Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), Chairman 

Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights 

Christopher H. Smith (R-NJ), Chairman 

"Organ Harvesting of Religious and Political Dissidents by the Chinese Communist Party" 

Testimony on the Movement of Quitting the CCP 

Charles Lee, MD, Spokesman 

Global Service Center 

for Quitting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 

September 12,2012 

Thank you, Mr. Chainnen and distinguished members of the committees for gi ving me the 

opportunity to testify today. Also, I would like to thank the gentlemen who have just spoken 

about the harvesting of organs from Falun Gong prisoners of conscience. I myself was 

imprisoned in China for three years and can confirm that during that time, I forcibly had blood 

samples taken from me without being told the reason. lfit were not for the support of people like 

those in this room and the international attention given to my case, I could have also been at the 

victim of organ harvesting, like thousands of anonymous Falun Gong practitioners. 

In my testimony today, I would like to touch on three points related to the Chinese Communist 

Party (CCP) rule and a movement of Chinese people renouncing their affiliation with the CCP, 

referred to in Chinese as "Tuidang" that can help us better understand organ harvesting. 

1. The CCP has a long history of killing and its nature is fundamentally nefarious. 

Organ harvesting is the latest manifestation of this. 

2. Through the Tuidang movement, Chinese people are finding a way out of the moral 

crisis that has engulfed China and are rejecting the CCP's culture of violence 

3. The Tuidang movement is helping prepare China for a post-CCP future 

1. The CCP has a long history of killing and its nature is fundamentally nefarious. 

Organ harvesting is the latest manifestation of this. 
39


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The phenomenon of live organ harvesting illustrates a fundamental point about the Communist 

Party. It is the latest episode in the CCP's history of killing. Communist movements together 

have caused the deaths of 150 million people worldwide, including 80 million people in China. 

Since the CCP took power in China in 1949, it has subjected the Chinese people to one massive 

violent campaign after another, destroying China's traditional culture and values and causing 

pennanent ruin to the environment During the Great Leap Forward, an estimated 40 million 

Chinese people starved to death because Communist Party officials exaggerated the size of the 

grain harvests, confiscated grain, and then forced farmers to participate in steel production 

instead of harvesting food, causing a severe-and manmade-famine. The starved farmers were 

not even allowed to go out to beg for the reason that the Party's image could not be tarnished. 

During the Cultural Revolution, more than 8 million people were killed in a nationwide 

movement of struggle and turmoil. People were even forced to turn against their families, 

friends, and neighbors. 

Most recently, in 1999, the CCP launched the campaign to persecute practitioners of Falun 

Gong-who at the time numbered 100 million-arresting, torturing, and killing innocent people 

for seeking to follow Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance, improve their health, and 

uplift their morality. Over 3,500 deaths from torture have been documented, but as we've heard 

today, tens of thousands of others have been killed so that their organs could be sold for 

transplants. 

How could something like this happen? Such inconceivable deeds go beyond the routine 

suppression common to dictatorships because the Chinese Communist Party is not just an 

average authoritarian regime. When we look at its behavior and philosophy from its origins to 

today, it is evident that the CCP is particularly malicious, inhumane, and nefarious, or in other 

words-evil. It has been like this since its very origins. They set a mission to conquer the world 

by deception and violence, to destroy all civilizations, social structures and moralities in human 

society. Communism and the theories of "Atheism and Dialectical Materialism" have been only 

tool s they used for that purpose. 

Although very few people in China today truly believe in Marxism or Communist theories, the 

CCP's fundamental attributes, like atheism and struggle, continue to underpin the CCP's actions. 

Having destroyed traditional Chinese values-like compassion, integrity, and respect for the 

divine-that provided social and political stability in China for thousands of years, the CCP and 

its officials lack a moral baseline. Worse still, they have worked tirelessly to infuse this moral 

depredation into Chinese society at large. 

The result is the rampant corruption, tainted baby food products, and life-threatening 

environmental pollution that regularly feature in the headline news about China. It is the absence 

of this moral baseline that has also enabled CCP officials, as well as members of the police force, 

the courts, and even the medical profession, to participate or condone organ harvesting, such a 

heinous crime against humanity. Under its rule, the CCP has thus brought about the darkest page 

in China's glorious history and a profound moral crisis. The suffering of Chinese people seemed 

unendurable and endless. 
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However, in persecuting Falun Gong's principles of "Truthfulness, Compassion, and Tolerance," 

the CCP has driven the last nail into its coffin. 

2. Through the Tuidang movement, Chinese people are finding a way ont of the 

moral crisis that has engulfed China and are rejecting the CCP as a whole 

How did the Tnidang movement start? 

For the first several years of the persecution, Falun Gong practitioners repeatedly appealed to 

CCP officials to top the persecution, while enduring tremendous hardships to explain to the 

Chinese public that Falun Gong was not as the CCP's propaganda machine claimed. Yet the CCP 

responded by intensifying the brutal measures used in the persecution. Meanwhile, it also 

became clear that because of how the CCP shapes the thoughts of Chinese people through 

education and media control, many Chinese had difficulty believing the reality of what was 

happening to Falun Gong. Therefore, to open people's eyes to the abuses faced by practitioners, 

practitioners realized they first needed to free people from the CCP's mind-control. 

As such, in late 2004, the overseas Chinese-language newspaper TJajiyuan (Fpoch Times), run by 

Falun Gong practitioners, published an editorial series called the "Nine Commentaries on the 

Communist Party." The commentaries detail the history of the Communist Party in China, with a 

particular focus on its human rights record and episodes like the above-mentioned violent 

political campaigns, including the crackdown on Falun Gong. It points out that the CCP is an 

evil specter and it is anti-human and anti-universe, which is why CCP advocates "fight with the 

heaven, fight with the earth and fight with human." Karl Marx himself also referred 

Communism a "specter" in the Communist Manifesto. The continuous and intentional 

accumulation of the evilness throughout the entire history has made the CCP the most wicked 

and destructive force on earth. 

With the publication and wide spread of "Nine Commentaries on The Communist Party", the 

biggest grass-root human rights movement started. The first Tuidang statement was received by 

the Epoch Times in December 2004. Then on Jan. 1,2005,50 overseas Chinese scholars jointly 

renounced their memberships in the CCP and its affiliated organizations. On Jan. 12,2005, The 

Epoch Times Solemn Declaration was published. The Declaration urged whoever has joined the 

CCP or its affiliated organizations should quit immediately and erase the stain on their 

conscience left by the CCP "specter" in order to definitively break from the party and avoid 

suffering tuture retribution upon the CCP's demise. On the same day, tuidang.epochtimes.com 

was established as a platform and a database to publish and record renunciation entries. 

Why are Falun Gong practitioners promoting Tuidang? 

With the help of Falun Gong practitioners inside China and abroad, the Tuidang movement has 

grown stronger and faster with time. Today, over 123 million renunciation statements have been 

received. Each day, 70,000 people choose to be freed from the mental control of the CCP. These 

people don't know each other They aren't part of one organization. But they have all made the 

same personal choice - to reclaim their conscience. 
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The Falun Gong activists involved in Tuidang seek to promote the movement not to catalyze 

regime change per se, but to offer Chinese citizens a chance to understand the CCP's history of 

violence, and take a principled stand by choosing to no longer associate with it. In this process, 

Falun Gong practitioners often say they feel they are offering people a chance at moral 

redemption, healing, and inner peace. Indeed, when reviewing Tuidang statements, it is quickly 

evident that people overwhelmingly frame their decisions to withdraw from the party in moral 

and spiritual tenns: they are making a decision to reclaim their conscience. 

The spiritual meaning of this movement is fundamental. The Nine Commentaries empowers 

people with the true nature of the CCP. It provides explanations for the irrationality of CCP's 

actions. It melts away CCP's brainwash. It provokes soul searching that leads to spiritual 

awakening. Once a person is free from CCP's brainwash, one is no longer controlled by this evil 

specter, one is capable of independent and rational thinking. When more and more people's 

spirits are freed, the broader social/physical environment will change. The CCP will then lose its 

feeding ground and collapse. 

Here are some examples of how people have made a decision to reclaim their conscience. 

A man writing under the name of Chen Feng wrote that upon learning about the human rights 

abuses committed against Falun Gong, such as large-scale arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and 

organ harvesting, he realized clearly that "the true nature of the party is 'deceit, evil. and 

violence,'" that he was leaving this evil organization in order to "rebuilt an upright life, and 

speak the truth." 

In another case, a group of 11 people from Chifeng in Inner Mongolia collectively wrote: "The 

Communist Party culture has poisoned the people, destroyed China's splendid civilization, and 

hanned countless innocent lives. They have launched numerous campaigns, such as the June 4th 

massacre, the unprovoked persecution of Falun Gong, and the organ removal from Falun Gong 

practitioners. it is extremely evil, it angers the heavens. We withdraw from the Communist Party, 

Youth League and affiliated organizations; we are determined not to associate with this evil 

party." 

3. The Tuidang movement is helping prepare China for a post-CCP future 

As more and more people's consciences are freed from the CCP's control, the broader social and 

political environment is changing. The CCP is losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the 

Chinese people, a process that will ultimately lead to the CCP's disintegration. 

When we look at the news being reported from China, we see many reflections of these 

dynamics playing out Tn some locations, local policemen have reportedly refused to use violence 

against fellow citizens. Meanwhile, Chinese people's human rights consciousness and courage to 

oppose the CCP has notably increased. Last year, there were an estimated 180,000 cases of 

"mass incidents" in which protestors abuses by CCP officials, an average of over 500 per day. 

These events are happening at a time when the CCP is facing potential economic decline, 

internal fighting, and fragility within its upper ranks that ranges from the Wang Lijun-Bo Xilai 
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scandal to the rumors swirling in recent days regarding Xi Jinping's health. As these dynamics 

unfold, it is becoming clear that the CCP's rule may come to an end soon. As respected China 

scholar Minxin Pei recently wrote in Foreign Policy, "Are we obsessing about China's rise when 

we should be worried about its fall?" 

Once the CCP is no longer governing China, the question emerges - what happens tben? How 

does a society in the kind of moral crisis and with crimes of the scale that we're talking about 

today emerge to become stable and peaceful" 

The Tuidang movement does not prescribe specific institutional reforms for a post-CCP China. 

But it does provide a way out of the moral ctisis. Tbe Tuidang movement offers hope for China, 

as tens of millions of Chinese people not only reject the Party's culture of violence, lies, and 

struggle, but also embrace truth, integrity, and conscience. 

Wbat should the US government do then" The simple answer is to stand together with the people 

of China rather than with the CCP regime. 

Perhaps some of you in the audience may be thinking that the revelations about organ harvesting 

are so horrible, yet we must maintain strong tics with the Chinese government. But it is equally, 

ifnot more important to maintain strong ties with the Chinese people. As the Chinese people 

learn more about the human rights atrocities committed by the Communist Party, or encounter 

the party's repression themselves, they are rejecting it. The United States should support their 

courageous and inspired actions. Indeed, both the Senate and the House of Representatives 

recognized the Tuidang movement last year via Resolution 232 and Resolution 416. 

Tn this context, T would respectfully recommend the following: 

I. That the US. government publicly condemn human rights violations in China, including 

the persecution of Falun Gong. 

2. That the US. government demand the release of all ptisoners of conscience. 

3. That the US. government continue to facilitate Chinese people's ability to obtain 

uncensored information. 

4. That the US. government continue to pay attention, to support those who quit the CCP, 

to support the peoples' choice to be free ofils hold. 

Chinese people deserve the same freedoms that the American people have been enjoying for 

centuries and arc greatly encouraged when the US. government stands with them. Moreover, a 

free China will also bring benefits to this country and the entire world. 

Thank you again very much again, Me Chairman, for giving me this opportunity to testify T look 

fonvard to working together more in the near future. 
43

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you for that testimony, and thank all 

of the witnesses. I understand Mr. Smith has another commitment, 

so what we would like to do is, I am going to permit—why don’t 

you go first and then I will ask the questions I had afterwards. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I really do appreciate it. 

Just first of all, your testimonies are extraordinary, incisive, filled 

with information that is actionable, and I hope that the administration, as well as the Congress, does more. 

I think Dr. Danovitch, your suggestion that we amend the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 is a good one. We are going 

to scope out doing a bill, I think. It is a great idea. Just like sex 

tourism is criminalized and you can’t go anywhere in the world and 

think if you are in Brazil abusing a little child you evade U.S. law, 

the same ought to hold true here. And thank you for that very important recommendation. 

I guess just two basic questions. Mention was made about 

Manfred Nowak. I have read his report, the Special Rapporteur on 

Torture, and it was striking that he didn’t get to talk to death row 

prisoners. I am wondering if he made any conclusions or has spoken out—he is not the Special Rapporteur on Torture anymore—

about the organ issue? Did he understand, did any of the U.N. bodies, frankly, not just this specialist on torture, but the U.N. Human 

Rights Council, the Committee against Torture’s, which has a 

panel of experts, has anybody weighed in and said, ‘‘What you are 

doing to individuals through execution, especially the Falun Gong?’’ 

It is barbaric and must stop. 

Yes, please, Dr. Noto? 

Dr. NOTO. Yes, Manfred Nowak himself actually stood up in front 

of the United Nations and said he believed that Falun Gong practitioners were being executed for their organs, and he had said at 

that time he was hoping this practice would stop immediately. So 

he was actually a very big believer. 

Mr. SMITH. Did the U.N. do anything in follow-up, and did the 

U.S. Government do anything in follow-up? 

Dr. NOTO. As far as I know, no. 

Mr. SMITH. You mentioned, Mr. Gutmann, that our Government 

has done little. What do you think the Obama administration 

should be doing? 

Mr. GUTMANN. I think you need a dual track approach in this, 

in the sense that on one side you need to pressure corporations. We 

don’t really have any laws forbidding companies from doing say 

what Roche is doing, the pharmaceutical company in Switzerland. 

They are doing a testing of transplant patients on the mainland, 

currently, clinical testing. And similarly, Isotechnika Pharma of 

Canada is also doing that, for profit, on the Chinese mainland. 

These are transplant patients who obviously could well be carrying 

Falun Gong organs, Uighur organs, and so forth. There is a problem there. TFP Ryder Healthcare of the U.K. is trying to build a 

medical center, including a transplant center, inside Dalian, which 

was the epicenter of Falun Gong organ harvesting according to 

every witness I spoke to. 

So I am not sure exactly what the mechanism that you would use 

for that to inhibit this kind of thing, but I think the Chinese listen 

44

to this kind of stuff very closely. The Chinese leadership cares 

about money. They care about investment very, very much. 

By doing this you would strengthen the reformers inside China. 

If Wen Jiabao indeed does have some sort of plan to come clean, 

about this you would at least, let us find out. Let us find out by 

putting him on the spot. 

But the second prong to that, the second part of the attack is to 

bring these witnesses forward. Because you, by putting these witnesses on this kind of stand and putting them through the kind of 

cross-examination that only Congress can do, we would also 

strengthen those reformers in China. We would prevent what exactly is happening now, which is this attempt to bury the whole 

issue, to say, okay, within 3 to 5 years this whole issue is going 

to be gone and we will never have to look at it again. 

Mr. SMITH. But again I would note for the record that we did 

have a series of hearings in the ’90s and beyond, and we never 

seem to get anywhere with the Chinese Government even acknowledging it. So some of the acknowledgements of recent vintage certainly shows that they are aware. And maybe they are so brazen 

and arrogant now, they feel they can say it and who cares. 

Let me ask you. Years ago I read a book about the Japanese Unit 

731 operating in China which did horrific experimentation on a 

number of people, especially upon Chinese. I find it appalling that 

the Chinese Government could countenance this kind of torture 

when it sings out as it does and complains to this day about the 

abuses committed by the Japanese by way of torture, especially 

Unit 731. 

And if I could, finally, because I am running out of time, Dr. 

Danovitch, you mentioned that, I believe it was you, it has been 

well documented that medical outcomes for such transplants are 

poor. I wonder if you might tell us why. Because if you can dry up 

demand or, just by talking about how they don’t do it state-of-theart-wise they might come at it at a different level. 

Okay, Dr. Danovitch? 

Dr. DANOVITCH. Can I answer you? 

Mr. SMITH. Yes, please. 

Dr. DANOVITCH. Yes, unethical medicine tends to be bad medicine. If you care only about the money and not about the outcome, 

medicine tends to be bad. So there are several reasons why. The 

most common reason are infectious complications, and in fact, the 

Chinese Ministry of Health has itself admitted that there are high 

incidences of infectious complications in people who undergo 

vended transplantation, around the world by the way, not just in 

China—that has been reported elsewhere—and in transplants from 

executed prisoners. And I, in my own practice at UCLA, have seen 

people arrive at LAX with vicious infections and be admitted to the 

hospital sometimes for weeks and months. 

Also when livers are recovered from executed prisoners, for technical reasons I won’t go into now, often complications occur 3 or 4 

weeks later. That is when Americans go to China, get a liver from 

an executed prisoner and return, there are specific complications in 

the biliary tract that occur late because of the mechanism of recovery that then those patients end up spending months sometimes in 

U.S. hospitals suffering those complications. It is very dangerous. 

45

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you very much. And I guess I will proceed. We have been joined by Congressman Turner from New York, 

and if after my questions you have any questions to ask or an 

opening statement we will be happy to accommodate you at that 

time. 

Mr. TURNER. Absolutely. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. Let me just ask some specific things 

just so I will get this on the record. We have a Radio Free Asia 

and Voice of America and other organizations that are supposed to 

be representing the values of the American people. Have they been 

playing a positive or negative role in this whole issue of forced 

organ harvesting? Have there been interviews of the Voice of America? Have any of you been interviewed with the Voice of America 

or Radio Free Asia, and what kind of role are they playing? 

No? Nobody has been interviewed? 

Mr. GUTMANN. Can I take a shot at that? 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Please do. 

Mr. GUTMANN. There is a long-standing taboo in the journalism 

community about Falun Gong, about this issue. To touch this issue 

is the Third Rail of journalism. If you touch it—if you are in Beijing, if you are based in China—you will not be given access to top 

leaders anymore. I can give you an example of this. 

I had a friend who wrote for the South China Morning Post. He 

wrote a very powerful article about Falun Gong back in the early 

days. The South China Morning Post was blocked, the web version 

was blocked in China for 6 months. That was at a time when the 

South China Morning Post was desperately trying to get penetration of that market. This is common. And so there are many dangers for doing this for journalists, and I believe those extend across 

the board. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Not just journalists in general, I am talking 

about now, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, is that included 

in, have any of you been interviewed on this issue on either one 

of these? 

Dr. NOTO. I have never personally. I believe there was one Radio 

Free Asia interview, but I don’t remember who was on. That was 

positive. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. So I know this never happens, but we have 

our journalists here. Is there a Radio Free Asia or Voice of America 

journalist with us today? Have you conducted any interviews on 

this issue before? All right. Well, we are going to put you under 

oath and get you right now. 

I think this is very significant. I mean this is tantamount to one 

of the most hienous and ghoulish crimes that has been going on on 

this planet for the last 20 years, and yet the outlets that are supposed to be representing American values haven’t bothered to do a 

story on it. I think that this is very significant. And I think it 

maybe sends an unfortunate message to other journalists throughout the world, and perhaps it sends the message that maybe Americans don’t care. Maybe this is just a small group of troublemakers 

who are trying to cause a problem on this issue. So no, none of you 

have been—I think I will send a letter to Voice of America and 

Radio Free Asia to find out why this hasn’t been covered as it 

should. 

46

Now have the Governments of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, 

these governments acknowledged China’s forced organ harvesting 

program? What are the policies of those governments, or are they 

just looking the other way? 

Dr. DANOVITCH. I can’t answer for those countries. I can say that 

Malaysia now, where 75 percent of Malaysians go to China to get 

organs, have now introduced rules to hopefully diminish that. The 

Israelis now have laws that don’t permit their insurance companies 

to pay for transplantation if those transplants are illegal elsewhere. 

That is a rule that could well be adopted by other countries. I can’t 

answer for Taiwan and the other Asian countries that you mentioned. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. In Japan, Korea? 

Dr. DANOVITCH. As far as I know, Japanese and Koreans still go 

to China for organs. I can’t give you specific numbers. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Dr. Noto? 

Dr. NOTO. I can’t speak for those countries, but I can speak for 

Australia who passed a law that stops the training of Chinese 

transplant surgeons in Australia. If they come to Australia they 

need to sign a contract that says they won’t participate in forced 

organ harvesting. And from what I have heard from physicians 

there it has basically stopped Chinese doctors from coming to be 

trained in Australia. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. All of this reflects a dehumanization of values. I know there is some sort of an art exhibit, plasticization or 

something like that. Do we have any evidence that those, I mean 

they are apparently made out of real bodies. Is there any indication 

that these are the bodies of religious prisoners or political prisoners? 

Dr. NOTO. I can speak to there is one association where the companies that were doing these plasticizations was in Liaoning province. I don’t know if I am pronouncing that correct, but that is 

where Wang Lijun, the police officer who came to the U.S. Embassy 

for asylum, he had stated that he had done thousands of transplants, surgeries and experiments in that same province around 

the same time that this company you are mentioning with the 

plasticization took off. So we think that there is a possibility some 

of these bodies did wind up there. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Again that is a reflection that such a monstrous thing can be looked at as art, and this just reflects a degeneration of values. 

The Chinese Vice Minister of Health said earlier this year that 

within 5 years that the PRC would stop organ harvesting of prisoners. I think it has been commented on a little bit here. Maybe 

we can come down just officially one by one. Do you take that seriously, and do you think that this will indeed be phased out? Just 

right down the line. 

Mr. GUTMANN. The sequence of events here is very interesting. 

I mean Wang Lijun made his break for the Chengdu consulate. 

Shortly after that the words, ‘‘live organ harvest’’ were available on 

Baidu, the search engine. Okay, this is after some back and forth. 

This is in the middle of the crisis. They have never been allowed 

before. It was a brief period where you could search those terms 

in China. It was a kind of brinkmanship as we could see it. This 

47

is followed a few days later by the announcement, out of the blue, 

in a kind of case of ‘‘mentionitis’’ that they are going stop the organ 

harvesting of all criminals within 3 to 5 years. Not criminals of 

conscience, that is not mentioned of course. Nobody mentioned it. 

The Wall Street Journal didn’t mention it. The Washington Post 

didn’t mention it. Nobody brought up that issue. Again, the taboo 

held. 

But the point is, clearly if you look at that sequence of events 

coming in the middle of one of the worst leadership crises China 

has had in years, this is playing a major issue. Now for once, I 

don’t always agree with Falun Gong analysts, but I have to here. 

This is clearly organ harvesting, and the organ harvesting of Falun 

Gong in particular is playing a major role as a political football in 

this Chinese leadership transition. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. So you are optimistic that this could be a signal that something real is going to happen? 

Mr. GUTMANN. I am optimistic in that sense, but as much as I 

think a terribly heinous crime has been committed and may well 

still being committed, I don’t think the leadership has shown any 

sign of reform whatsoever. I think they are preparing to bury this 

most recent mass murder just the same way that Tiananmen was 

buried, the same way the Cultural Revolution was buried and the 

same way the Great Leap Forward was buried. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I see. 

Dr. Lee, are you optimistic that this Chinese Vice Minister of 

Health is speaking policy that will be actually implemented in the 

elimination of this heinous activity? 

Dr. LEE. Yes, I think in looking at the true nature of the CCP, 

I do not count on them at all. Because when this organ harvesting 

issue came out in 2006, and several months later China’s health officials says that they took the organs from the executed prisoners, 

the reason is to cover up the actions on Falun Gong practitioners. 

So when things happen and then they took measures trying to 

cover up, but they have like signed agreements or make promise 

all these years, but a lot of times they just broke it. 

So if you look in the future, the only thing you can count is that 

the change within China that the regime has less and less control 

over the society. Things will change for the better, and hopefully 

that Chinese people were leaving the Communist Party. By that 

time we can be more optimistic of that the government promise 

something, we can count on that. Thank you. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I didn’t quite understand your answer. 

Dr. LEE. I am sorry. What I am saying is that we cannot count 

on them. They make promises but they don’t keep it at all. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Gutmann has some optimism. You have 

no optimism? 

Dr. LEE. No optimism on them, but on the future——

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Oh yes. Well, we can all be positive about the 

future. But I was thinking mainly the future based on the statement by the Chinese Vice Minister of Health. 

What about you? 

Dr. DANOVITCH. I will try and be a realist. I have actually personally heard the Chinese Vice Minister of Health, Jiefu Huang, in 

an international forum, admit that their behavior of the Chinese, 

48

the ongoing use of executed prisoners is an embarrassment to 

them. He admitted that in an international forum. That is quite 

something. 

I do believe that there are forces in China that generally want 

to see improvement. But I do also agree that they may not have 

full control, and there are also forces that enjoy the money chain 

and corruption that comes along with the ongoing abuse of executed prisoners and of vending. I think it is our job, since we can’t 

control what goes on in China, what is our job in the United States 

is to do our best to make our absolute abhorence——

Mr. ROHRABACHER. You are giving me one of these ‘‘on the other 

hand’’ answers where they say, well, on the other hand this. If you 

had to come down are you an optimist of this? 

Dr. DANOVITCH. I am more optimistic now than I was several 

years ago. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Good. 

Dr. Noto? 

Dr. NOTO. I am not very optimistic. If history teaches us anything it told us twice before the Chinese Medical Association said 

they would stop. Both in 2001 and 2007 they said they would stop. 

Again this year they keep saying it is still happening. So if we go 

by their word I have very little faith, plus the Chinese Medical Association themselves has no power over the military, which we believe is playing a major role here. So they can say whatever they 

want, but if they can’t get the military to take action it is not going 

to stop them. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. All right. And how many Falun Gong practitioners have had their organs harvested, and how many political 

prisoners, et cetera, and Tibetans? How many are we talking 

about? I heard the number 65,000 victims over a few year period. 

What are we talking about here? 

Mr. GUTMANN. A number I come up with, and it is an estimate 

with a huge range possibility in there, it is based on a survey 

method at 65,000 over an 8-year period essentially. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. 

Dr. Lee, do you have another estimate? 

Dr. Danovitch? 

Dr. DANOVITCH. No, but I can just give you the Chinese Liver 

Transplant Registry. The Ministry of Health own registry gave a 

number of 21,000 liver transplants from executed prisoners up 

until August of this year. That is likely to be a minimal number 

but that is the thought. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. And we also heard that to get that number 

of organs transplanted you have to have 100,000, perhaps, operations to——

Dr. DANOVITCH. I am not sure that is correct. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER [continuing]. Achieve that. Well, yes. 

Dr. Noto, what do you estimate? 

Dr. NOTO. After looking at everybody’s different investigations I 

would put the number at least at 50,000. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. This is obviously what we are talking 

about is a monstrous crime. To tear open the body of someone who 

has been incarcerated for any reason is very questionable. I mean 

49

even if the person is a murderer, if someone has ripped open the 

body of someone else and killed them. 

But to rip open the body of someone who is simply involved in 

a religious or personal or political idea that is contrary to the wishes of the ruling elite, to rip a body open of someone like that especially if that person’s religious or political beliefs are pacifistic and 

not a physical threat to the regime, this is about the most monstrous crime that I can conceive of. And yet the Voice of America 

and Radio Free Asia haven’t done any stories about it, yet we have 

major journalists in this country and countries throughout the 

West who have not done stories about this. Shame on our journalist community. I am a former journalist. That is how I earned 

by living before I went into politics. Shame. 

There were many people who were being slaughtered during the 

second World War, not just the Jews by the Nazis but many different peoples, and that slaughter was quite often just ignored. 

And this is, the fact that we are having a hearing today is an attempt to try to encourage a look at this issue, and for the American 

people and other peoples to hear about this, so that perhaps with 

a loud voice we can say together that decent people do not put up 

with this type of activity in their country, nor should they allow 

their fellow countrymen to purchase the organs of people who are 

being subjected to this ghoulish, horrible, criminal behavior against 

them. 

I appreciated the exact, the specific suggestions that have been 

made here. We will study those suggestions. 

Mr. Turner, do you have a statement or a question you would 

like to ask? 

Mr. TURNER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just one question. Do 

we know the number of foreign nationals on an annual basis that 

travel to China as patients? Do we have an estimate perhaps? 

Dr. DANOVITCH. No, we don’t. And that is an extraordinary fact. 

We do know about people coming into this country to get organs, 

but we don’t know how many people go outside. I don’t think the 

numbers are very large, but we don’t know those numbers and we 

certainly should. Not just from the ethical point of view, from the 

medical, public health and cost point of view. No, we don’t. There 

is no documentation. You can get the data in a kind of background 

way by looking about people who are in Medicare and whether they 

get medications afterwards, but it is very, very indirect. We have 

no precise numbers. 

Mr. TURNER. And do we know if any of this is done on demand? 

That is, someone on the internet contacts the Chinese, I need a 

liver, 2 weeks, and say well, it might take us three but we will find 

one. 

Dr. DANOVITCH. Well, I had a specific patient of mine who went 

to China, despite my request that she not do so, and basically got 

a kidney more or less on demand. I have a colleague in Israel who 

had a patient had a heart transplant at a given date, which someone must have been executed for that very purpose, and it is well 

known that that happens. There are proliferation of internet sites 

that are looking for foreigners to come to China to get organs from 

executed prisoners contrary to Chinese law. The Chinese do have 

laws, but those laws are often flouted and ignored. 

50

Mr. TURNER. And are these operations all run by military units? 

Dr. DANOVITCH. Not necessarily. Some are by military units and 

some are in——

Mr. TURNER. Political? 

Dr. DANOVITCH [continuing]. So-called academic centers. 

Mr. TURNER. Yes, sir? 

Mr. GUTMANN. Can I just mention something? There is a doctor, 

a surgeon in Taiwan who I spoke to in a reasonably confidential 

manner who initially was very standoffish, but then he revealed to 

me that he had been taking his patients over to the mainland for 

a long time to receive organs, to get new kidneys and livers and 

so on, aging patients. And he had negotiated for the Chinese price, 

not to pay the foreigner price, pay the Chinese price. And so he had 

gotten to know these doctors very well in the karaoke bars and all 

the stuff that you do when you negotiate in China. At the end of 

this negotiation period they said, hey, you know what. We are not 

only going to give you the Chinese price but you are getting the 

best of the best. You are getting all Falun Gong organs. 

Now this is a top surgeon in Taiwan. He is an incredibly credible 

witness. If your committee were to call him it is possible that he 

would testify to this, and I think he could explain a lot about this 

business. He was basically doing it right up until the Olympics, so 

we would have some fairly, reasonably current information on this. 

And I think he is quite credible. 

Mr. TURNER. Thank you. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. All right, we are going to adjourn in a moment. And let me just note that organ transplanting in and of itself 

is not evil. Organ transplanting in and of itself, I certainly think 

that we should encourage people in this country to participate in 

organ donating if they are in a car accident or something like that, 

that is something that is laudatory and speaks well of people who 

are involved in organ transplanting in that way. 

But what we have focused on today is an evil manifestation of 

something that is good that has been perverted into being something that is probably one of the most evil activities on this planet 

today. And that is taking people who are being incarcerated for 

their political beliefs or their religious beliefs, people who are in no 

way engaged in a violent activity against any other human being, 

and murdering them in the process of stealing their body organs. 

This is a crime against humanity. We should do our best to identify 

those specific individuals who are engaged in this and put them on 

the list of people to observe to be brought to justice. And specifically, that does not exclude Americans who are willing accomplices 

to this crime against humanity. 

We will have further discussions on this as time goes on, and 

hopefully next year we will be able, in the next session, be able to 

have a hearing, and call to task some of the Americans who are 

engaged in this activity at least as accomplices to this crime. 

I want to thank each of our witnesses for coming today. Thank 

you, Mr. Turner. This hearing is now adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 4:38 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]

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u.s. HO[T,~E OF REPRESENTATIVES 

WASHINmON. /J(' 20515-0128 

Subcommittee on Oversight and Inyestigations 

Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), Chairman 

Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights 

Chdstopher H. Smith (R-NJ), Chairman 

September II, 2012 

You are respectfully requested to attend an OPEN hearing of the Subcommittee on Oversight and 

Investigations, and the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights to be held in Room 2172 of 

the Raybum House Office Building land available live via tbe Committee nebsite at 

http://nww.hcfa.bouse.govl: 

DATE: 

TIME: 

SUBJECT: 

WITNESSES: 

Wednesday, September 12,2012 

2:30 p.m. 

Organ Harvesting of Religious and Political Dissidents by the Chinese Communist 

Party 

Damon Nota. M.D. 

Spokesman 

Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting 

Gabriel Danovitch, M.D. 

Professor of Medicine 

UCLA Medical School 

Charles Lee, M.D. 

Spokesman and Public Relations Director 

Global Service Center [or Quitting a,e Chinese Communist Party 

Mr. Ethan Gutmann 

Adjunct fellow 

Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and Author. Losing the New China 

By Direction of the Chairman 

The Committee on Foreign Affairs seeks to make its facilities accessible to persons with disabilities. If you are in need of special 

accommodations, please cofl202/225-5021 at least/our busmess days m advance of the event, whenever practicable. Questions With regard to 

speCiaf accommodations m general (incfudmg availability of Committee materials in alternative formats and assistive listening devices) may be 

directed to the Committee. 
53

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75859m.eps

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS 

MINUTES OF SLJBCOlvlMlTTEE ON Ol'erslcill (fllri Im'l,£tlguiloJIY will, Ajr/c(l, Globuf Hf!ldlll, UII! Hmlll1!l RJgf/(\ HEARING 

nny Wednesday Date __ 9i.12,,-"11 ... 2~~_Rooll1,_-,,2,,-1c;72,-,RR,,,,,,-,,,O,-,-Jl __ 

Starting TimIJ 

Recosscs ~I L ... to __ ) L-to __ ) L-to __ ) L-to~_) L-to~_) L-tu __ ) 

Pl'csldlng McmbeJ'(') 

Cludrllf.(fII D((IIa RQlmrfmdJer wi'" C"(I;rlll(l1/ Chris Smith 

Clleck ,,/I oftllefullowblg tll,,1 apply: 

01)011 SessIon [l] , 

Executive (closed) Scs."Ilol1 0 Televised [l] 

TITLE OF HEARING: 

Electronically Reeorde(1 (t"lled) G'J 

Stenogl'nphle Record IZI 

Orgall HIII'VBstiJlg ofReligiolls alld Political Dissidellis by Ihe Chinese Commullist p(/l'IY 

SUBCOMMITTEE MEMBF.RS PRESENT: 

CJwil'l1lrw Dalla RO/:l'flhachel', Chairman C/o'is Smith, Rmt{(il1g jJfembel' Kal'eJl Boss, and Congressman 

Robert TlImel~ 

NON .. SUBCOMMITTEE ME~IllEHS PH F.8RNT: (J\{aI* Wffh an ~ (j'fhcy are not members offullcollwliUr:.(J.) 

HEARING WITNESSES: Smnc [IS meeting notice attached? Yes m No 0 

ar "no ", please /ist be/ow and inc/ude lille, agency, department, or orgallizaJloJl.) 

STATF,J\'fENTS FOR TEE RECORD: (Lis! WI)' .... ("femenls J'ubmilfcdjo,. the record.} 

Prepared Statcmetll of D(mum Noto) lVD 

Prep(Jred Stalemellf ofG((llflel Dmwv!telr, MD 

Prepared Statement of Charles LeeJ AiD 

Prepared Statemollt ofillr. Hflutfl Gutmann 

Ifllow ~1mry Htln'esled'lll Sun'ery-based E~'(lmrrte of Falun Gong M(mlcrji'om 2000 (f) 2009" by Ethml GlltmallN 

,r11w Xlnjla"g PNit:edlll'e: HeijiJJg1s 'New Froll/ier' is gromul 'tern for fIre org((H fumrest/Ilg o/politic:a! prIsoners, 1/ by 

EtTlall GulnumllJ Tlw Week/ySfnllrf(l}'~ lJecember5, 20ll. 

TIMESCHElllJl,IWTO RI~C()NVENE ____ "j 'Nj-J- ;~;MItAIlJOURNED __ 4.:..::.:.3",8p:.:':.:.1I~ (( .... / .. _~ /ld///~ S;;bcommiltee StAffDkecto;: ~ttJf. 
54


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The Xinjiang Procedure 

Beijing's ?Yew Frontier' is ground zero 

for the organ harvesting of political prisoners. 

By ETHAN GUTMANN 

To figure out what is taking place today in 

a closed society such as northwest China, 

sometimes you have to go back a decade, 

sometimes more. 

One clue might be found on a hilltop 

near southern Guan~ou, on a partly cloudy autumn day 

in 1991. A,small medical team and a young doctor starting a practice in internal medicine had driven up from Sun· 

Yat-sen Medkal University in a van modified for surgery. 

Pulling in on bulldozed eard1, they found a small :fleet of 

similar vehides----clean, white, with smoked glass windows 

and prominent red crosses 

on the side. The police had 

ordered the medical team to 

stay inside for their safety, 

Indeed, the view from the 

side window of lines of 

ditches.-some filled in, others freshly dug-suggested 

that the hilltop had served 

as a killing ground for years. 

Thirty·six scheduled 

executions would translate 

into 72 kidneys and corneas 

divided among the regional 

hospitals. Every van contained surgeons who could work 

fast: 1~-30 minutes to extract. Drive back to the hospital. 

Tl'ansplant '\.vithin six hours. Nothlngfancy or experimental; execulion would probably ruin the heart. 

With the acceleration ofCbinese medical expertise over 

the last decade, organs once considered scraps no longer 

went to waste. It wasn't public knowledge exactly, but Chinese medical schools taught that many otherwis.e wicked 

criminals volunteered lheir organs as a .final penance. 

Right after the first sho[S me van door was thrusl open 

and t\'I70 men with white surgical coats thrown over their 

Ethan Gutmdnn, an adjunct fellow at tire Foundation for Drjl:l"1SC 

oJDcltiomtdeJ~ wishes to tltal1kjeljltl GibsonIar research assistaflce 

alid tire Ped" Uf,llenbergfamily for research support. 

DECE.MBER 5, 2011 

uniforms carried a body in, the head and feet still twitching 

slightly. The young doctor noted that the wound was on 

the right side of the chest as he had expected. When body 

#3 was laid down, he went to work .. 

Male, 40-ish, Han Chinese. While the other retail 

organs in the van' were slated for the profitable foreigner 

market, the doctor had seen the paperwork indicating this 

kidney was tissue-matched for transplant into a SO-yearold Chinese man. Without the transplant, that man would 

die_ With it, the same man would rise miraculous.ly from . 

hi, hospital bed and go on to have a normal life for 25 

years or so. By 20161 given all the anti-tissue-rejecticn 

drug advances in China, they could theoretically replace 

the liver, lungs, or heartmaybe buy that man 

another JO to 15 years. 

Body #3 had no special 

characteristics save an angry 

purple line on the neok .. The 

doct'OI recognized the forensics. Sometimes the police 

would twist a wire around a 

prisoner's throat to prevent 

him from speaking up in 

court. The dOctor thought 

it through methodically. 

Maybe the police didn't 

want this prisoner to talk because he had been a deranged 

killer, a thUg, or mentally unstable. After al~ the Chinese 

penal system was a daily sausage grinder, <:xecuting hardcore criminals on a massive scale. Yes, the young doctor 

knew the harvesting was wrong. Whatever crime had been 

committed, it would be nice if the prisoner's body were 

allowed to rest forever. Yet was his surgical task that different from an obstetrician's? Harvesting was rebirth, harvesting was life, as revolutionary an advance as antibiotics or 

steroids. Or maybe, he thought, they didn't want this man 

to talk because he was a political prisoner. 

Nineteen years later, in a secure European location, the 

doctor lutd out the puzzle. He asked that I keep his identity ~ 

a secret. Chinese medical authorities admit that the lion's ~ 

.hare of transplant organs originate with executions, but <3 

THE WEEKLY STANDARD /19 
55


75859f-2.eps

no mainland Chinese doctors, even in exile, will normally 

speak of performing such surgery. To do So would remind 

international medical authorities of an issue they would 

rather avoid-not China's soaring execution rate or the 

exploitation of criminal organs, but rather the systematic 

elimination or China's religious and political prisoners. Yet 

even jf this doctor feared consequences to his fami1y and 

his career, he did not fear embarrassing China, for he was 

born into an indigenous minority group, the Uighurs. 

Every Uighur witness I approached over the course of 

two years-police, medical, and security personnel sc~ttered across two continents-related compartmentalized 

fragments of information to me, often through halting 

translation. They acknowledged the risk to their careers, 

their families, and, in several 

While it is difficult to know the strength of the claims 

of the detainees) ac:tual connections to al Qaeda, the bask 

facts are these: During the 1990s, when the Chinese drove 

the Uighur rebel training camps from neighboring countries such as Kazakhstan and Pakistan) some Uighurs 

tied to Afghanistan where a pardon became Taliban sol~ 

diers. And yet, if the Chinese government claims that 

the Uighurs constitute their own Islamic fundamentalist 

problem, the fact is that I've never met a Uighur woman 

who won"t shake hands or a man who won't have a drink 

with me. Nor does my Jewish-sounding name appear to 

make anyone flinch. In one of those vino veritas sessic)lls, I 

asked a local Uighur leader if he was able to gct any sort of 

assistance fr<lIIl groups such as the Islamic HUman :Rights 

Commission (where, as I 

cases, their lives. Their testimony reveals not just a procedure evolving to m.cet the 

lucrative medical demand 

for living organs, but the 

genesis of a wider atrocity. * The family was told . to visit a military 

hospital in Urumqi 

where the hospital 

found during a brief visit 

to their London offices, 

veiled women fiin-ch from 

an extended male hand~ 

drinks are forbidden, and. 

my Jewish surname is. a very 

big deal indeed). "Useless!" 

he snorted, returning to the B vodka bottle. ehind closed doors, 

the Uigburs call 

their vast region in 

China)s northwest corner 

(bordering on India, Paki· 

staff laid it out: One 

kidney, $4,700. The 

nurse learned that the 'donor' 

was, in fact, a protester. So if Wasbington's goal 

is to promote a reformed 

China, then taking Beijing's 

stan, Afghanistan) Tajiki- word for who is a terrorist is 

stan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and l\iongolia) East Turkestan. The Uighurs are ethnically Turkic, not East Asian. 

They are Muslims with a smattering of Christians) and 

their language is more readily understcod in Tashkent than 

in Beijing. By contrast, Beijin~s name for the so~c.a1led 

Autonomous Region, Xinjiang, literally translates as :'new 

frontier." 'W11en Mao invaded in 1949, Han Chinese constituted only 7 percent of the regional population. Follow~ 

ing!he !lood of Communist party administrators, soldiers, 

~hopkeepers, and construction corps, Han Chinese now 

constitute the rnajodty. The party calculates that Xinjiang 

will be its top oil and natural gas production center by the 

cnd of this century. 

To protect this investment, Beijing tradi[ionally 

depicted all Uighur nationalists-violent rebels and nonviolent activists alike-as CIA proxies. Shortly after 9/11, 

that conspiracy theory was tossed down the memory hole. 

Suddenly Chilla was, and always bas been, at war with al 

Qaeda·led Uighur terrorists. No matter how transporently 

opportunistic the switch, the American intelligence community saw an opening for Chinese cooperation in the w.ar 

on terror, and signaled their acquiescence by allowing Chi· 

nese state security personnel into Guantanamo to interrogate Uighur detaInees. 

20 I THE WEEKLY STANDARD 

to play into the party's hands. 

Xinjiang has long served as the party's illicit labora~ 

tory: from the atmospheric nuclear testing in Lop NUT ill 

the mid-sixties (resulting in a significant rise in cancers in 

Urumqi~ Xinjiang's capital) to the more recent creation in 

the Tarim Desert of what could well be the world's largo 

est labor camp, estimated to hold 50,000 Uighurs, hardcGre 

crimimtls, and practitioners of Falun Gong. And when it 

comes to the first organ harvesting of political prisoners, 

. Xinjiang was ground zero. 

I

n 1989, not long after Nijat Abdureyirnu turned 20, 

he graduated from Xinjiang Police School and was 

assigned to a special police force, Regiment No. 1 of 

tbe Urumqi Public Security Bureau. As one of the first 

Uighurs in a Chinese unit that specialized in '~social security"--essentially squelching threats to the party-Nijat 

was employed as tbe good cop in Uighur interrog3tion-S~ 

particularly the high.profile cases. I first met Nijat-thin, 

depressed, and watchful-in a crowded refugee- camp on 

the outskirts of Rome. 

Nijat explained to me that he was well aware that his 

Chinese oolleagues kept him under constant surveillance. 

But Nijat presented the image they liked: the little brother 

DOCEMBER 5,2011 
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75859f-3.eps

with the guileless smile. By 1994 he had ~etr.ted all of 

the government's secret bastions: the detention center, its 

interrogation rooms, and the killing grounds. Along the 

way, he had witnessed his fair share of torture, executi<lns, 

even a rape. So his curiosity was in the nature of professional interest when he questioned one of the Chinese 

caps who came back from an execution shaking his head. 

According to his colleague, it had been a normal procedure--the unwanted bodies kicked into a trench> the useful corpses hoisted into the harvesting vans, but then he 

heard something coming from a van, like a man screaming. 

"Like someone was still aliver Nijat remembers asking. "What kind of screams?" 

"Like from hell." 

Nijar Abdureyim: 'It's so you won't feel pain when they shoot you.' 

Nijat shrugged. The regiment had more than ell()llgh 

sloppiness to go around. 

A few months Later, three death row prisoners were 

being transported from detention to execution. Niiat had 

become friendly with one in particular, a very young man. 

As Nijat walked alongside, the young man turned to Nijat 

with eyes like saucers: "Why did you inject me?" 

Nijat hadn't injected him; thc medic-al director had. 

But the director and some legal officials were watching the 

exchange,. so Nijat lied smoothly: "It's so you won't feel 

much pain when they shoot you." 

The young man smiled faintly, and Nijat, sensing that 

he would never quite forget that look~ waited until the execution was over to ask the medical director: "Why did you 

inject him?" 

"Nijat, if you can transfer to some other section, then 

~ go as soon as possible." 

~ "What do you mean? Doctor, exactly what kind of 

~ medicine did you inject him with?" 

"Nijat, do you have aoy beliefs?" 

g "Yes. Do your 

~ lilt was an anticoagulant, Nijat. And maybe we are all 

~ going to hell." 

DECEMBER 5, 2011 

I firS! met Enver Tohti-a soft-spoken, husky, Buddha 

of a man-through the informal Uigh.ur network of 

London. I confess that thy first impres.sion was that 

he was iust another emigre living in public housing, But 

Enver bad a secret. 

His &tory began on a Tuesday in June 1995, when 

he was a general surgeon in an Urumqi hospital. Enver 

recalled an unusual conversation with his immediate 

superior, the chief surgeon: "Enver .. we are going to do 

something exciting. Have you ever done an operation in 

the field?" 

"Not really. What do you wnnt me to do?" 

"Get a mobile team together and request an ambulan.::e. Have everyone out front at nine [omorrow}~ 

On a cloudless Wednesday morning, Enver led two 

assistants and an anaesthesiologist into an arnhulance and 

followed the chief surgeon's car out ofUrumqi goingwe:st. 

The ambulance had a picnic atmosphere until they realized they were entering the Western Mountain police district, which specialized in executing political dissidents. 

On a dirt road by a steep hill the chief surgeon pulled of(, 

ond came back to talk to Enver: "When you hear a gunshot, drive around the hill." 

«Can you tell us why we are here?" 

'~Enver, if you don't want to know, don't ask." 

"I want to know." 

"No_ You don't want to know." 

Thc chief surgeon gave him a quick, hard look as he 

returned to the car. Enver saw that beyond the hill there 

appeared to be some sort of armed police facility. People 

were milling about---civilians. Enver half-satirically suggested to the team that perhaps they were family members 

waiting to collect the body and pay for the bullet, and the 

team responded with increasingly sick jokes to break the 

tension. Then they heard a gunshot, possibly a volley, and 

dnwe around to the execution field. 

Focusing on not making any suddcn moves as he foOllowed the chief surgeon's ear, Enver never really did get a 

good look. He briefly registered that there were 10, maybe 

20 bodies lying at the base of the hill, but the armed PQlice 

saw the ambulance and waved him over. 

"This onc. It's this onc." 

Sprawled on the blood-soaked ground was a man, 

around 30, dressed in navy blue overalls. All convicts were 

shaved, but this one had long hair. 

"That's him. We'll operate on him." 

"Why are we operating?" Enver protested: feeling for 

the artery in the man's neck. "Come on. This man is dead." 

Enver stiffened and corrected himself "No. He's not 

dead." 

"Operate then. Remove the liver and the kidneys. 

Nowl Quick! Be qui~k!" 

THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 21 
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75859f-4.eps

FollQwing the o::-hief surgeon's directive, the tcam 

loaded the body into the ambulance. Enver felt himself 

going numb: Just cut the clothes off. Just strap the limbs 

to the table. Just open the body. He kept making attempts 

to follow normal procedure-sterilize, minimal exposure, 

sketch the cut. Enver glanced questioningly at the chief 

surgeon. "No anaesthesia," said the chiefsurgeon. ((No 

life support." 

The anaesthesiologist just stood there~ anTIS foldedlike some SOrt of ignorant peasant, Enver thought. Enver 

barked at him. nWhy don't you do something?" 

"What exactly should I do, Enver? He's already unconscious. If you cut~ he's not going to respood." 

But there was a response. As Enver's scalpel went in, 

Ett.ver Tohti: I am a killer, he screamed inwardly. 

the man's chest heaved spasmodically and then curled 

back agalIL Enver, a little frantic now, turned to the chief 

surgeon. '~ow far in should I cut?" 

r~you cut as wide and deep as possible. We arc working 

again~t time." 

Enver worked fast, not bothering with clamps,. cuning 

with his right hand, moving muscle fUld scn tissue aside 

with his left, slowing down only to make sure he e~cised 

the kidneys and liver cleanly. Even as Enver stitcbed the 

man bad< up-not internally, there was no point to that 

anymore, just So the body might look presentable-he 

sensed the man was still alive. 1 am a killer:) Enver screamed 

inwardly. He did not dare to look at the face again, just as 

he imagined a killer would avoid looking at his victim. 

The team drove back to Urumqi in silence. 

On Thursday, the chief surgeon confronted Enver: 

"So. YeSterday. Did anything happen? Yesrerday was a 

usual, normal day. Yes?" 

Enver said yes, and it took years for him to understand tbat live organs had lower rejection rates in the 

new host, or tbar tbe bullet ro the chest had-other 

than that first sickening lurch-acted Eke some sOrt of 

22/ THE WEEKLY STANDARD 

magical anaesthesia. Hc had done what he could; he 

had stitched the body back neatly for the family. And 15 

years would elapse before Enver revealed what had happeoed that Wednesday. 

As for Nijat, it wasn't until 1996 that he put it together. 

It happened just about midnight, well after the cell 

block lights were turned off. Nijat found himself hang· 

ing our in the detention compound's administrative office 

with the medical director. Following a pause in the conversation" the director, in an odd voice1 asked Nijar if he 

thougbt the place was haunted. 

"Maybe it feels a little weird at night," Nijat answered, 

"Why do yOll think that?" 

~4Because too many people have been killed here. And 

for all the wrong reasons.~' 

Nijat finally understood. The anticoagulant. The 

expensive "execution meals" for the regiment following 

a trip to the killing grOlmd. The plainclothes agents in 

the cells- who persuaded the prisoners to sign statements 

donating their organs to the state. And now the medical 

director W3S 'confirming it all: Those statements were real. 

They just didn't take account of the fact that the pris.oners 

would still be alive when they were CLlt up. 

"Nijat, wc really are going to hell." 

Nijat nodded, pulled on his beer, and didn!t botber 

to smile. 

O n February 2,1997, Bahtiyar Shemshidin began 

wondering whether he was a policeman in name 

only. Two years before, the Chinese Public Security Bureau of the Western city of Ghulja recruited Bahtiyar for the drug enforcement division. It was a natural 

iit bec8usc BahEiyar was tall, good-looking, and exuded 

effortless Uighur authority. Bahtiyar would ultimately 

make his way to Canada and freedom, but he had no trouble recalling his initial idealism; back then, Bahtiyar did 

not see himself 3S a Chinese collaborator but as an emergency responder. 

For several years, heroin addiction had been creeping through the neighborhoods of Ghulja, striking dawn 

young Uighurs like a medieval plague. Yet inside the 

force, Bahtiy8.1' quickly grasped that the Chinese heroin 

cartel was quietly protected, if not encouraged, by tbe 

authorities. Even his recruitment was a bait~and-switch. 

Instead of sending him after drug dealers, his Chinese 

superiors ordered him to investig-dte the Meshrep-a ~ 

uaditional Muslim get-together promoting clean living~ ~ 

sports, and Uighur music and dance. If rhe Meshrep had § 

:flowered like a traditional herbal remedy against the opi- S ate inv3derJ the ~hinese authorities read it as a disguised ~ 

attack on tbe Chmese state. 5 

In early January 1997, on the eve of Ramadan, the ~ 

DECEMBER.5,2011 
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75859f-5.eps

entire Ghulja police force---Uighurs and Chinese 

alike-were suddenly ordered to surl'ender their guns 

"for inspection.'l ~ow, almost a month later, the weapons were being released. But Bahtiyar's gun was held 

back. Bahtiyar went to the Chinese bureaucrat who controlled supplies and asked after it. "Your gun has a prob1em," Bahtiyar was told. 

"When will you fix the problem?" 

The bureaucrat shrugged, glanced at his list, and 

looked up at Bahtiyar with an unblinking stare that said: 

It is time for you to go. By the end of the day, Bahtiyar got 

it: Every Chinese officer had a gun. Every Uighur officer's 

gun had a problem. 

Three days later, Bahtiyar understood why. On Feb· 

ruary 5, approximately 1,000 Uighurs gathered in the 

center of Ghulja. The day before} the Chinese authorities 

arrested (and, it was claimed, severely abused) six wornell; 

all Muslim tcachers, all participants in the Meshrep. The 

young men came: without their winter coats to show they 

were unarmed, but, planned or unplanned, the Chinese 

police fired on the demonstrators. 

Casualty counts of what is known as the Ghulja incident remain shaky. Bahtiyar recalls internal police estimates of 400 dead, but he didnt see it; all Uighur police· 

men had been sent to the local jail "to interrogate prisoners') and were locked in the compound throughout the 

-crisis. However, Bahtiyar did see Uighurs herded into the 

-compound and thrown naked onto the snow-some bleeding, others with internal injuries. Ghulja's main Uighur 

clinic was effectively shut down when a squad of Chinese 

special police arrested 10 of the doctors and destroyed the 

clinic's ambulance. As the arrests mounred by late April, 

the iail became hopelessly overcrowded, and Uighur polito 

ical prisoners were selected for daily executions. On April 

24) Bahtiyar's colleagues witnessed the killing of eight 

political prisoners; what struck them was the presence of 

doctors in "special vans for harvesting organs." 

I

n Europe I spoke with a m.1rse who worked in a major 

Ghulja hospital following the im:ident. Nervously 

requesting that I provide no personal details.) she 

told me that the hospitals were forbidden to treat Uighur 

protesters. A doctor who bandaged an arm received a 

IS-year sentence) while another got 20 years~ and hospital staff were told, "If you treat someone, you will get the 

same result." The separation between the Uighur and Chinese medical personnel deepened: Chinese doctors would 

11) stockpile prescriptions rather than allow Uighur medical 

~ s.taff a key to the pharmacy, while Uighur patients were 

~ receiving 50 percent of their usual doses. If a Uighur 

g couple had a second child, even if the birth was legally 

~ sanctioned, Chinese maternity doctors, she observed} 

D.ECE.MBER 5, 2011 

administered an injection (described as an antibiotic) to 

tbe infant. The nurse could not recall a singl-e instance of 

'the Same in;ection given to a Chinese baby. Within three 

days the infant would turn blue and die. Chinese staffers 

offered a rote explanation to Uighur mothers: Your baby 

was too weak, your baby could not handle the drug. 

Shortly after the Ghulja incident, a young Uighur protester's body returned home from a military hospital. Perhaps the fact that the abdomen was stitched up was just 

evidence of an autopsy, but it sparked another round of 

riots. After that, the corpses were wrapped, buried at gunpoint, und Chinese soldiers patrolled the cemeteries (one 

is not far from the current Urumqi airport). By J unej 

tbe nurse was pulled into a new case: A young Uighur 

Chi~lCs/! poUee hlSpect the bodies of executed prisoners, 1994. 

protester had been arrested and beaten severely, His family 

:paid for his release, only to discover that their son had kidney damage. The family was told [Q visit a Chinese military hospital in Urumqi where the hospital stafflaid it out: 

One kidney, 30,000 RMB (roughly $4,70D). The kidney 

will be healthy, they were assured, because the transplan [ 

was to eome from a 21-year-old Uighur male-the same 

profile as their son. The nurse learned that the "donor" 

was, in fact, a protester. 

I

n the early autumn of 1997, fresh out of a blood·work 

tour in rural Xinjiang, a young Uighur doctor-let's call 

him .M.urat-was pursuing a promising medi1:3l career 

THE WEEKLY STANDARD 123 
59

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75859f-6.eps

in a large Ururnqi hospital. Two years later he was planning 

his escape to Europe, where I met him some years after. 

One day Murat's instructor quietly informed him that 

five Chinese government officials-big guys, party members.-had checked into the hospital with organ problems. 

Now he: had a job for Murat: "Go to the Urumqi prison. 

The political wing, not the criminal side. Take blood samples. Small ones. Just to map out the different blood types. 

Th.~s all you have to do." 

"What about tissue matching?" 

"Don't worry about any of that) Murat. We'll handle 

that later. Just map out the blood types." 

Clutching the authorization, and accompanied by an 

assistant from the hospital, Murat, slight and bookish, 

found himself facing approximately 15 prisoners, mostly 

tough-guy Uighurs in cheir late twenties. As the first prisoner sat down and saw the needle, the pleading began. 

. ~Iyou are a Uighur like me. Why are you going to hurt 

<'I'm not going to hun you. rm just taking blood." 

At the word "blood)" everything collapsed. The men 

howled and stampeded, the guatd, ,creaming and shoving them back into line. The prisoner shrieked that he 

was innocent. The Chinese guards grahbed his neck alld 

squeezed it hard. 

"It's just for your health," Murat said evenly, suddenly 

aware the hospital functionary was probably watching to 

make sure that Murat wasn't too sympathetic. "It's just for 

your health,'l Murat said again and again as he drew blood. 

When Murat returned to the hospital, he asked the 

instructor, "Were all those prisoners sentenced to death?" 

tlThat's right, Murat, that's right. Yes. Just don't ask 

any more questions. They are bad people--enemies of the 

country." 

But Murat kept asking questions, and over time, he 

learned the drill. Once they found a matching blood type, 

they would move to tissue matching. Then the political 

prisoner would get a bullet to the right side of the chest. 

Murafs instructor would visit the execution site to match 

up blood samples. The officials would get their organs, rise 

from their beds, and check out. 

Six months latel~ around the :first anniversal), of Ghu1ja, 

five new ofIlcials checked in. The instructor tolu Murat 

to go back to the political wing for fresh blood. This time, 

Murat was told that harvesting political prisoners was normal. A growing export. High volume. The military hospi· 

tals are leading the way. 

By early 1999, Murat stopped hearing about harvesting 

political prisoners. Perhaps it was over, he thought. 

Yet the Xinjiang procedure spread. By the end of 1999, 

the Uighur crackdown would be eclipsed by Chinese securiry's largest~scale action since Mao: the elimination of 

24 j Tm: WEEKLY STANDARD 

Falun Gong. By my estimate up to three million Falun 

Gong practitioners would pass through the Chinese corrections system. Approximately 65,000 would be harvested, 

hearts still beating, before the 200& OI)'lTIpics. An unspedned) significantly smaller, number of House Christians and 

Tibetans likely met the same fate. 

By Holocaust standards these are piddling nwnbers, so 

let's be clear: China is not the land of the tinal solution. But 

it is the land of the expedient solution. Some will point to 

recent statements from the Chinese medical establishment 

admitting the obvious-China's medical environment is 

not fully ethical-and see progress. Foreigo investors Sus-

:pect that eventually the Chinese might someday-or perhaps have already--abandon organ harvesting in favor of 

the much more lucrative phannaceutical and clinical testing industries. The problem with these soothing narratives 

is that reports~ some as recent as one year ago~ suggest that 

the Chinese have not abandoned the Xinjiang procedure. 

In July 2009, Urumqi exploded in bloody street riots 

between Uighurs and Han Chinese. The authorities 

massed troops in the regional capital~ kicked out the Western journalists, shut down the Internet, and, over the next 

six months, quietly, mostly at night, rOWlded up UighW' 

mnles by the thousands. According to information leaked 

by Uighurs held in captivity, some prisoners were given 

:physical examinations aimed solely at assessing the health 

of their retail organs. The sigoals may be faint, but they are 

consistent, and the conclusion is inescapable: Chi na, a state 

rapidly approaching superpower stanlS~ has not just committed human rights abuses-that's old news.-but has~ for 

over a decade;, perverred the most trusted area of human 

expertise into performing what is, in the legal parlance of 

human rights, targeted elimination of a specific groulJ. 

Yet NijHl sits in refugee limbo in NeuchatelJ Switzerland, waiting for a country to offer him asylum. He con· 

fessed to me. He confessed to others. Ilut in a world eager 

not to offend China, no state wants his confession. Envel' 

made his way to an obscure seminar hosted by the House 

of Commons on Chinese human rights. \"o/hen the MPs 

opened the floor to questions~ Enver found himself standing up and speaking, for the first time, of killing a man. 

I rook notes, but no British MP or their staffers,could be 

bothered to take Enver's munber. 

The implications are clear enough. Kothing but self· 

determination for the Uighurs can suffice. The Uighurs, 

numbering 13 million, are few, but they are also desperate. 

They may fight. War may come. On that day; as diplomats 

across the globe call for dialogue with Beijing, may every 

nation look to its origins and its conscience. For my part, if 

my Jewish-sounding name tells me anything, it is this: The 

dead may never be funy avenged, but no people can accept 

being fatally exploited forever. .. 

DEClcMUER 5, 2()11 
60

[NOTE: The survey-based estimate of Falun Gong Murdered from 

2000 to 2008, ‘‘How Many Harvested?’’ by Mr. Ethan Gutmann, 

submitted for the record by the Honorable Christopher H. Smith, 

is not repinted here due to length limitations but is available in 

committee records.]

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